Blackout at Justice

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Extreme political correctness is a good description of the shocking way the Department of Justice censored a study criticizing its lackluster performance on racial diversity issues.
When the Justice Department hides some of its own flawed employment policies, it loses some of its moral authority to monitor and prosecute unfair workplace practices in general.
The department began on the right track by asking a consultant, KPMG, to review racial diversity in its work force of attorneys. Censors blacked out a major part of KPMG's findings, including a comment that the department was doing too little to address perceptions of workplace unfairness among its black attorneys.
Censors had heavy had
About half of the report's 186 pages were doctored before the document was placed on the department's Web site. A Justice Department spokesman said the agency had blacked out those pages because parts of KPMG's findings were inaccurate. The public eventually was able to read the unexpurgated report after Russ Kick, a writer and editor in Tucson, Ariz., electronically restored the original text and posted the unedited version on his Web site, www.thememoryhole.org.
The study found that the attrition rate among minority attorneys was 49 percent higher than that for whites. It also found that minority attorneys were "significantly more likely than whites to cite stereotyping, harassment and racial tension as characteristics of the work climate," and that minorities were significantly underrepresented in management.
Push needed
Recruiting, hiring, promoting and creating a supportive environment for minorities won't come about without a strong push from Attorney General John Ashcroft. As the report notes, promoting diversity "will take extraordinarily strong leadership" from the top.
During the stormy Senate confirmation hearings on Ashcroft's appointment to his current job, he was backed by black conservatives who said he had a good record on civil rights. He now has a chance to show he deserves that support by aggressively promoting diversity on his staff.