
Chapter 7 of Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race focuses on ideas and experiences surrounding affirmative action.
This awesome chapter has helped me consolidate a few ideas I’ve heard.
- When [even marginally] progressive HR departments start anonymizing resumes, CVs and cover letters to impede unintended bias, we should fix all systemic hiring bias before we start attacking affirmative action.
- When we can use actual data to support a variety of diversities in our organizations…at all levels!…we can start confronting the necessity of affirmative action.
- If we feel an initial defensiveness about affirmative action when we just hear the words, we have some issues to work out. If the issues are, how are we as white/male/otherwise entitled, ever to get a fair chance at getting a good job if we are boxed out by affirmative action programs, begin by studying irony in the dictionary. You know that great adage: when you’re accustomed to entitlements, equality feels like oppression? Maybe it’s us.
- If you believe in objective meritocracy, that’s a crutch for retaining entitlements. Please prove to me that objective meritocracy exists, with evidence.
Thank you very much. And read Oluo’s book!
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