IBM didn't hire unqualified black people,
and they didn't let black managers show favoritism towards blacks.
If you
worked for a black person, at IBM, he would treat you even-handedly, and if you worked
with a black person, he would not get promoted any faster than you did because he
was black.
I can't say the same thing about women.
I worked in a
writing group with a third-line manager who only hired and promoted women.
She practiced reverse discrimination as the way to level the playing field.
Favor women.
The men who worked for her could transfer into another organization,
leave the company for a better job, or forsake advancement, remain a writer, and
fight burnout.
Old Folks ate lunch with other men in her group. They joked
about being LSAs. Lifetime Senior Associate.
* * *
IBM had Ethnic Heritage Day.
People came in the costume of their
native country and brought the native food of their country.
Latinos, Asians,
Europeans participated.
Not so many blacks did.
They considered themselves
Americans. Not African-Americans. Americans.
Old Folks put on bib overalls,
a feed-sack shirt, red horsehide brogans, and a jipijapa hat and came as a Florida
cracker.
He brought a banana pudding he made himself with a yard-egg meringue.
People looked at him askance.
A white person was supposed to be ashamed of
being white.
A cracker was supposed to be ashamed of being a cracker.
What did Old Folks have to be ashamed of?
Being poor? Being rural? Being
from a state that was segregated when he was young?
His father had been one
of the elected representatives who oversaw the transition from segregation to integration,
in Florida, a mayor or city councilman.
He was proud of his father, not ashamed.
That was a thankless job. Old Folks's father did it as a civic duty, in a spirit
of service to the community, the whole community, not just middle-class white people.
Brew drew some raised eyebrows, though.
Some people thought he was making
fun of blacks who were not more assertive about claiming their own racial identity.
They read racism into Old Folks's gesture of brotherhood.
If you see things
that way nothing is going to change your mind.
Old Folks was to encounter
this attitude again at Lucent Technologies.