As a former ‘minority hire,’ I know why so many people want to kill affirmative action
When I started my journalism career more than 30 years ago, I was considered a “minority hire.”
It’s a pejorative term rooted in the backlash against affirmative action programs that have helped increase opportunities for racial and ethnic “minorities” in employment and education. The term “minority hire” is like a code for fraud. It meant you only got your job because you were a racial and ethnic minority, a reality that smacked 23-year-old me like a brick to my face.
Back then, I had little understanding of how my entry into my chosen profession coincided with efforts to make American newsrooms more reflective of their communities.
Since 1965, when the Los Angeles Times tried to cover an uprising in the Black community of Watts with a white staff, my industry has been rightly criticized for its hiring practices. Diversity in newsrooms was still bleak when I came along 20 years after Watts.
My parents were from Mexico, I grew up in an immigrant household, and so it was upon graduating from San Jose State University that my career goals became entangled with the backlash against affirmative action. My experience as a “minority hire” was a microcosm of a broader American cultural war where terms such as “affirmative action” and “diversity” inspired dread and anger.
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, which amended the state constitution to prohibit state institutions from considering race as a factor in college admissions and government hiring.
Despite the myth of California as a “progressive state,” voters in 2020 rejected affirmative action again.
Then last week, the dismissive arguments by some U.S. Supreme Court justices signaled that the court may be poised to strike down affirmative action in college admissions nationwide.
There are many strongly held positions about affirmative action, but they often skirt the real reason why people want to kill it: competition for coveted jobs and placement in universities.
The problem has never been the idea of affirmative action because many support equal opportunities in the abstract. The problem is always in the implementation.
When two people compete for one job, one person is disappointed or even angry and maybe even aggrieved.
Affirmative action is getting dismantled because its implementation makes enough people feel aggrieved. As a former colleague once said to me, “I’m all for affirmative action as long as it doesn’t affect me.” That comment can be explained by another former Bee colleague, Pultizer Prize-winning author Dale Maharidge.
In his 1996 book, “The Coming White Minority,” Maharidge writes: “Many whites dislike cultural change because it is seen as working against their interests. A white revolt is at the root of what is happening in California.”
Maharidge was prescient to use the term “revolt” to describe opposition to affirmative action 20 years ago because a revolt is what we’ve seen. The more multicultural California and the United States have become, the more affirmative action has been attacked. The difference now is that Supreme Court justices appear ready to lead the revolt.
The conservative majority within the U.S. Supreme Court is not popular in California, but on affirmative action, the justices are on the same side as a majority of California voters.
This is despite the persistent under-representation of Black and Latino workers in professional occupations projected to have above-average job growth, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This is even though Black and Latino students are underrepresented at elite four-year universities. There also remains a persistent achievement gap in California public schools. But the failure to lift Black and Latino students gets far less publicity in progressive California than the pay of mostly white teachers.
In my own industry, a 2018 story by the Columbia Journalism Review described diversity hiring in print journalism as “Decades of Failure.”
“According to the Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities comprise almost 40 percent of the US population, yet they make up less than 17 percent of newsroom staff at print and online publications, and only 13 percent of newspaper leadership,” according to CJR.
In the early days of my career, the lack of representation in newsrooms coupled with the tension that we “minority hires” seemed to inspire created unpleasant memories ranging from the condescension of some white colleagues to the competitive suspicion of some “minority” colleagues.
Some friends would check out my light skin and ask: “What kind of minority are you?”
Well, my family has been in Mexico for centuries. My mom and dad were farm workers and cannery workers in the United States. We spoke Spanish in our small house in San Jose with metal bars on the windows because were burglarized so many times. I attended inner-city public schools and community college and was the first in my family to graduate from an American university.
When I entered the workforce, I had no point of reference for how to handle myself in an office setting. Early on, it was clear to me that my worldview was far different from many of my colleagues.
I remember sitting in on a meeting where more experienced journalists mocked a Latina city councilwoman because they learned that she had once Anglicized her name. Blanca had once gone by Blanche, and my colleagues thought this made her a phony.
Sadly, I didn’t have the confidence to speak up, and my colleagues didn’t ask me what I thought. If they had, I would have said that many Mexican Americans Anglicized their names because their parents insisted they adopt “American names” to combat the unvarnished racism visited upon older generations.
My journalism colleagues didn’t understand this because our newsroom was severely lacking in a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. Without that understanding, you had a newsroom that was not reflective of the community it covered — not even close.
A homogenous workplace, industry, or university can become like an exclusive club where members believe that coveted spots within the club should belong to them.
When a few people once denied entry to the club start to trickle in, or when they start to ascend, suddenly it can be a problem. It can cause a backlash. I’ve seen it happen.
The goal of diversity — whether promoted via affirmative action programs or not — has been to create workplaces of varied backgrounds and perspectives that were representative of increasingly multicultural communities.
At the ground level, this goal created tension among co-workers. There were failures and regrettable outcomes. There have also been successes and mutual respect forged among colleagues.
I was a “minority hire” until one day I wasn’t. Life went on, and old tensions faded. They aren’t important anymore, but diversity is.
It’s the regret of my adult life that my generation has fought so hard to kill affirmative action programs that were working. I only hope to be around long enough to see the death of racial animus that can live like cancer within us if we let it.
This story was originally published November 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "As a former ‘minority hire,’ I know why so many people want to kill affirmative action."
