
Boeing communications boss resigns over sexist article he wrote in 1987 - andness
https://nypost.com/2020/07/03/boeing-communications-boss-niel-golightly-resigns-over-article/
======
wegs
Core to any sort of social progress is the belief that people can change, and
people changing.

I sure as heck wouldn't want anyone judged for views they held 30 years ago. I
don't want to be judged for the views I hold today in 30 years either.

That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if
you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life
now.

I'm a different person now than I was in college, and I'll be a different
person in another 30 years. I may be a better person or a worse person -- I
don't know yet -- but I definitely will not the same person I am today. I can
think of few things a person might have done in 1987 which ought to affect
their lives now.

This does not reflect well upon Boeing at all.

There is also an element of ageism here. Virtually anyone beyond some age will
have held currently-unacceptable views at some point in their lives.

~~~
threatofrain
The problem is there isn't a culturally agreeable calculus to know when
someone is trustworthy, and that the "punishment" here is one of withdrawing
from relations through the free exercise of association. The main intervention
you can do is to tell people to stop exercising their freedom of association.

> That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago,
> if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal
> life now.

If a person molested one child 30 years, should a label of "sex offender"
follow them as they attempt to regain their life as a youth educator? Should
they never ever be allowed near children again?

If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their
intellectual inferiority, should they be entrusted with a leadership position
over black Americans?

~~~
wegs
I think key in my post was "and reformed."

There were plenty of, for example, KKK members who then became anti-KKK
activists. If you were born in 1915, and your parents were a member of the
KKK, odds are pretty good you might have written something like that in the
1930's. It's how you were brought up. We don't have permanent digital records
of everything that happened, but I'd say it's almost guaranteed you would have
expressed such views.

If by the 1950s and 1960's, you had renounced those views, and wanted to be a
civil rights activist, it's important you can do that. If anything,
familiarity with the opposition would make you more effective.

Without the ability to do that, the civil rights movement would have needed to
wait for a lot of people to die (or at least retire). It happened when it did
in part because people could and did change their minds.

So to answer your question: In all of the cases you listed, it's possible for
people to grow and reform. It's a question of what evidence is available that
they have, in fact, reformed. To go with the KKK example, sharing KKK secrets
with the FBI, taking the large personal risk of publicly denouncing the
organization, and joining the civil rights movement would be pretty darned
good evidence.

~~~
arkades
> I think key in my post was "and reformed."

Is there good reason to expect that they reformed?

Is it as or more reasonable to expect they've simply learnt to hold their more
objectionable views close to the vest?

If the answer to the former is "no," and to the latter is "yes," then I don't
really know how you'd expect anyone to work with a leadership that openly
views them as a hindrance to the workplace.

If he'd made a public anti-semitic article 20 years ago, and didn't undertake
very significant acts of reformation, certainly _I_ would take for granted
that he's still an anti-semite. There's no reason to imagine otherwise. And
I'd feel very uncomfortable working for a company where the leadership
includes and accepts a publicly professed anti-semite.

~~~
wegs
I'm not close enough to this situation, but the evidence I have is:

(1) He said so. (2) There weren't any allegations of improprieties in the past
decade or two in the articles I've read. (3) 30 years ago, likely a majority
(and certainly a near-majority) of people had at least some level of
discomfort with women serving equally in the military. Today, it's an
extremist view held by a tiny minority. Most people who held those views 30
years ago did, in fact, change views, not closet them up.

What you're describing is a symptom of exactly this cancel culture. People DO
learn to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest, and that's a
problem. People can't actually change views without open and critical
conversations.

I live in an extremely progressive city with a lot of racism and bigotry
simmering just below the surface. It's bad -- many people in positions of
power hold extremely bigoted views. That never plays out in the open, but
those people act on those views, either without articulating them, or
articulating them as abstractions.

I see no way to address any of that without honest and open conversations,
which we can't have. Saying the wrong thing leads to career death, so everyone
says the PC thing.

And when racism happens, in most cases, people depart quietly, and move into a
similar position at another company / school / police department / etc. It's
pretty rare that anything goes public. But if it did -- someone was closed out
of the economy because of a perception that they were racist -- what do you
think the result of that on racial tensions would be?

It's important to have systems to address and resolve problems. If you have a
racist, the desired outcome should be that in a few years, they're not racist
anymore. Start there, and work backwards to how to build out systems to do
that.

There's also a longer post about the value of due process, and of innocent-
until-proven-guilty (which is not the same as NO process, which is what we
often have right now).

As a footnote, your discomfort is not the paramount issue here. We have laws
to protect former felons, people with bad credit records, etc. from employment
discrimination. Even if I might rather not hire a former felon, or someone who
can't manage their finances well, I'm not allowed to ask those questions in a
job interview. That allows people who've made mistakes -- often much bigger
than this one -- to return as contributing members of society. That's a good
thing. Otherwise, we end up with revolving doors to jails. Indeed, I'd argue
those are the laws which ought to be expanded -- they're not nearly strong
enough, and that disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations. We want
paths to remediation for everyone, rather than for no one.

------
whatshisface
From the boss's article:

> _They may become inhibited and stilted, self-consciously muting the more
> overt expressions of their comraderie because they feel that frank vulgarity
> is inappropriate in the presence of females, even if that vulgarity is a
> male social lubricant and if women profess not to object._

 _They may openly rebuff her presence because they are unable to relate to her
on masculine emotional terms._

 _They may treat her with patronizing tolerance, as the unit 's mascot._

 _They may being to compete with each other for her attention, breaking up
group loyalties and shared destiny for individual sexual or romantic
gratification._

Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of
his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists point
out exist today.

To balance out your opinion of how right he was, he also said this:

> _In contrast, women do not naturally band together ritual comradeship._

Clearly, he didn't provide any sources or reason to believe that. His article
was armchair speculation. Repeating cultural beliefs without support, as if
they were scientific facts, served as the mainstay of "polite" racism and
sexism for decades, and although polite society has moved on from those
cultural beliefs, it's a lesson to all of us that the practice of writing
these unscientific articles never went out of fashion.

~~~
zozbot234
> Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of
> his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists
> point out exist today.

ISTM that he's predicting some very real social frictions, but that calling
them "consequences of sexism" may be a bit silly-- unless you posit that
literally any institutional dynamic that might disadvantage women in some way
is per se structural/institutional sexism, which is really just a matter of
semantics. They're consequences of forcing people presenting with very
different gender roles (male vs. female) to interact in a newly diverse
environment. This will always involve some compromising of values.

~~~
pessimizer
"Gender roles" seems obviously institutional. Who exactly assigns them, and
why would it be silly to say that the portions that aren't clearly biological
are likely sexist?

~~~
jtbayly
Are you saying it’s not clearly biological for men to behave differently
around women?

That it’s not clearly biological for a man to place a high priority on seeking
a woman for “individual sexual or romantic gratification” in a way that can
cause him to view other men as competitors at the expense of “group loyalties
and shared destiny”?

------
major505
this cancel culture thing is getting out of control.

First you cannot judge how people would talk or act in the past based in
present values.

Why are people able to consider cultural subjectivity when talking about other
cultures, but not our own? We are not the same society that we where 40 years
ago. Things changed, opnions to

And event if the guy was sexist, this attitute dosent consider if his opnion
changed over the years. People learn new things, get new experiences that
change theirs perspectives.

Letting go a worker because of a opnion he held 35 years ago should be met
with a lawsuit.

~~~
pessimizer
He was canceled by Boeing. If they thought he was worth keeping, it would have
been very easy to defend him against this ancient article, especially since
his classy exit shows him to be willing to contritely say the right things
now.

If you're saying that Boeing is out of control, I agree, although firing some
exec for being passionately sexist at one time in his life doesn't rank on the
list of their sins imo.

~~~
goatinaboat
_it would have been very easy to defend him against this ancient article_

Would it? Or would anyone who tried to defend him also have their own 30+
years ago opinions dredged up? It's not safe for anyone until there is "herd
immunity" against being cancelled and we're a long way from there yet.

------
olivermarks
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls
the past.”

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because
there will be no words in which to express it.”

------
hindsightbias
If a United States Naval Officer goes to the trouble to get his passionate
views into the annals of the USNI, you better go to the trouble to retract
them if you’ve evolved.

This wasn’t some tweet. And context matters in retrospect given what happened
in the Tailhook era.

~~~
apsec112
The article says he apologized:

"Golightly stepped down Thursday as Boeing’s senior vice president of
communications following an employee complaint about the 1987 article, which
he called “embarrassingly wrong and offensive.”"

~~~
hindsightbias
A former Naval Officer and C-Level aplogizing when he gets caught 30 years
later is not honorable. The time to do it was decades ago. It’s a wonder who
vetted him.

He’s not some kid on the internet.

~~~
apsec112
The guy is in his 60s. Asking people to remember everything they have ever
written over their entire life, and then publicly retract it as soon as they
change their minds about any given portion, is not reasonable. Heck, I had an
article published in a student newspaper twelve years ago (in 2008), and even
now I barely remember what it says.

------
jtbayly
Cancel culture strikes again.

------
asveikau
Maybe he was asked to quit, perhaps rather forcefully. But he is going out in
a classy way by saying his prior position was wrong.

The people on this thread calling this "cancel culture" could learn something
from the frankness of the statement.

Keep in mind his company has military contracts. If the PR guy is on record
opposing women in the military, even a long time ago... Not good.

~~~
apsec112
This culture of "never forget, no excuses, no forgiveness" is part of why the
US has so many people in prison. Suppose someone commits an armed robbery.
They should be arrested, certainly, for many reasons. But after they have been
tried, punished, and served their sentence, should they be permanently exiled
from society? Should they never be able to find employment for the rest of
their life? No, because that doesn't help anyone and just creates more crime.
This person is probably rich enough to retire, but most people are not - they
_need_ a job, or else they'll get evicted and wind up homeless. "You can never
work again" isn't that much better than America's history of insanely
vindictive prison sentences.

~~~
asveikau
I totally believe in forgiveness.

But I think you miss the point. This guy's entire job was promote the public
image when, among other things, selling to the military. And he wasn't rank
and file. He was near the top.

He won't have trouble finding a job that doesn't involve giving a bad image to
a military contractor.

~~~
apsec112
He wasn't re-assigned, transferred, or demoted, even though Boeing is a big
company with plenty of positions - he was fired. And many people are willing
to fire even blue-collar workers and random small business managers:

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

------
hawkice
He claims this is why, but if you're the chief spokesperson for a company that
can't get past a safety and reliability scandal, I think it's just he was
asked to resign.

~~~
jtbayly
He's only been there 6 months. Seems unlikely.

------
Kednicma
I see people complaining that he was canceled, but if it takes three and a
half decades to get canceled, then I'm not sure I see the problem. If I were
to write an article about how I think that women ought not to serve in the
military, or any such similar drivel, then I would probably perish naturally
before any punishment arrived.

Are folks here anticipating that they themselves will get canceled for their
old sexist writings, or is there something else here?

~~~
apsec112
This sort of retroactive vindictiveness is bad for everyone. In 1987, almost
no one supported gay marriage, and many people wrote articles saying so. (DOMA
was enacted in 1996 under Bill Clinton.) A lot of people, perhaps a majority
of Americans, have changed their minds in the light of new arguments and
evidence. How willing will anyone be to change their minds, if the response is
"that doesn't matter, you're fired and exiled from polite society for the rest
of your life"?

"An army officer in the Qin dynasty was supposed to lead his troops somewhere
but got delayed.

He asked a friend of his "What is the penalty for being late?"

"Death." Says his friend.

He then asks "What is the penalty for rebellion?"

"Death." Says his friend.

He replies "Well then..." And thus began the Dazexiang Uprising."

~~~
Kednicma
Well, this executive voluntarily resigned. He could have just as easily issued
a statement condemning his younger self for their sexist and puerile remarks,
disavowing his older views and committing himself to doing better. Plenty of
folks have done just that, and found themselves growing and improving as
people.

There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported gay
rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]. (He also opposed DOMA [1].) Indeed, a
majority of Americans, some 70%, have had to change their minds about this,
but that does not mean that there were not folks back then who had reasonable
moral stances about ensuring that all of us have the right to volunteer to go
die for this country.

I'm not seeing what's actually bad here. Indeed I'm not even seeing what's
vindictive. The wages of free speech is people reading and thinking about what
you say.

[0] [https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-
right...](https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-rights)

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-
sold...](https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-soldiers)

~~~
apsec112
"Well, this executive voluntarily resigned."

In this context, "voluntarily resignation" usually means "resign now, or
you're fired":

[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/business/23family.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/business/23family.html)

"He could have just as easily issued a statement condemning his younger self
for their sexist and puerile remarks, disavowing his older views and
committing himself to doing better."

He did do all of these things. It didn't matter, he was still fired. No
forgiveness allowed.

"Plenty of folks have done just that, and found themselves growing and
improving as people."

In my experience, making someone apologize and then firing them anyway rarely
leads them to personal growth.

"There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported
gay rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]."

I don't think even Sanders supported gay marriage in the 80s. The linked clip
just says that being gay shouldn't be illegal.

"Indeed I'm not even seeing what's vindictive. The wages of free speech is
people reading and thinking about what you say."

Reading, thinking, and responding to speech is good and healthy. "You are
never allowed to earn a living, participate in commerce, or support your
family for the rest of your life, regardless of what you do or how many times
you apologize" is vindictiveness.

~~~
Kednicma
It sounds like you're speculating; do you have _evidence_ that he did not
voluntarily resign?

