When pundits wax rhapsodic about the “colorblind” era we live in–or fulminate against affirmative action policies as interfering with that “post-racial” state–some of us think of cases like Wet Seal.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just determined that Wet Seal, a national women’s clothing chain, illegally discriminates against African-Americans (New York Times, 12/4/12). Corporate managers, the EEOC found, “have openly stated they wanted employees who had the ‘Armani look, were white, had blue eyes, thin and blond in order to be profitable.'” The three-year investigation was spurred by former store manager Nicole Cogdell, who was terminated along with other black employees after a senior vice president inspected stores in her area, then sent an e-mail reading, “African-Americans dominate–huge issue.”
Cogdell worked hard; her King of Prussia, Pa. store was successful, ranking 8th out of 500 Wet Seal stores. She and others lost their jobs because they’re black, period.
I was struck, if not really surprised, by the dailies’ decision to run this as a “Business” story. I was struck again by the L.A. Times lede (12/4/12), which called the discrimination finding
just the latest problem plaguing the struggling Foothill Ranch company, which in the space of five months has fired its chief executive, overseen a board overhaul and revamped its strategy to bolster flagging sales.
If it’s clear that Wet Seal is not the one being “plagued” here, it seems equally obvious to some of us that the heart of the story lies in the fact that high-level corporate managers are so very comfortable saying such things, writing them down, denying peoples’ livelihoods based on them. Surely this suggests a problem more pervasive than one executive at one retailer.
But if journalists acknowledged the depth and scope of the problem, it’d be impossible to write ingenuously of the company’s provision of “an ethics hotline, which workers can use to report incidents that violate the retailer’s anti-discrimination policy,” as if that were an adequate response, or to take company president Kenneth Siepel’s comments that employees are now asked “to think carefully about the meaning and importance of every sentence” as evidence of change, and move on.
Certainly it would be harder to entertain talk of U.S. racism as a thing of the past.
The corpress is willfully blind
And it has nothing to do with an indifference to color
Detroit is America’s most segregated city, followed by Milwaukee and New York, according to the New York Times. But The Times reserves the word “racist” for the south. The same discriminatory anti voting-rights law that in SC, (or GA?), was labelled “Jim Crow and racist”, in Wisconsin was… just a law. No racist intention in Wisconsin in keeping blacks, the poor and youth from voting. The Nation, which rightly won’t allow racist or homophobic comments, left a comment calling “southern whites” “knuckle walkers”. At 67, there are times the old feet and knees hurt so much, wish I could knuckle walk. I complained to The Nation, but didn’t check to see if they removed it. No one, in any medium wants to cover white southerners like me who were in the civil rights movement in the South. (As opposed to Long Island where there were demonstrations in the ’60s against red lining, another word for segregation.) A friend in Detroit says her white neighbors now are as racist as they are Republican. A friend in NYC deplored that a boarding school “was lost”. And when I asked what she meant, her reply: “It’s black.” I ask people with southern accents in New York whether they’re assumed to be racist. “Only about half the time”, many say. A Librarian at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC says “100%” in her experience. Records on The Civil Rights Movement are there waiting to be explored and written about. I’d do it myself, but I’m going blind. Usually use caps. We’re dying off. Ralph from Alabama died of AIDS in Paris, though he spent his last weeks at NYU hospital. Lost touch with Spike from Mississippi. Jim from TN died of cancer. The person I’d most love to find is Cordell Black, who is or was black. My name was April White. We joined arms and sang, “Black and White together.” A cousin in DC says there was an article on a protester Not Really Southern because Jewish. Jews from New York died to give African Americans the right to vote. Miss Daisy, however, didn’t do much, some black friends say. Not even get him into MLK’s talk. Where we sat in at the two main drag’s crossroads is now half MLK Blvd. Guys I talked to at the National desk of The Times, when you still could, said there are MLK Streets or Avenues in their majority white hoods in various parts of the South. Occupy didn’t cover the South. Or hasn’t so far. A New York friend drove South last year. He found Occupy Savannah delightfully integrated, with biracial couples holding hands smiling. I love biracial couples. The solution. I tell them to have lots of kids. No one else have more than one. Overpopulation is a, if not the, major cause of climate change. To “diversify” Occupy Wall St, required a schlep from the South Bronx to Zuccotti Park. Harlem is now majority white. I picketed, sat in, marched, met and sang for integration. But it feels wrong Harlem is no longer majority black. It was the soul of African America, so the soul of America. Now what? Starbucks? When I drive down to Pawley’s Island from Chapel Hill, I drive through what used to be KKK country. Go in a filling station restaurant. There before you is MLK’s dream. Or part of it. Black and white farmers sitting at the same table eating and laughing together. A menu in Spanish, unlike here on the Yupper West Side. The white guy probably votes Republican. Black guy probably votes Democratic, unless he’s part of the seven percent of black men who didn’t vote. They may share views on gay marriage – against it. Abortion? The white farmer is agin it. I don’t know about the black man. Same scene in a diner near HIllsborough. It seems the upper classes are less integrated, including Golf playing yankee snow birds, who often live in gated communities.
Once I was watching Week in Review and thought with some outrage, “Why doesn’t Gwen Eifell have any African Americans on her show?” My post racial moment. I like America now. I like US being gloriously mixed up! And I’m proud of having picketed that segregated motel at age eighteen by myself. It feels good to do the right thing. Now an African American president!!! I love U.S.
Everything is really not very good for anyone hard working or ‘poor’, anymore. African Americans have either been assimilated, lulled to sleep, or imprisoned. The jobs are shipped out of country to slave labor and those that remain will be offered to the whites first, the asians, the latinos and finaly the youth of various nationalities and colors. The elite wealthy are sucking up and hoarding everything not tied down, and there are ignorant schemers, liars and cutthroats everywhere! I’m almost happy to be over sixty and dying!
For SOC 345
Us racism is alive and well children.More so lately on the black side than the white.This last election had anywhere from 93-100% of blacks voting BLACK.Make all the excuses you want.If 93-100% of whites voted white…. no excuse would suffice.Period!Anti semitism is on the rise.Anti asian.And I would say anti black as well.Within the black community light skin blacks are looked at as “preferable”.Horrific.Our own government works hard at community activist techniques to divide our communities.They imbue class warfare into every aspect of society.Inclusive president my ass.Republicans called haters of all woman.Religious people derided as” touched”.Success attacked on every level while failure is subsidized.Quota systems providing business not with the best and brightest.Providing instead a forced leveling of the field to the lowest common denominator.Imagine lowering all standards for medical schools to be more inclusive to less highly educated or intelligent people.The example above is a sad,stupid articulation of what a company feels would best sell its product.Turn on BET network.When talking about product sales and distribution.Marketing,and commercial advertising ….caucasians are far and few between.Things will get better when we do as Martin Luther King said “judge a man not by the color of his skin but by the content…”Instead the left inserts race into everything they do.This election was an absolute disgrace.”They gonna put you back in chains”.Remember drunk and stupid uncle Joe’s gaffe?Remember Clinton furious that Obama pulled the race card on him and his wife last time round?Lovely bunch aren’t they?
With the black and brown population being warehoused in jails disproportionately (Jim Crow, the sequel), as long as 20 states have laws like Stand Your Ground as well as Stop & Search, and as long as black and brown unemployment is always a few points above the national average, anyone suggesting that this culture is color-blind is blind.
Free spirit unless you are saying that the majority of people in jail that are black are wrongly convicted you should really zip it.If 10 black guys and one white guy break the law throw em all in jail.And I don’t give a shit what color they are.I heard Jesse Jackson say more black men are in jail that in college.Yeah so what!Stop breaking the laws.And you Reverend how about you blame the criminal.Not the ones who brought him to justice.
@michael e:
The world is full of White dominated multi-ethnic societies which boast about the fairness and the color-blindness of their justice systems. Neither history nor current statistics support such claims. Whether it is Maoris in New Zealand, Aboriginals in Austrialia, or Indians, or Blacks in the United States or in other nations of the Americas, Whites always find reasons to jail vast numbers of non-Whites for even minor infractions, while leaving the majority of the White population unscathed. Case in point, in the United States, for decades, Whites have been by far the biggest users and distributers of illegal substances, and their banks are the biggest launderers of drug money, yet the percentage of Whites prosecuted and incarcerated for these crimes remains microscopic. Talk is cheap. Neither America, nor Australia or New Zealand, nor Brazil or Russia will ever throw all of the White criminals in jail because, in all of these places, Whites own the justice system, and in spite of their self-serving color-blind rhetoric, they use it to protect their own, and to punish non-Whites.
pleasehead……So blacks are not breaking the laws disproportionately .They are arrested disproportionately.I see I see.And It is the whites who are protecting their own ,keeping white criminals out of jail?Yes I have often seen that.And a huge majority of incarcerated blacks are actually innocent?Got ya. Wow….I have read that most mass murderers are white males between 25-45 years of age.I suppose you see a racist element there too.Where do they find you guys?
Michael e: “Us racism is alive and well children.More so lately on the black side than the white.This last election had anywhere from 93-100% of blacks voting BLACK”
Walter Lippmann “The more untrained a mind, the more readily it works out a theory that two things which catch its attention at the same time are causally connected.”
Random paul……….Do you think the fact that 90-100% of whites would always vote white in 1950 mississippi is a fact”casually connected” to the FACT that it was racism.Why dont you for once just stand up…be a man….and yell out your beliefs.If 95% of whites voted white it would be racism.When blacks do it why you didnt see a thing.You cant make this stuff up.you really cant.
And by the way….My “mind’ was trained in the same school as your president.Few differences of course.I got in there the old fashioned way.Stellar grades from day one.And a perfect SAT score.Also my curriculum was may i be so bold to say-far more difficult than his .And yes i was at the top of my class.He is I feel “an over educated fool”, to quote the black panther who beat him in his first Chicago election.Or as Bill Clinton put it…an Amateur.You drink the kool aid if it quenches your liberal thirst for revenge against all people who succeed..