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Work Force Diversity : A Modest Memo to Management : Do Me No Favors, Tell Me No Lies

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Special To The Times

TO: Management

FROM: An Employee of Color

RE: Workplace Diversity

One of the enduring--and erroneous--assumptions I’ve encountered as a racial minority in the corporate workplace is the smug certitude that I exist in my position for some reason other than the most obvious--that is to say, my job performance. It was true in the early 1970s, when I entered the work force, and it remains true today.

It’s an absurd Catch-22. Because if I am not competent, but you hire me anyway (solely to satisfy someone’s need for a more diverse-appearing staff), you’re doing yourself no favor. And if I am competent and you hire me only because I’m a minority, you are not doing me one, either. Because in that case, I probably already deserved the job more than some of the non-ethnic people who were also in the competition.

Most African Americans who have integrated American workplaces (and I dare say this is true of Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and other racial minorities as well) have had this drummed into us since childhood: “If you want to succeed Out There, you will have to be five (10, 15 . . . pick your ratio) times more prepared than the whites.” Our parents knew that the playing field in the integrated world was not level, and they weren’t holding their breath for anyone to even out the corporate parquet before we got there, either.

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But being competent doesn’t prevent us from being exposed to management’s patronizing suppositions that we need more help, guidance or supervision than our white peers (some of whom have less experience).

In one of my first jobs with a household-name publisher of book series, a prim research chief blithely pointed to a seat directly outside her door when I asked where my desk would be. “Right next to me,” she chirped, full of faux cheer. “That way I can keep an eye on you.” (Why, I wondered? Was she worried that I would pilfer the pencils if I weren’t in her direct line of sight?)

Such offhanded offenses are still committed daily. Those of us who struggle to perform in the integrated marketplace often do so in the face of subtle racism that drains one’s energy and enthusiasm for the job.

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The result? Some of us self-destruct. (What company doesn’t have its apocryphal story of a minority staffer who loses it--seemingly suddenly and without reason--and accuses the corporation of trying to do him in, sometimes via a kamikaze memo or public utterance?)

Some of us burn out. (I know a brilliant woman with an Ivy League degree who spent a year as a secretary “because I wanted a job where I knew why they were going to treat me like crap--because I’m a typist--instead of wondering all the time if they’re being condescending because I’m not one of them.”)

Some of us turn inward or become schizophrenic. (“Hey, I put on my white-boy suit before I leave for work and become a black man when I cross my front door at night.”) And some of us, many of us, actually, perform our jobs with competence and even distinction despite the slings and arrows.

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The playwright Lorraine Hansberry (“A Raisin in the Sun”) once confided to her friend James Baldwin, “I love being black, Jimmy, but it can be terribly inconvenient.”

Anyone who is black and has spent time toiling in the integrated workplace knows exactly what Hansberry meant. And anyone who knows what she meant will also know that, judging from the past, it will still be inconvenient to be black or Asian or Latino or Native American in the predominantly white workplace for the predictable future.

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