Drug company blocking white and Asian applicants from fellowship programs.
QUICK FACTS:
- White and Asian applicants are not being accepted for a prestigious fellowship offered by the pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer.
- With its “Breakthrough Fellowship,” Pfizer provides college students with a master’s degree that is fully funded as well as several years of employment.
- Recently, however, the fellowship requirements specified that it only accepts applications from “Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American” students.
- While the company claims to be an “equal opportunity employer,” its requirements say that applicants must “meet the program’s goals of increasing the pipeline for Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic and Native Americans.”
DISCRIMINATION DETAILS AND LEGAL REACTIONS:
- “One of Pfizer’s Bold Moves is to create a workplace for all, and we are committed to increasing diversity by fostering a more inclusive workplace,” Pfizer says on its Breakthrough Fellowship Program page.
- “To build this, Pfizer has launched a Breakthrough Fellowship Program – a nine-year commitment to increase minority representation at Pfizer, designed to enhance our pipeline of diverse leaders. The Breakthrough Fellowship Program, first-of-its-kind, works to advance students and early career colleagues of Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American descent with a goal of developing 100 fellows by 2025,” the site reads.
- Adam Mortara, one of the country’s top civil rights attorneys, spoke out on the issue: “This Pfizer program is so flagrantly illegal I seriously wonder how it passed internal review by its general counsel,” said Mortara.
- Heriot, who is a law professor at the University of San Diego, also addressed the issue, saying, “Major corporations seem to have forgotten that there’s such a thing as law. They seem to think that as long as they’re woke, they’re bulletproof.”
BACKGROUND:
- A nationwide trend has begun to emerge in the area of discrimination against white employees, with companies such as Uber, NASDAQ, and JPMorgan Chase as well as American Express all coming under fire for their anti-white policies.
- A former employee of American Express is suing the company for its “anti-racism” policies through which the company allegedly treated its white employees in a disparaging way, forced them to undergo training, and told them to treat their black co-workers differently.
