Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
When air pressure differential sucked a door plug off an Alaska Airlines 737 at 15,000 feet last winter because someone had forgotten to bolt it to the fuselage, a narrative quickly emerged in the right-wing media, and eventually showed up in Senate hearings and conservative judicial rulings, that DEI, of all things, was the culprit for Boeing’s decline. That’s what leads us to this week’s executive order officially placing diversity and equity on its institutional no-fly list for staffing the Federal Aviation Administration.
Like so many superficially inane right-wing ideas, the DEI theory of the collapse of American aviation contained a kernel of accuracy. Over the past quarter-century, Boeing had devolved from a deeply meritocratic organization into an explicitly anti-meritocratic organization. Engineers and quality officials are repeatedly chastised by their superiors for having too much “knowledge.” I recently interviewed a former quality manager who told me she was mocked and ridiculed for having graduated from aviation school. She said her bosses at Boeing in Charleston, South Carolina, made rude and racist comments about her Black inspectors even as they explicitly encouraged her to hire minorities over white men with aviation experience. That’s because Boeing views its employees as fundamentally disposable and has been for decades now at war with employees who know enough about planes to resist their constant and unrelenting orders to move faster and cut corners.
Everyone who knows anything about Boeing understands that the “root cause” of its institutional decline was its 1996-1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, a failed plane maker with a toxic, diabolical culture and a C-suite with an illustrious track record of fomenting distrust, plotting coups, insinuating itself into power vacuums, and bankrupting airplane manufacturers.
As it happened, McDonnell long ago had been a contractor on Project Mercury, the early effort to get a man in space that launched after the Soviets launched Sputnik. It was the “Hidden Figures” era: Unusually intelligent people from all walks of life who exhibited the propensity to learn complex things were drafted into the program in spite of rampant institutional racism as a matter of national security. But McDonnell Douglas, a product of the borderline neo-Confederate big-business culture of St. Louis, only had one Black man on its 600-man Mercury team: Percy Green, a lab technician who had put himself through engineering school working as a mechanic and hospital administrator.
Green’s career in aerospace was destroyed when he was filmed one day climbing the then-under-construction St. Louis Gateway Arch with a sign on his back demanding that the project begin hiring Black men as construction workers. The spectacle was captured on TV news, and when he showed up for his job on the third shift that night, he later recalled a supervisor staring at him in stupefaction.
Missouri Historical Society
Percy Green with the Gateway Arch in the background, 1970
Green was a die-hard believer in meritocracy, even though he knew it didn’t exist at the time. In the Army, he observed that Black enlistees were given the worst, dirtiest jobs, though he himself was plucked from the crowd for training as an engineer. The titans of St. Louis industry were vehement union-busters who plotted amongst themselves in a pseudo-secret club called the Veiled Prophet Society, which literally invented the debutante ball; Green would later become the Veiled Prophet’s number one bête noire. St. Louis was in the early stages of an extreme and rapid period of white abandonment, during which wealthier white families fled to the suburbs with their tax dollars and Black unemployment rocketed to nearly 13 percent. Green believed Black men’s loss of the ability to generate steady income would ultimately destroy Black families, and his hope was that through media stunts like climbing the Gateway Arch he would “make racism less profitable.”
But he naïvely thought he would be OK, because he had prearranged a deal with a bondsman to bail him out of jail with plenty of time to make it home and shower before third shift. So long as his political views didn’t interfere with the quality of his work, Green assumed his job was safe.
It wasn’t. He was “laid off” within weeks of the Gateway Arch stunt, thus commencing a nearly decade-long legal battle between Green and the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which in 1967 merged with the Douglas Aircraft Corp. Along the way, Green won an important Supreme Court decision that lowered the threshold for filing employment discrimination lawsuits, but McDonnell Douglas prevailed in the end, because while Green’s Blackness was “protected” under federal law, his outspoken populism and criticism of authority were not. He’d been naïve enough to assume he would be protected, because prior to his promotion he had belonged to the machinists union. At Boeing, where nearly all the engineers in Seattle are unionized, he would have been.
Today, the courts are littered with race, sex, age, and disability discrimination lawsuits against Boeing. These cases typically don’t go anywhere because the plaintiffs were almost invariably fired principally for the content of their character: for refusing to break the law and/or defraud the government, or for questioning orders they believed to compromise passenger safety, or refusing to terminate a subordinate for some made-up infraction. There is an obscure law that theoretically protects aviation industry whistleblowers from being terminated or penalized for attempting to prevent a plane from crashing, but in practice it protects almost no one but Boeing.
So those whistleblowers are left to seek justice by focusing on incidents in which the boss used racist slurs, or made fun of their age, or sexually assaulted them at an office happy hour, because that stuff happens all the time in an explicitly anti-meritocratic workplace like Boeing’s.
“DEI” as it exist(ed) in the 21st century has mostly served as a deeper-pocketed version of what Percy Green dismissed as “tokenism” in the 1960s. It exists because to truly attempt to make elite institutions more legitimately meritocratic would simply cost too much money, as the Brookings Institution showed in a recent analysis showing how exclusive colleges could achieve equivalent proportions of underrepresented minorities under race-blind admissions policies so long as they were willing to triple their financial aid budgets. DEI never asked for anything like that, because it is an entrenched oligarchy’s corner-cutting “solution” for the problems created by an entrenched oligarchy, and it was probably destined to crash and burn like every other half-baked, boss-approved pseudo-fix for an existential challenge. (See: MCAS.)
But now it’s gone, and Boeing’s leadership will surely do what all the other craven broligarchs seem to be doing right now, and spout mendaciously about the persecution of rich white men while replacing docile BIPOC women making $250,000 a year with psychopathic dilettantish drunks like Pete Hegseth, who won’t quit getting wasted until you appoint him Master of the Universe.
This will backfire. The toxic narcissist failson elite so perfectly exemplified by Hegseth—soon to be Boeing’s single biggest customer!—is the original sin of American decline, and deep down we all know it. When the backlash begins, the rest of us can’t let them appease us with cheap tokenism.
