I have an employee. In my new venture I hire mostly college aged kids. It’s a part time position and it’s pretty transient. Class schedules change, graduation, etc. I’m always hiring.
Last fall I had two black guys, two black girls, one Asian/black mix, one middle eastern girl, a Chinese guy and a white guy.
Since: both black guys and the white guy left and the mixed girl moved. I’ve since hired four people. Two white guys and one who is white/Egyptian and a white girl. Those four are literally the only people who applied and came close to meeting the qualifications.
The black girl who has worked for me the longest (over 2 years) asks to meet today. She says “you know, this is the least diverse your organization has ever been.”
I tell her i hire who applies. She says she wasn’t asking me to do anything. She’s just making a statement. Then she says “we were pretty diverse last summer.”
I ask her to define diversity. “When all or most of your employees look like me.”
So I ask her how in the world that would be diverse. “That’s what diversity means. You only hire people who are underrepresented. Not all these white people.”
So I got out the statistics. Blacks are 12% of the population. About 20% of my staff is black. I’m going to continue to hire people who can do the job and I don’t give the first shit what color they are.
That gets me “it’s not about quotas or statistics. It’s about hiring people like her instead of white people. But as a cis white man raised in racism I will never understand.
Is that what “diversity” means? Hire people who are not qualified because of the color of their skin? Does she have any clue how racist that is?
And she says she can’t be racist because she’s been oppressed all her life.
I tell her she’s paid more than anybody else who works for me. She was promoted over others. She is in a supervisory position over everybody there except me. How is she oppressed.
Again. I’m racist. I don’t see the microaggressions she faces all day. And this isn’t about her. It’s about her people and how my hiring isn’t diverse enough because the majority isn’t black.
Fuck this.