Racism in the Workplace: a Memoir (Part Two)

PART ONE

I helped build the new Kearney (Nebraska) High School

When I started working construction, I told everybody: “This is undoubtedly the most segregated workplace I’ve ever seen.” I’d only worked the field for a couple of days before I realized we had one White masonry crew, and one Black masonry crew, and they didn’t work together. Despite hiring a couple of Hispanic junior project managers, my general contractor was almost entirely white. And, at least in my area, I discovered White people don’t hang drywall or install suspended ceilings.

Yes, I told anybody who’d listen how segregated my workplace was. Only after doing this for several months did I realize “anybody who’d listen” was almost exclusively White. The friends I made volunteering at the community theatre; my former colleagues at the University; the friends who’d carried over from other workplaces and my school days. The people I had any opportunity to speak with outside work, were pretty solidly white.

It’s not like my community has the lily-white complexion of a pre-Norman Lear sitcom, like Mayberry or something. Though my small-ish Great Plains community is Whiter than America overall, we have a pretty sizable Hispanic community, and our African American population has increased in the last four or five years. But my spaces—my leisure activities, my commerce, my watering hole, my church—don’t overlap with theirs.

Most importantly, as I became aware of this, I also became aware that construction probably wasn’t my most segregated workplace. The race-based crew divisions were visibly jarring in construction, because they were visible. Most of my workplaces haven’t mirrored the complexions of the communities in which they were built, because employers tend to be self-selecting. Nowhere was that more pointed than in education.

Teaching English, I had three non-White colleagues: a Black man, a South Asian woman, and a Native American woman. I loved all three, had good collegial relations with each, and remain in contact with all of them a decade later. But by the time my teaching hitch ended, two had already moved elsewhere, and the third was winding down. Who knows what happened later, but when I left teaching, the department had become more White, not less.

In the unlikely event that my former colleagues are reading this, I must strenuously emphasize: this doesn’t mean you’re racist, not in the sense of personal bigotry or spewing the N-word. As I emphasized in Part One, I’ve seen that ugliness exposed in my current workplace. The racial division I saw in teaching was invidious, but also impersonal. No individual caused it. Chances are, no individual could’ve stopped it, either.

A promo photo from my old university’s teaching endorsement program

Instead, the racism I experienced in teaching established itself long before the University. Black and Hispanic people have fewer opportunities to attend high-achieving post-secondary school, and even fewer to attend graduate school. The educational system sorts what traits and accomplishments it considers worthy of reward; and those accomplishments generally resemble the leadership’s own. That leadership has, historically, been White.

Further, university admissions generally reward student accomplishments at the high school level. Throughout most of America, public schools are funded largely through local property taxes. This means well-off neighborhoods have competitive schools with the latest resources; and, as Sheryll Cashin writes, the most well-off in America are overwhelmingly White. Poorer, less-White neighborhoods soldier on with dilapidated buildings, underpaid staff, and outdated technology.

Worse, as American educator Jonathan Kozol writes in Savage Inequalities, even citizens who consider themselves progressive react unthinkingly when asked to consider spending wealthy communities’ funds in poorer school districts. This ensures that education, American society’s great economic leveler, keeps poor kids in poor schools. And it ensures few people have opportunities to meet across racial lines, except in books, which are good but insufficient.

Therefore higher education, which trains the next generation of schoolteachers, continues to reward a system of accomplishments which are overwhelmingly White, middle class or wealthier, and unresponsive to changing national demographics. Construction industry racism involves dropping the N-word and segregating the work crews. Education racism involves ignoring non-White accomplishments, often without realizing that’s what we’re doing. Both preserve an existing, unfair power dynamic.

Education, as a work field, isn’t immune to change and improvement. Within living memory, the field assumed women should only teach children, and men would handle the heavy lifting of college. Thankfully, this attitude hasn’t survived, and many schools have overturned this gender hierarchy. We could do the same with racial hierarchy, if we wanted. But it would involve acknowledging invisible segregation, which White people notoriously hate doing. Still, the time has clearly come.


TO BE CONCLUDED