Last entry I criticized a book called Street Data Audiobook, about diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) when it comes to schools. I did feel a little guilty about posting something that comes down on this kind of thing right when Trump is going on a rampage against any sort of diversity initiative regardless of how much long term good it does or the data we have to support it. It felt tacky of me, but at the same time, it’s a discussion we need to have.
I finished Street Data a couple days ago and it didn’t get much better but I feel like I have more to say about it.
There’s a point in the book where she tells the story of a latino kid whose teacher randomly mentions that “asians are good at math” and made it like this big deal where he’s marginalizing this kid and trying to tell him that he somehow can’t be good at math. But from the teachers perspective, it’s just a random fact. It’s technically true statistically. He wasn’t claiming it was a rule.
Then later a story of a teacher who says to a black student, “I don’t see why anyone would be afraid of you. You’re not even that dark skinned.” Okay, fair enough. That’s tacky to be sure, but it turned into this whole drama where the parents had to come in, and talk about how traumatizing it was for their kid and the teacher had to go through sensitivity training and the kid and mom made this big show of forgiveness. I mean, to be fair, it wasn’t advocating firing people like this or anything, but to someone like me who was treated like garbage by many of my teachers, it feels like certain minorities are being coddled–I don’t like that word, I don’t want to use that word “coddled” here, but it’s like, I can’t think of a less offensive word that accurately describes the situation–and other demographics are being totally ignored.
This reminded me of a time in first grade when I was talking to the teacher. I was explaining my evenings: my parents worked at the same hospital. My mom worked midnights and my dad worked evenings. Their shifts would sometimes overlap. They didn’t want me home alone so on those nights my mom would take me to work with her, then I would watch TV in the waiting room (we didn’t have a TV at home) or if it got late, they would make me try to sleep somewhere. I told my teacher about this situation and in front of the whole class, she shouts, “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard!”
And I got hurt and confused almost immediately so I asked her why she felt that way and she said something like, “are you kidding me? They seriously take you to a hospital where you just sit around? They do this regularly? What is wrong with your parents?”
And I just never understood what her issue was with this situation but it really stuck with me over the years, making me afraid to talk about how my parents did things, and how we thought and how we dealt with issues. It gave me this internal idea that the world would always see us as freaks and that I needed to hide who we were. In other words, I felt marginalized.
But in books like Street Data, it feels like they don’t even acknowledge that unique situations of marginalization like this happen all the time–unless schools have somehow magically completely and totally changed, which maybe thanks to student’s recording their teachers meltdowns and posting them to YouTube, maybe it has? I dunno, to be fair, I’m very very far removed from school systems these days so I’m not speaking as a genuinely informed person.
Marginalization can happen for all sorts of whacked out reasons that have nothing to do with any of the traditionally protected groups. What about the girls who don’t like fashion, boys who don’t like sports or cars, vegans and other healthy eaters, people who maybe said one stupid thing one day and are judged for years for it, Pagans and other alternative religions, nerds, etc etc.
To be fair, a lot of what this book proposed, I’d probably vote for. It’s not pushing racial quotas or anything like that, but I have a big issue with the exclusionary language in general.
When you focus everything on traditionally marginalized groups like this book does, and if our policies are focused on these groups, well, that marginalizes, not only the people who don’t fit into those groups, but it also marginalizes anyone who does fit into those groups but who happen to have problems and complaints that have nothing to do with their minority status.
It claims we should be moving away from “satellite data”, but at the same time, the wording seems to entirely focus on the satellite data that segregates people into “marginalized demographics” instead of seeing them as individual humans that are far more than their race or gender identity.
It claims to be “anti-racist” but in many ways it’s not. It’s “reverse racist”, where you try to even out the playing field by battling one form of discrimination with another.
I took a night off from listening to it and moved on to a book called How We Learn to be Brave by Mariann Edgar Budde. Coincidentally, this book was also a lot about diversity and inclusion which I didn’t realize when I bought it. But instead of schools, it’s talking about churches. It’s from a religious perspective and it handles DEI concepts far better than Street Data. It actually told stories of discrimination to put a human face on it.
It felt like it was trying to get to a place where we are all treated like equals, and deeper systems and ideals are put in place so that we can recognize marginalization in all it’s myriad forms instead of just the typical ones that the liberals like to list out.
It’s funny that I bought those two books that I didn’t realize were about DEI, right when all this DEI drama with Trump is happening–maybe it was the Audible algorithm watching current events.
But one of my trans friends has been on one hand very worried about the loss of DEI protections at his work, but on the other, has been noting that there are a couple silver linings to what Trump is doing: 1) now it’s easier for heteronormative people to ask LGBTQ people questions about how our world works without fear of repercussions for saying something insensitive. 2) There are some or many situations where minorities are really given preferential treatment and get jobs or schooling where more qualified people are rejected. That, of course, is not cool with folks like myself. We do need to be treated equally, but most DEI initiatives are not actually doing this, but some of the DEI extremists, (maybe like the ones in Street Data?), get these kinds of unfair practices pushed in and they taint all the other initiatives that really are designed for equality.
Trump’s slash and burn strategy against these things is gross and wrong and it’s not motivated by equality. It feels more like it’s motivated by a desire to cause as much chaos as he possibly can so he can squeeze every ounce of wealth and power that he can out of America. He’s spitting in the face of democracy and half our population, and knowingly trying to divide us, waging psychological warfare on his own people. It’s treason. But it’s not all bad.
So I’m only an hour into this writing, so I guess I’ll tell a story. This one time at my first tech job, I was talking with the CEO and I joked something like “Dude, this place is a sausage fest. You must have some really sexist hiring practices or something.”
He got rather mad and was like, “Do you know what percentage of women have gotten jobs here? Take a guess! Take a wild guess at what percentage of women got hired here!”
“Dude, I’m just joking, just joking!” I said.
And he’s like “I know, but it still irritates me and seriously, take a guess. What percent?”
I shrugged.
“One hundred,” He says. “Absolutely one hundred percent. Every single woman who has ever applied for a job throughout the entire lifetime of this company has gotten a job here. Literally every last one. Meanwhile you’ve sat in on some interviews. You can see we’ve turned away lots of men. Remember those two QA tester girls?”
“Yeah, they did a fantastic job,” I said.
“They’d never used the internet before! I turned away multiple qualified men who knew how to use the internet and a couple who actually had experience in quality assurance. We are a web development company and I hired two women who had never used the internet because I was terrified of being called sexist by people who don’t have the slightest clue what hiring for a tech company is actually like.”
And also, years earlier there was once where I tried to convince my boss to move me to a cashier position at Boss Tweed fish and chips from prep cook and I was told point blank that they have a policy that they do not hire men for customer facing positions. Period. He claimed this was normal for most restaurants across the country. “Nobody wants to order lunch from a fuckin dude” he says.
Then my next job, a redneck dive bar, I ask the owner if I can move up to bartender. I offer to go to bartending school on my own dime. She says no, they have a policy of never putting men in customer facing positions. “We’ve tried hiring male bartenders in the past and every time I get customers yelling at me, ‘I don’t wanna order a beer from a guy!’ They revolt. But this is normal. Successful restaurants just don’t hire men for customer facing positions. It’s just how it’s done in the industry.”
But customer facing positions make tips. I spent almost 10 years in the restaurant industry watching women allowed to have these jobs and often making double what I made if you count in the tips.
So I absolutely do not support what Trump is doing to our diversity policies, but we do need to admit that there are some real problems in there. Our unwillingness to look into and admit to these kind of issues, and our unwillingness to try to understand the other side is a huge part of why this is happening.
We need to see this as the complex and difficult issue that it is. We need to start telling our stories.