Mercedes Petronas paints F1 cars black and joins anti-racist bandwagon – also hails an anti-Semite
Next F1 season will feature Mercedes cars painted black. This is “a signal of their commitment to greater diversity and inclusion in motorsport”. This does not mean everyone driving a black car is on the side of angels, nor that white van man is a racist sod. It’s all about changing the colour to fit the mood. Mercedes racing cars are usually silver. Mercedes said the Black Lives Matter movement had “shone a searching light on how much we need new measures and actions in the fight against racism”. So a black car will show how Mercedes is not racist and is anti-racist.
This is the board at Mercedes:
The Mercedes board is white but the racing team has one high-profile black employee: F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton. He says driving in a black car is an “important statement we are willing to change and improve as a business”. Mercedes F1 team says “just 3% of our workforce identify as belonging to minority ethnic groups and only 12% of our employees are women. This lack of diversity shows that we need to find new approaches to attract talent from many areas of society we do not currently reach.”
Come, come. The talent is already attracted. Is he saying that less blacks, Kurds, Jews, gypsies and Turks want to work for a company that celebrates speed and spends the best part of the year travelling the planet in search of it? If he is, he’s talking rot. The barrier is in the hiring and opportunity, not the application.
Mercedes F1 team principal Toto Wolff adds: “Racism and discrimination have no place in our society, our sport or our team: this is a core belief at Mercedes. But having the right beliefs and the right mindset isn’t enough if we remain silent. We wish to use our voice and our global platform to speak up for respect and equality, and the Silver Arrow will race in black for the entire 2020 season to show our commitment to greater diversity within our team and our sport. We will not shy away from our weaknesses in this area, nor from the progress we must still make; our livery is our public pledge to take positive action.”
All well-intentioned and commendable, I’m sure. But until the faces making the decisions and owning the capital change, everything else risks looking like a marketing exercise.
Note: The F1 team is named Mercedes Petronas. Petronas says it is “the custodian of Malaysia’s national oil and gas resources”. It is wholly owned by the Government of Malaysia. Mahathir bin Mohamad served as the Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and 2018 to 2020. He is a member of the Parliament of Malaysia for the Langkawi constituency in the state of Kedah. He is, by his own definition, “proud to be labeled antisemitic” and who told the Cambridge Union: “I had some Jewish friends, very good friends. They are not like the other Jews, that’s why they are my friends.” He said a Jewish cabal “ruled the world”.
In his 1970 book The Malay Dilemma, he described Jews as being “not merely hook-nosed, but understand[ing] money instinctively,” sentiments he repeated in a BBC interview last year, when he also questioned the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Here he is being hailed by Petronas.
Dr Mahathir, Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister, took on an advisory role at Petronas after stepping down in 2003.
Dear Mercedes. You’ve got a lot of work to do…
Posted: 29th, June 2020 | In: Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
