I’ve been digging into some of the stories of people getting fired for supposed racism.

What I found was companies cravenly sacrificing employees—some of them working-class people of color—who did nothing wrong.

My latest @TheAtlantic.

[Thread] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/

One of the most shocking stories is that of Emmanuel Cafferty, a Latino electrical worker who loved his job @SDGE.

“For the first time in my life,” he told me, “I wasn’t living check to check.”

A few weeks ago, a white activist thought he saw Cafferty doing a “white power symbol” - basically, the OK-symbol which trolls on 4-chan appropriated for giggles - and shared a picture of it on Twitter.

Within two hours, Cafferty was suspended. Within a week, he was fired.

Cafferty has no interest in politics.

He is no white supremacist.

The man who took his photo admitted he likely misinterpreted the interaction.

Most Americans don’t even know the “new meaning” of the OK-symbol.

There's not a shred of evidence Cafferty did anything wrong.

“I got so desperate,” Cafferty told me, “I was showing them the color of my skin. I was saying: ‘Look at me. Look at the color of my skin.’”

But to prove their anti-racism, the all-white team of investigators @SDGE was apparently willing to shatter the life of a brown man.

(In a statement, SPD&E claimed that “multiple factors led to the decision to terminate.”

They refused to answer any of my specific questions about the evidence they brought to bear on this decision or the process of terminating Cafferty.)

I also have new and damning details on the firing of David Shor.

(Shor is the progressive data analyst who tweeted the main findings of a paper by Omar Wasow in the American Political Science Review, and was then fired from his job at @CivisAnalytics.)

In an on-the-record statement, @CivisAnalytics claimed: “We have not, nor would we ever, terminate employees for tweeting academic papers.”

But... how do I put this politely... the evidence for that assertion is... difficult to come by.

Shor had worked at Civis Analytics since its founding, for seven years.

Some activists explicitly asked Civis to fire Shor for his tweets.

And the company’s CEO, @danrwagner, explicitly told his employees he fired Shor over the Tweets.

(Oops.)

There is also some interesting context here:

When I asked Civis’ Head of Communications for a list of its leadership team, she gave me an all-white, all-male list.

In the past months, there has been a lot of internal discontent about this lack of diversity.

Civis recently went so far as to scrub the names of its leadership team and the photographs of its employees from its website!

Right now, there’s virtually no information on either. A few months ago, Civis still had a picture of its board up.

(Oops.)

I'm gonna through a crazy thought out here:

Is it conceivable that Civis might be more interested in a superficial show of anti-racism than in addressing its own lack of diversity?

The coup de grace:

When I pressed Civis for any kind of evidence that Shor was fired for reasons unrelated to his tweets, the response was pretty revealing. Civis asked to withdraw its original, on-the-record statement claiming that Shor was not fired over his tweet.

Let me be clear:

The racial reckoning of the past month can, and hopefully will, be very positive.

There is still a lot of racism in America. We must not tolerate it.

But that makes it all the more important not to punish people who, you know, did nothing wrong.

There are three reasons why even—or rather: especially—those who primarily care about social justice should not dismiss the fate of people like Shor and Cafferty as a minor detail or a necessary price for progress.

1)

These incidents damage the lives of innocent people without achieving any noble purpose.

2)

These injustices are liable to provoke a political backlash.

If a lot of Americans come to feel that those who supposedly oppose racism are willing to punish the innocent to look good in the public’s eyes, they could well grow cynical about the enterprise as a whole.

3)

Those of us who want to build a better society should defend the innocent because movements willing to sacrifice justice in the pursuit of noble goals have, again and again, built societies characterized by pervasive injustice.

A core tenet of liberal democracy is that people should not be punished for reasonable actions or unsubstantiated allegations.

No matter how worthy the cause they invoke, you should not trust anyone who seeks to abandon these fundamental principles.

Please help redress these injustices!

All Cafferty wants is his job back. You can sign this petition to put pressure on @SDGE to right an egregious wrong. https://www.change.org/p/sdge-reinstate-emmanuel-caffertys-job-sdg-e

As for Civis, its CEO claimed, in part, that he was responding to pressure by his firm’s clients.

If any leaders of organizations that work with Civis read this thread, you might want to consider how you feel about innocent people being fired in your name...

And finally, please read and share my full piece @TheAtlantic.

There's lots more there than can fit into even as long a Twitter thread as this one.

[End] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/