Michael - I know this was probably not directed at me, but in all seriousness, do you really believe that there can be any other solution besides a mandate which requires minorities to be hired? I know from working with these upper level executives and managers, they have a mindset, it's sort of like a corporate club. These people have been churned through a corporate system, many of them what I would call corporate-lifers, where they are used to being in a certain environment (a white, male-dominated one) and used to having things run a certain way (the way it makes the company the most profit). Any change to that is very difficult and very much despised. I can't believe that some of the 50 year old men I have worked with would suddenly change their minds on a dime and make it easy for those who don't fit their proper "corporate" stereotype to infiltrate the organization and start running the show. No way it would have ever happened at the 2 large companies I worked for. They were and are still white, male-dominated organizations. Even with Affirmative Action, this fact remains and people buck our current mandate all the time.
In addition, I forgot about this one. I worked for an electrical engineering company who had a branch office in my city. The home office, which was made up of about 1,000 people had no blacks, asians, or hispanics. Our branch office was desparately looking to hire engineers. We had one black gentleman come in for an interview. He had a good resume and didn't seem any better or worse than anyone else in the company. When the interview was over, my boss basically implied that guy had a snowball's chance in hell. They ended up hiring a guy who had graduated from a local trade school and had been working at UPS (I think because he was cheap, but he was also white). Later, the company did bring someone on who was on H1B visa, but I think they got some type of tax break for it. That guy used to complain about the racism at work to me all the time. After he got his citizenship, he quit right away and moved out of state to work for another company.
This stuff happens too often. It's just that most white males are not sensitive to the issue and therefore think it should be reversed.