Lawmaker: Hire More Whites to Run Government

Robb Pitts, a county commissioner in Atlanta, Ga., says the county needs to hire more whites.

What? Not really?

Yes.

Pitts, a black, said, “I would encourage the county manager to find ways to inform all ethnicities when new positions arise and make a concerted effort to diversify our employee base.”

That was in a recent email to constituents, and Fulton County Personnel Board Chairman Paul Zucca says still today the workforce “needs more diversity.”

“It is important for the people of Fulton County to feel empowered, to feel equal,” he said.

The issue is that the county employees have become heavily weighted in favor of blacks, and that has generated a series of costly court cases.

“There has been a pattern against white job applicants that has been going on a long time,” said Dick Williams, longtime host of “The Georgia Gang” Sunday broadcast on Atlanta’s WAGA-TV.

“Racism is wrong no matter where it comes from,” added Mo Ivory of Atlanta CBS radio and a prominent black voice in sprawling Fulton County where the capital of Georgia is located.

They were referring to the most recent federal court settlement of a high-profile lawsuit by a white person charging discrimination on the part of the black-dominated Fulton County government.

Former Human Services Deputy Director Doug Carl was awarded $1.7 million of taxpayers’ money in a racial discrimination lawsuit against his county employer, according to the May 22 Atlanta Journal-Constitution. {snip}

Carl filed the lawsuit six years ago, saying he was passed over for a director’s job because he is a white male. The newspaper reported that jurors heard testimony that a former county manager called employees “white marbles” and “black marbles” in making personnel decisions.

“They also heard second-hand testimony that County Commissioner Emma Darnell allegedly told a deputy county manager that there were ‘too many white boys’ in Human Services and that the new director should be black and female,” the paper reported.

{snip}

Census figures put Fulton County’s population at 48 percent white and 45 percent black, yet 83 percent of the county government’s 5,500 employees are black and 14 percent are white.

“There are indications that the imbalance is exacerbating resentments in a county polarized along racial lines and leading to discriminatory employment practices that are costing taxpayers millions of dollars in lawsuit payouts,” Constitution reporter Johnny Edwards says.

{Snip}

Prominent attorney A. Lee Parks, who represents Carl and who has successfully represented numerous white victims of job discrimination over the years, says Fulton County has developed a reputation “for having a patronage-driven workforce that doesn’t work very hard and has too many people on its payroll.”

White people, he says, have problems working there because they fear the discrimination that blacks once faced decades before.