'Star Wars' Star Reveals Tina Fey Told Him He Was 'Diversity' Hire, Gave Him Imposter Syndrome
Successful Hollywood actor, writer and producer Donald Glover says he was so hurt by being told that he was merely a “diversity hire” early in his career that it took years for him to overcome the feeling that he didn’t really deserve his success — showing exactly how divisive “diversity” as practiced by the left can be.
Glover, who has had roles in the TV series “Atlanta” and “Community” as well as the films “Men in Black: International,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” broke into show business in the late 1990s.
In 2006, he got one of his big early breaks when he was hired as a writer for the popular NBC comedy series “30 Rock.”
But things were not as bright as they seemed — at least not to Glover.
In an interview with GQ published Tuesday, he said “30 Rock” star Tina Fey sent his whole world tumbling down with what she told him about his hiring.
The actor and writer was a resident assistant at New York University when he was hired as a writer by NBC. But it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“It definitely didn’t feel like I was supposed to be there,” Glover told the magazine. “I used to have stress dreams every night where I was doing cartwheels on the top of a New York skyscraper with the other writers watching me.”
So, why was his big break such a stressful experience? He says he was made to feel like an imposter.
As GQ put it: “But it’s safe to assume Donald Glover’s impostor syndrome was complicated by the fact that he was hired because of a diversity initiative at NBC, in which adding a Black writer to your writers room didn’t count against your budget. He jokes about it being a two-for-one, because you could get someone from Harvard and a Black voice in the room for basically no money at all.”
“There is no animosity between us or anything like that, but [Tina Fey] said it herself…. It was a diversity thing,” Glover said of the divisive policy.
Fey confirmed the story, according to a 2018 Glover profile in The New Yorker by Tad Friend.
“I wondered, Am I being hired just because I’m black?” Glover was quoted as saying.
Friend said Fey “told me that the answer was in large part yes; she admired Glover’s talent but hired him because funds from NBC’s Diversity Initiative ‘made him free.'”
While the actor/writer’s life made a serious change for the better once he joined the cast of “Atlanta” in 2016, he said his earlier years were wracked with feelings of inadequacy because of what he was told at NBC: He was hired to fulfill a policy goal, not because he was talented.
But Glover’s self-doubt created by liberal “diversity” policies certainly mirrors the harm detractors of diversity rules say can be caused by such ideas.
In 2021, for instance, Business Insider noted that many minorities feel this “impostor syndrome” effect when they find out or have the suspicion they are merely “diversity hires.” The syndrome, defined as an “inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills,” can be damaging to self-esteem.
Business Insider offered the example of hospital executive Julia Bernard-Thompson, who was racked with self-doubt when she was told her hiring was intended to “tick a box.”
“It messes with your head,” she said. “You go from feeling really proud of yourself, really accomplished … to feeling like, oh, so my qualifications and my experience didn’t really matter. They just went, ‘All right, she’ll do because she’s Black.’ It kind of messes with the accomplishment of getting a role you really wanted.”
In fact, according to a study of such programs published by Harvard Business Review, diversity programs are a failure at the very purpose they are aimed at affecting.
The survey, published in 2016, found that diversity rules rarely make companies fairer. Instead of raising up minority employees, they make minorities feel inferior and white employees feel unfairly treated.
By their very nature, diversity programs that place quotas on hiring put worthiness and merit in the back seat, and this, in turn, puts a serious dent in an employee’s self-confidence.
Glover was able to achieve a level of acclaim that helped him rise above his feelings of being hired solely to “tick a box.” Many others are not.
These programs tend to foster even more division in a country that is already divided enough.
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