The Times obsession with race and gender diversity crops up in some unexpected places in the paper.
Restaurant critic Pete Wells, last seen here writing about the "pleasure" of being served by "women" and "others who don't look like men of European descent," gets into it again in a three-star review of a restaurant called Carbone. He writes, "I'm not ready to play along with all of Carbone's casting decisions: currently all the captains, typically the most highly tipped employees, are men."
Where to begin? First of all, might it be possible that the restaurant employees pool and divide their tips? Second of all, as I said last time around, if there's race or sex discrimination in hiring waitstaff at Manhattan restaurants, I'm against it, and the Times should do a reported article about it. Instead, the reviewer's comment casually accuses the restaurant of discrimination without giving the management a chance to respond. Finally, as a customer, I care that the waitstaff is efficient and personable, not whether the waiters are men or women.
The "Deal Professor" column in the Times business section pulls a similar stunt, injecting racial politics into a column about James Comey's nomination as FBI director. The columnist, Steven Davidoff, writes about Mr. Comey's stint working at the Bridgwater hedge fund. He writes that the Bridgewater culture is detailed by a series of videos featuring "young, bright-faced, mostly white employees." How is it relevant to Mr. Comey's nomination that the employees in the videos are "mostly white"? Is the deal professor casually accusing Bridgewater of discrimination in hiring without allowing the company a chance to defend itself? The faculty of Moritz College of Law, where Professor Davidoff works when he's not working for the New York Times, is also mostly white. So is the student body. If there's discrimination, the Times should do a reported article directly confronting it rather than these sly asides.
As recently as 1986 the Times was publicly professing a policy that "The race, religion or ethnic background of a person in the news, under The Times's policies, may be specified only if it is pertinent to the news. And in such a case, the relevance must be demonstrated in the article." The Davidoff mention of the race of the Bridgewater employees — a group, by the way, that includes one named Parag and another named Kokoro — fails to meet the standard of that Times policy.