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Review:
Deborah Watts is
founder and president of a marketing consulting company,
Watts-Five Productions which she used to (essentially)
self-publish this interesting book. Her business is located in the Minneapolis-St.
Paul ("Twin Cities") area. This might present an interesting
observation. Many people tell me that the "liberal"
upper-Midwest Twin Cities, located half way to the North Pole at the 45th Parallel,
is the "whitest" major metropolitan area in the United States. One
could quarrel with this: we have other robust minorities, like
the Hmong and the Sioux, for which her book and world-view could
reasonably apply. In 1999, my employer at the time, Reliastar (became
ING and then Voya since) had a lunchtime workshop with her presenting her
book.
The book has a
slick, horizontal black-and-white cover (the "Schindler's List"
artistic effect), and consists mainly of a large number (starting with
"101") of scenario-based aphorisms, one per page, in large, very
readable type. There is a bonus of 33 extra "new" scenarios. In
her appendix, she provides a positive interpretation of the word,
"Black" which has (like "Negro") become somewhat a
negative, almost derogatory expression (at least when compared to
"African-American"). There is space for the reader to make his or
her own notes, also done in one of Power's books listed elsewhere on this
site; to me this seems to pander a bit to the reader.
Many of the
situations depict instances where people believe that they are behaving
"appropriately" (even given the “new rules” about workplace
conduct) but are actually in a subtle way insulting the African-American
staff member. Here is one example, from p. 10: "When I see
you, I don't see color. I don't think of you as black." Other
examples show much deeper and more venomous discrimination. Today,
responsible employers (under considerable legal pressure) maintain workplace
conduct codes that prohibit offensive remarks, but it is difficult to draw
the line where commends have cultural innuendo "between the
lines." Jonathan Rauch has provided a perspective on how the
"hostile workplace" concept can be carried too far in a New
Republic article, "Offices and Gentlemen: Don't Joke, Don't
Preach, Don't Argue, Don't Comment, Don't Opine (and For God's Sake Don't
Touch)" in the June 23, 1997 issue. Yet I
can remember a slur back in 1984 at a Dallas employer (which was reasonably
progressive for the time) by a tech coworker, “pro football is nothing more
than pitting my blacks against your blacks”.
I used to think
that most of this ill-will had been gone from corporate America for
years, but many anecdotes provided to me by African-Americans prove that this
is no longer true. And I can recall, some twelve years ago, that
managers would complain to me that they had to be extremely careful when
disciplining non-whites. People may, with some psychological
labor, learn acceptable visible "behavior," but it still seems that
people harbor negative attitudes and often need to perceive people of other
races as "inferior." Why? Is this a curious
blend of collectivism and narcissism? Even a recent ABC
"20-20 Downtown" (February 17, 2000) showed how black public
figures are often mistreated by police, cab drivers, and others; and another
"20-20" segment depicted the amazing resistance of racist hate
groups.
Most
readers of this web site know that I am no fan of over-using the facile
analogy between racial discrimination and anti-gay discrimination, but I will
make some comparison, based partly upon a reading of
Brian McNaught's Gay Issues in the Workplace (St.
Martin's Press, 1993), which appeared during the previous (1993) March
on Washington. (McNaught had authored On Being Gay.) McNaught's most
important contribution here is his discussion of "heterosexism,"
which does seem to echo or redirect racism. For example, gay
employees feel constrained to call their lovers "partners" rather
than "spouses." More important, some employers assume
(incorrectly) that gay people do not have families and expect them to work
the inconvenient hours so that their team-mates can be with "their
families." (The Wall Street Journal discussed
this problem with an egregious examples from a law firm in 1997). I've seen
some insensitivity myself: for example, an office email which said that the
way to face hardship was to "spend more time with your children and to
confide in your children." What about people who don't have
children?
Most of these
commentaries about "the fair and prosperous workplace" (as I called
it in the DADT book) assume that success is measured in
terms of conventional ascent up the corporate ladder, and that the main
barrier is "the glass ceiling." Indeed, in the age of
the Internet and of entrepreneurialism, conventional ideas of
"achievement" (and therefore, negatively speaking,
"discrimination") in the corporate workplace may well become less
relevant.
On October
26, 2000 the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a review from the Boston Globe
by Vanessa E. Jones of the book by Lena Williams: It’s the
Little Things: The Everyday Interactions That Get Under the Skin of Blacks
and Whites (Harcourt, 268 pgs).
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