Microblog Monday: The System

 I believe that my success in life has been the result of multiple factors. It’s partly due to my own hard work and reasonable level of intelligence. I worked hard during college to get perfect grades, while working a part time job. Those grades got me into a top grad school with a full ride scholarship, and I worked a full time job for my last two years of grad school. All of that put me in a great place for my first job, and working hard at that and subsequent jobs earned me promotions and new opportunities. I’m proud of the hard work.

But hard work was just one part. My success in life was also due to the fact that my parents placed a high value on education. And they owned a nice house in a neighborhood with great schools. That’s the result of their parents also prioritizing education, and having jobs that paid well enough to send both of them to great schools. My success is also due to the fact that my parents were both successful corporate professionals. I learned from them how to act, and how not to act, in interviews, in professional settings. In a broader sense, my success is partly due to the fact that my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents all had the ability to shape this country in the way that best suited their beliefs, through civic participation.

My employer, like many others, has a social media type channel for our employees. Anyone can post anything. Some is done by corporate communications, some by different user groups, some by individuals. Corporate Communications has recently celebrated some of the efforts to further social justice and racial equity. One individual has railed against that, decrying the notion that systemic inequities exist. He posts often, and with great detail, about how people just need to work harder/behave better to do as well as he does. 

To that, I can only look to my life, compared to the lives of people of color. My parents could vote. My grandparents could vote. My great-grandfathers could vote, even if my great-grandmothers could not before 1920. For many POC, equal access to voting didn’t exist until 1965. While the right to vote theoretically existed starting in 1870, the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries meant that many men of color couldn’t vote until 1965. For POC, their grandparents and great grandparents did not have a chance to shape the country in the way they thought best. That sounds pretty systemic to me.

Looking beyond voting to education, the inequities in the US are even worse. My parents went to good, neighborhood schools.  My grandparents went to good neighborhood schools. For POC, schools were just being desegregated when my parents were entering grade school. Because of the way schools had been segregated, and because of where POC lived, most POC didn’t have good neighborhood schools to go to. They fundamentally did not have the same opportunities that whites did, and therefore their children won’t have the same opportunities and same role models. Once again, sounds pretty systemic.

Let’s talk about home life. My parents and grandparents grew up in decent neighborhoods. To be clear, my grandparents didn’t have it easy. My grandmother was abused by her alcoholic parents and lived in poverty until another relative took her in. My grandfather was one of seven kids (Irish Catholic) in a family that would have been considered poor back then. Despite that, though, they were able to buy a house in a good neighborhood when they got married. They worked hard at jobs that were good for that time. Even my grandmother was able to get a job. Those jobs, however, would have been unavailable to POC, since businesses could, and mostly did, openly decide to hire only whites. Their ability to buy a home was due partly to their hard work and partly to their race. POC did not have that same opportunity. Further, lending laws, redlining, and covenants crafted by local governments expressly prohibited POC from certain neighborhoods. See this article for a good description of the lingering effects of these practices. That is about as systemic as it gets.

I don't understand the perspective that systemic inequities don't exist. It seems to me to be the utmost example of being self-centered to assume that 'if I could pull myself up by my bootstraps, they could too.' That completely glosses over the fact that "my" bootstraps were miles longer and stronger than "their" bootstraps. I don't know how we can fix these issues. I work at a Fortune 500 company where only two or three people have been willing to challenge the 'no systemic racism' poster, and where our head of Diversity and Inclusion has done a few things that were so jaw-droppingly not supportive of diversity or inclusion I don't even feel comfortable describing them on an anonymous blog. Again, I wonder how can we, how can I, make positive change in the face of such resistance. (For anyone asking, "why don't you reply?", as an HR employee in learning & development, with the current executive order, I've been prohibited from replying on the social media channel as my response could be considered an 'official' HR response and therefore could expose the company to a hotline complaint and resulting legal action.)