Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site cca.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!cca!diego From: diego@cca.UUCP (Diego Gonzalez) Newsgroups: net.politics,net.social,net.women,net.flame Subject: Re: Discrimination and Affirmative Action Message-ID: <2973@cca.UUCP> Date: Mon, 17-Jun-85 18:39:37 EDT Article-I.D.: cca.2973 Posted: Mon Jun 17 18:39:37 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 20-Jun-85 07:36:55 EDT References: <566@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> <449@unc.UUCP> Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge Lines: 95 Xref: watmath net.politics:9469 net.social:689 net.women:5932 net.flame:10628 I'd like to say something out of my own experience. I could give you a lesson in sociology and anthropology. But I have been reading the net discussion about the affirmative action issue and feel that I should give you some insight. I am a light-skinned, Hispanic-sur-named black. I grew up in Massachusetts communities that were predominantly (more than 98%) non-colored. They had, because it was important to my parents, good school systems. I received a good education, attended the state university, graduated and served as an officer in the Navy. After some years in graduate school, I entered the civilian working world. During my school and service years, I had encountered some adverse racial discrimination but it was rarely blatant enough to stir me to react. I tended to consider it ignorance and let it pass. At the time that civil rights leaders (and other voices) were looking for an affirmative action law or laws, I felt that equal access guarantees were sufficient. I no longer believe this. Here is why. Sex- and race-biased imbalances in the workplace are not accidental nor unconscious. They are, in fact, the result of very deliberate selective hiring practices (you could call it "the principle of hiring for similarity"). It is a set of practices grounded in a kind of thinking which most of us, at one time or another, have been guilty. The thinking I speak of is the rationalization that there will be greater harmony (and therefore productivity, I assume) in the workplace if the members share similar backgrounds and culture. For centuries, this type of hiring was practiced without question. In American society, we are faced by facts that compel a different approach. There are some factors that, by the old standards, would perpetually exclude some members of society from most workplaces (if only on the basis of tradition). The two most notable -- although certainly not most important -- are a person's sex or race. Like the protagonist in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", women, blacks, Hispanics and other visually recognizable minorities were considered blanketly incapable of doing the functions of the white male business majority. In fact, a survey of Massachusetts corporate boards recently seemed to indicate that this attitude is far from dead. I have been a victim of such attitudes, treated like an "invisible" person, and my career opportunity has been narrow. I am different. But the differences that have made my professional life more difficult than normal have not been differences of qualifications or aptitude. There are differences of style, presentation, and of relationship. They are the kinds of differences which, if accepted and utilized in the American workplace over the last decades, would have resulted in a much different picture in the comparative successes in the international marketplaces. They are the differences that simply request that individuals not assume that their place in the world is their right due to their maleness, whiteness, or American-ness. What I am saying is that many people, some probably without even realizing it, sincerely believe that they have been born with some kind of superiority. The courts and lawmakers of the past two decades agreed broadly that the kind of exclusory discrimination described above had occurred and that it should be halted and corrected as soon as possible. Their conclusion was that active adjustments should be encouraged and, where possible, directed. They saw then, as I do now, that the problem was a deep seated one, and that passive approaches would have little effect on making actual changes in hiring and promotion practice. They fully understood that change required actually having minorities working in positions from which "tradition" had perennially barred them. Further, they knew that from the point of strictest "fairness," affirmative action would for a time create its own form of discrimination. However, in the long term a policy actively pursuing true employment equality could accomplish in fact a long denied constitutional principle. It was to this end that today's affirmative action laws and programs were created. The intent (and effect, in most cases) of the laws is to create a dynamic process that actively begins a change. Without such laws, it would be too easy for an employer so disposed to shrug off a minority job candidate by saying "Not qualified" or "No _____s or ____n applied." Affirmative action applies the pressure to find and promote persons who, in the past, had no recourse is cases of job or promotional rejection. As minority workers increase their presence in the workplace, as they are accepted as fully contributing members of th professions, are promoted and themselves assume the power of hiring, the need to actively enforce minority hiring should diminish. Consider that it has been one hundred and twenty years since the freeing of the majority of American blacks and sixty-odd years since women won the right to vote. If the issue of workplace equality were to follow its course simply by "equal opportunity" policy, can anyone predict at what time in the future minorities could widely claim a reasonable share the workplace pie. It is, to me, unfortunate that laws must be passed to compel people to do what seems just, fair, and beneficial (to say nothing of being common sense). That is the reality of American society, however, and our own law -- the Constitution -- says that equality of human kind is a basic tenet of our national beliefs. People talk about morality a lot these days. The Constitution is our stated moral guide, it seems to me, and if we are not up to taking action to bring such dreams to pass what are our *real* goals for democracy?