Challenges In The Workplace: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 11

One of the main purposes of these posts, sourced mostly from the three books whose covers are shown on the posts, is to help build a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of race in America today.  I also hope that many readers will find the posts to be less polarizing than so much of what we see on the subject from the media and politicians, which often is intended to rile us up and drive us further into our respective political corners. The goal of these posts, like most Lone Liberal Republican posts, is to work towards more sensible, pragmatic and consensus-oriented discussions about difficult issues that America faces today, like race.

This book complements the first two in that it is less statistically oriented, and instead full of very human stories. Some interesting and thought-provoking excerpts from the book follow, including some that I hope will help the reader question the ways we stereotypically classify people based on race.

●       “An important site for the Nigerian second generation when discussing antiblack discrimination was the workplace. Respondents’ reports on their workplace experiences were varied. A bit less than half (43 percent) felt they had not been discriminated against because of their race. The majority (57 percent) felt they had been discriminated against because of their race. Some respondents who felt that they had been discriminated against at work thought that their experiences were analogous to those of African Americans.”

●       “In my nursing clinical when I go there and perform my duties, every once in a while older Caucasian patients may not want me to touch them for any reason. Just little things like that. They don’t outright say, ‘I don’t want your care,’ but whenever I enter their rooms, they are like, why do I have to get this one? They look at me weird to see if I’m not taking anything from their room.”

●       “The resumes of applicants with difficult-to-pronounce names are put aside. She said it just makes them feel more comfortable if they can pronounce your name. She told me that the initial reaction if they look at your name and they cannot pronounce your name is that they just don’t want to bother. [When this interviewee changed her name she] was so amazed, because it was the exact same resume. It wasn’t like anything changed except the name, and it worked! It worked! It is crazy, but it just let me know that is how it is.”

●       “Seeing the often-racist representations of black people in the mass media, reading and hearing about multiple incidents of antiblack discrimination, and seeing evidence of racial inequalities—from residential segregation to deteriorating inner cities to racial imbalance in mass incarceration—also remind them that they are black. To many, the social relationships associated with being black and the many racial injustices that flow out of these relationships are in the air breathed in the United States.”

●       “Irritating events that constantly remind them that they are black and therefore different and foreign. These include being mistaken for the janitor or nursing assistant instead of the doctor in hospitals, being mistaken for the secretary instead of the lawyer in courtrooms and law offices, and shopkeepers, especially Asian ones, placing your change on the counter instead of in the palm of your hand. Alex described elderly white ladies crossing to the other side of the road when they saw him coming down the street . ‘When a black person is driving a nice car they get stopped by police.’”

●       “The female second generation of Nigerian ancestry I interviewed did not experience such rampant antiblack discrimination, especially in public spaces and by officers of the judicial system. Like the men, they felt they were discriminated against at work, but for the most part they agreed that they had it easy compared to their male counterparts. While many of the men had to constantly modify their behavior so as not to seem “aggressive,” the women did not have to do this.”

●       “Employers were aware that some clients were less willing to receive attention from black people and consequently took race into consideration in making hiring decisions.”

●       “A future where black people become increasingly divided by ethnicity and class could lead to the black poor being left further and further behind. It would no longer be that only white America or white Britain does not care about the black poor; all middle-class people, including the black middle class, would be abandoning the black poor... To prevent a widening of the gulf between middle-class and poor blacks and prevent further abandonment of the black poor, more attempts have to be made to create and nurture ties between new blacks and their proximal hosts and then between middle-class and poor blacks.”

●       “The election of President Barack Obama was also a seminal moment in their conception of and belief in what it means to be American and what being American meant to them. His election opened up previously unimaginable possibilities and gave them a strong sense of acceptance and belonging, especially because many saw him as a second-generation African immigrant, like them.”

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If you find the subject matter in these The Mainstreaming of Minorities posts interesting, check out this link to the late Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Disuniting of America, foreshadowing the difficult place identity politics would lead us. (I used to get scolded for suggesting people read it.) All twelve of the posts can be found in the “For Those With More Academic Interests” section on the Lone Liberal Republican website.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing, and be well.