He did more than that. He made a blanket statement that no white males would be getting raises or promotions. He made the comment behind closed doors where he didn't think it would get out. Wrong. I was working at a Wingcast in San Diego (Ford/Qualcomm) when he made the statement. We heard about it within 15 minutes of the utterance. The immediate reaction was "Screw him". There was an immediate revolt and work slow down. The white males stopped putting in extra effort. They just worked the standard hours and made no extra effort to correct the errors being made by those with the preferred skin color.
Jack Nasser was handed his walking papers shortly after his stupid utterance. Wingcast folded the shop in June 2002, so I wasn't around to see what Bill Ford did to try to fix the damage done by Nasser. Wingcast was the ultimate exercise in "diversity". It was populated with H1B labor from around the world. It was also an abject failure. Too many highly compensated H1Bs with a terrible work ethic. Too many who were creative resume writers who couldn't deliver on the bottom line.
Same thing when Hazel O’Leary was Secretary of Energy. By her dictate, no white male heterosexuals were to get promotions - at all - or performance ratings above a certain level.
There was one high level meeting at Los Alamos National Laboratory where the content involved classified information. Hazel O’Leary straightaway bitched that there were not enough “people of colour” and refused to allow the meeting to go forward until she was satisfied with the proper number of “people of colour” in attendance. And she was rather imperious about it - threatening people’s jobs. Well, her quota was met - and then they could not discuss anything (then again she would not be able to understand one bit of it anyway). In the mad scramble to meet the “people of colour” quota, there were some in attendence who did not have the proper clearance levels.
She also did away with colour coding of security badges. The colour coding referred to certain areas of the facility - clearance is compartmented, I won’t go further. In her mind, the colour coding was racist, and had to be one away with immediately.
She was also known for shaking down vendors and contractors for “donations” to her favorite charities (of which I wonder if she could be involved in some 419 schemes after she left office?).