Old Folks's first experience with affirmative
action came when he moved to Winston-Salem, and was looking for a job, after he found
out he couldn't support himself, Brenda, and Owen on what he made at Homecrafts ($375
a month, gross), the beermaking shop he had moved from Penland to work at.
He went by the Western Electric plant and applied for a job as a technical writer.
This would have been 1973. Owen was a baby.
Old Folks had a liberal arts
degree, a background in electronics, and computers--testing them, not using them
as a productivity tool--and had written half a dozen books. Plus site reports, as
an archeologist.
He was qualified for an entry-level job and Western Electric
were hiring.
* * *
The Personnel man told Old Folks that Western Electric had been found guilty
of discriminating against black people by the federal government and were under orders
to reach a certain level--a percentage--of black employees by a certain date.
Until then, he said, they were not hiring any white employees, no matter how qualified
they were.
If they couldn't find qualified black employees, they would hire
unqualified black employees and train them, or overlook their deficiencies, if they
couldn't learn.
* * *
Old Folks felt that this was necessary, given the company history, would
be temporary, and, once the diversity goals had been reached, would be phased out,
as a policy.
He was confident in his ability to do the job.
He didn't
need an edge, to keep a job, once he got it, and he wasn't asking for a favor, to
get a job. Who'd want that?
Well, as it turned out, plenty of black people
felt that they deserved that.
And it was complicated, but for them, they
had been so harmed by discrimination that they might not perform at a high level
in the job, once they got it, so they must be carried, promoted, along with more
qualified employees, indeed, they might need to be the ones making the hiring decisions
in the first place, because who understood the black experience better than a black
person, and wasn't the percentage of black employees more important than how qualified
any of the individual black employees were?
They might not be as qualified.
Whose fault was that? Surely not theirs.
Did being underqualified make
them less worthy of promotion?
Once you hired them, you had to promote them,
or you were discriminating against them. You were a racist. A bigot.
Huh?
Try to defend yourself against that charge. You can't. You're guilty.
You
white devil. You did this. You were in charge, when it happened. It's your
fault.