Before turning to the topic at hand, let me first of all sympathize with those of you caught in the snows of the east. (Some of you, of course, may like snow and so be enjoying it, but I write as someone who doesn’t even think it’s pretty on postcards, much less in real life.) Under normal circumstances, i.e., living in Virginia, I’d be there commiserating with you, but as it happens I’m writing this from lovely, warm Palo Alto.
Helene and I were supposed to leave Sunday to take advantage of her frequent flyer miles and the chance to house sit near Stanford for a week, but seeing the snow coming we raced it to the airport on Saturday and were able to fly out standby just as the main brunt of the storm was about to arrive.
California really is different, as I’ll get to in a moment, but at least everyone isn’t weird. We’ve just had a lovely evening with blogger Joanne Jacobs, and I’m happy to report that she is as appealing and interesting in person as in blog.
We arrived just in time for the big anti-war demonstrations in the area, or at least in time to experience the local press coverage of them. That coverage, plus the way other issues are covered by the press and even in everyday conversation, suggests that California is in the grip of a powerful new religious movement … and it’s name is diversity. The priests, acolytes, true believers, and just normal parishioners of this new religion seem to be everywhere, and everything seems to be filtered through its theology of proportional inclusion.
Perhaps some indication of how pervasive this worldview has become is to mention a few of the articles in one newspaper, the San Jose Mercury, on one day, Sunday, 16 Feb.
An article on warm-up peace demonstrations in San Jose and Santa Cruz, “Thousands Rally in San Jose To Oppose Strike on Iraq,” carried the sub-head (which does not appear in the online edition) “Diverse Turnout For Demonstration.”
The San Jose turnout was as deeply diverse as the city, with many of the estimated 3,000 marchers from the Latino, Asian, black and Middle Eastern communities. As they marched down Santa Clara Street, Unitarians joined Methodists; Jews walked with Palestinians….
Multicultural milieu
Under cool, cloudy skies, the peaceful crowd converged at Plaza de Cesar Chavez to hear speeches and music. Some members of racial and ethnic minorities, which are disproportionately represented in the U.S. military, worried that their sons and daughters would die overseas….
In Santa Cruz … Rainbow people in dreadlocks, dressed in peasant dresses and tie-dyed shirts, danced and pranced. Kids blew bubbles. Bongo players created a cacophony of sound competing with the professional musicians on stage.
The article then proceeded to quote a Hispanic activist, “members of the black clergy,” the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and a Japanese-American. It’s as though the diversity of the protesters sanctified the protest and proved that it must be right
And then there were the “Raging Grannies of the Peninsula,” and anti-war group of old (literally) activists, complete with a large multi-column picture. “Part of the joy of being a granny is nobody can dismiss you as being young and ignorant,” one said. Well, maybe not young….
Another article covered the opening of a secular Indo-American community center, which it was hoped would help unite the diverse community of Indo-Americans.
Of course, how “community” is defined has long been contentious in this heavily fragmented set of immigrants. Indo-Americans are fractured along myriad divisions, ranging from the regional and linguistic to the religious.
For every Bengali association, there is a Gujurati or Malayalee association — three distinct linguistic groups. And the desire to separate only intensifies when it comes to religion….
Center leaders emphasize that their facility is open to all ethnic groups, not just Indians. They also hope diverse Indo-American groups, often kept apart, will use their facility as a hub for their activities and allow other groups to be exposed.
One only begin to imagine the task of admissions officers, once Indo-Americans become recognized as a group deserving preferences (as surely they must), trying to figure out how many sub-groups it takes to represent that ethnic group fairly.
The lead article, on the front page, was on “Diversity In the High Tech Workplace.” It discussed the effort, and the millions of dollars spent, “to attract more women, blacks and Latinos to the white-male world of engineering” over the past decade, and lamented that “those efforts benefited only some groups — and that disparity in the high-tech industry remains rampant within companies.”
The workforces at the 10 highest-grossing tech giants based in the valley were more diverse in 2000, at the peak of employment, than five years before — but a Mercury News analysis of federal employment records shows that those gains were made almost entirely by Asians. Blacks and Latinos barely held their share, and women actually lost ground.
Even the success stories had their downsides, as highly educated Asians, just as much as women and others, found themselves concentrated in some job areas and largely excluded from others.
One wonders who “concentrated” them, and if this concentration actually resulted from continuing discrimination, which the article implies.
A related article — same paper, same day — reports that “Tech Companies Say Affirmative Action Is Needed.” It refers to a large number of large companies that are supporting Michigan’s use of race preferences. Especially given the failure to diversify beyond Asians (who don’t count at Michigan) in the ten largest Silicon Valley high tech companies surveyed in the article discussed previously, one wonders what continuing affirmative action will allow these companies to do that hasn’t already been tried and failed.
Finally, another article dealt with what might be called the dirty underside of diversity, a knife and baseball bat fight between two Asian-American fraternities at San Jose State University in which one student was killed and several injured. The article did not specify whether the combative fraternities had different ethnic bases, but even so it suggests that “Asian-American,” like “Indo-American” discussed above, may be too broad and arbitrary a category for admissions and other preferences successfully to “include.”
In California, as this one edition of one paper indicates, it’s now all diversity all the time.
UPDATE [2/18/03] – Further digging on the part of entrepid San Jose Mercury reporters has uncovered some relevant data that might explain, as an article today on the continuing saga of diversity in high tech puts it, why “Few Latinos, Blacks Choose Engineering: Recruiting Efforts Fail to Boost Numbers, Even During Boom.”
Classrooms like these [at San Jose State] help explain why Latinos and blacks made almost no progress in the tech industry during the boom, barely increasing their share of the workforce. Relatively few Latinos and blacks are preparing for tech careers in the nation’s universities.
[….]
In fall 2001, enrollment data shows that 170 black students were studying engineering at San Jose State, compared with 487 Latinos, 740 whites — and 3,003 Asians. Latinos by far are the most underrepresented. Although they make up about a quarter of Santa Clara County’s residents, Latinos account for 10 percent of San Jose State’s engineering students.
In the tech industry, Latinos and blacks are just as hard to find. A Mercury News analysis of federal employment data shows that the proportion of Latinos and blacks grew from a combined 11 percent to 12 percent at the valley’s 10 highest-grossing tech companies during the boom years from 1996 to 2000. In contrast, Latinos and blacks made up nearly a quarter of the overall U.S. workforce in 2000.
I hate to sound crass, but if this “underrepresentation” is not a matter of discrimination — as clearly at San Jose State it is not — I’m not convinced this is a problem crying out for a solution.
Indeed, in my opinion part of the problem is the people who consider this a problem. An example is one John Templeton, identified as “president of San Francisco-based Electron Access,” who said “tech companies often shift too much responsibility to the educational system.”
“The qualifications are generally just an excuse to avoid giving people an opportunity,” said Templeton, who has tracked the industry’s diversity record. “Everybody I know in technology picked it up from experience.”
Advising students and others that qualifications don’t matter does not seem like very good advice.
