A Righteous Car Dealer

I knew a man who was the head of a set of car dealerships in the South. The way in which things were done was you could come in and negotiate, and the salesman had a pretty big window of what they could give you the car for. They would negotiate, you would negotiate, and it was a lot of horse-trading going on except there was car-trading I guess.The salesman couldn’t go lower than this, but they could get this high and so it was a tradition. Somebody did some research and found out that men always were better negotiators with the salesmen than women, and white men and black men were better negotiators than African-American women.When somebody actually looked at what was going on, African-American women were regularly paying far more for their cars and were actually subsidizing the price for white men.With that information, the dealer had two options.On the one hand, he could say “because we’re not deliberately trying to hurt African-American women, we make better profits this way, we have no responsibility.” Or, we could pursue justice for all people, and take a deeper look at the system.The owner, a Christian man, ultimately decided he did have a responsibility to change the system. Ultimately, he changed the entire way he sold cars, beginning by creating a set-price, with no haggling allowed.At first, his own profits went down, with a noticeable loss of white male car buyers. Nevertheless, he says it’s the only way to be just. Over time however, as word got out about their change in pricing, a noticeable higher number of women and minorities began buying their cars from their dealership.What does righteousness look like? Do we have eyes to see systemic injustice? And are we willing to do something about it?