GM used to hire engineers – and build cars. Now it counts beans – and signals virtue.

Word arrives that GM will henceforth explicitly judge applicants for employment based on how they look  – i.e., the color of their skin – openly repudiating the quaint idea that academic and other earned qualifications ought to be the sole criteria for employment.

Your hue will count as much as your degree – a surefire recipe for competence in critical work such as engineering.

But then, GM is doing less of that these days while doing a great deal more in the way of signaling and perhaps different CV are relevant for work of that nature.

It's not just GM, either.

The pharmaceutical combine Merck – one of the developers of the Holy Jab – is on board, which will surely engender confidence in the due diligence of the people who mixed and tested whatever's in the Holy Jab – along with WalMart, Verizon, American Express, Caterpillar and IBM and others who have joined a new racial combine styled the OneTen initiative, whose purpose is to put race first while insisting not to approve is – can you guess? – racist.

Mass hiring of black people – because they are black people – is the goal.

The initiative will "focus on hiring and training black workers without four-year degrees" in order to provide them with "family sustaining" jobs that pay on average $50,000 annually.

But this is not racist.