Racism a Relic? Hardly

Texaco’s chairman says that the racist statements made by other company executives at a secretly taped meeting pained him, particularly because he believes the oil company has made progress in recent years in improving its minority hiring and promotion record.

In the recording, made at a 1994 meeting, senior executives are heard apparently agreeing to shred damaging evidence in a race-discrimination lawsuit and using racial epithets to refer to African American employees. The meeting was taped by one of the participants, who was a senior personnel manager at the time. He gave the tape to lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the discrimination suit after he lost his job in a company downsizing. A transcript of the tape was filed last week in federal court in connection with the suit.

This week, Texaco Chairman Peter I. Bijur denounced the racist remarks as defying the company’s “clear values and policies.” The most charitable explanation is that those values and policies evidently were not effectively communicated to some of the company’s most senior leaders.

The revelations have already sparked a criminal investigation by a federal grand jury into possible destruction of evidence, and there have been calls for a civil rights probe as well.

Certainly many companies have made progress toward eliminating discrimination and harassment directed toward minorities and women in the workplace. Yet the kind of reprehensible behavior exhibited by Texaco officials persists in far too many executive suites, law firms, universities and factories. The difference is that rarely are these ugly conversations caught on tape.

In the short term, the rantings of Texaco’s executives--two of whom have now been suspended but, note, with pay--have ignited outrage among customers, investors and the general public. Texaco’s stock price fell steeply early this week, apparently on news of the tape’s contents. A group of San Diego clergy and business leaders is calling for a national boycott of the corporation and urged customers to destroy their Texaco credit cards. Bijur said he has received many angry phone calls and e-mail messages from customers who say they intend to stop buying Texaco products. This is the inevitable, and proper, reaction to the exposure of socially intolerable behavior that is quietly tolerated all too often. So much for the notion promoted so fiercely lately that racial discrimination is largely a relic.