the other day, i threw a post onto Fistful of Talent on the arrest of Henry Gates Jr. it was a simple post merely bringing that situation to the attention of my fellow HR and recruiting pros who didn't have it on their radar, and reminding them of the little related lesson of why we don't consider arrest records when looking at one's criminal history for employment reasons. and the issue seemed like a no brainer to me... a relevant topic... but not everyone agreed. which i have to say, i'm just a little disappointed about. the comments that came through, and the emails i received, made me sigh. over, and over again.
i know that when talking about race, you always run the risk of offending. and i know that it's never an easy topic to tackle, which is why we don't talk about it enough... so let me tackle some of the issues that came up as a result of this post.
- how is this a relevant topic for Fistful of Talent? for those who don't see the obvious tie in... let me spell it out for you. clearly. if you do criminal history checks as a condition of employment, then you should know the distinction between evaluating arrest records versus convictions and the gates story illustrates nicely how arrests can happen - easily, mistakenly or for dumb reasons. the EEOC advises against considering arrest records as certain minority groups in the U.S. are disproportionately arrested - mainly blacks and hispanics. this is a fact. this is not anecdotal. this isn't pulling the race card. and why this is troubling? because even though certain minority groups are arrested more, the arrests don't always result in the same amount of convictions. so to make it very easy for you to understand, these minority groups aren't necessarily committing crimes more and therefore being arrested more. something else is going on and this is where racial profiling comes into play.
- why is this an incident of racial profiling? with the Gates situation specifically, the caller didn't say there was a "black man" specifically breaking in. this is true. but did the caller have to bring up race for it to be profiling? or for this to be a racial issue? not really. she made the call and then the dispatcher asked questions about the suspects' race. the fact of the matter is that so much of our bias is hidden. it's subconscious. we don't always have to blatantly say or point to color. we make snap judgments and then i think, things like this incident happen. and then they escalate, and then they become ugly.
- as a white woman, if the same thing happened to me (said my commenter...) i'd gladly take it in stride. people were just doing their jobs and trying to protect the community. i
think that while we don't know for sure how much race was a factor in this
incident, we can all pretty much agree that if it were a white man or
white woman facing a white cop, the outcome would not be the same. this wouldn't be an issue. we
know through history that black men and police have a different
dynamic. period. it's a fact of life. and i think if you can't admit to that fact, then you are in denial about race in the US. we're too quick to jump to conclusions about other people's situations and not look at them from the lense of the person it's happened to... and if we were to do that, admit that we don't walk in the shoes of a black man, and admit that we don't walk around
carrying all of the historical context of what it's like as a black man
in america - which is a lot to carry around, then i think we'd all make fewer absolutes about this being blown out of proportion, or that this isn't a race issue and that it's just coincidence that gates is black and the police officer is white. when you step back, when you look at the bigger picture, when you add in the complexity
of institutional racism and years and years of tense relations between black men and the
police... then this isn't so clear cut.
- obama is president. isn't it time to stop pulling the race card? for this statement, i almost want to scream... but it's exactly what i feared when obama was elected. a black president doesn't equate to the race problem being sovled in the US. the best analogy i can make is... if a female president were elected, would that automatically signal gender equality in the US too? would the wage gap disappear? would women then be paid the same as men for comparable jobs? there's too much history, the issue is too complex. a black president, just like a female president, doesn't solve hundreds of years of issues that are now embedded and rooted deeply, and that are sometimes institutional.
you may not agree with me on any of this. that's fine. i just ask for you to partake in a dialog on it though and not be scared of that. before you engage though, just do some homework. inform yourself, then come back and have a chat. as a starting point for you... a good cross section of diverse thoughts on the gates matter here on the daily beast, stanley fish on this being deja vu for gates, some good commentary on racial progress in the US, and an interesting discussion on racial profiling and how there's more being done about it than we realize publicly...
we don't talk about race enough. sometimes we talk about diversity, but we don't always talk about race. and i think in our little blogosphere made up of HR and recruiting pros, we're too nervous. we aren't ballsy enough. we don't confront these issues head on. which has left me thinking... what's stopping us? and why aren't i doing a better job of addressing the lack of dialog?




