Positive Racism

Ok, a personal axe to grind here.

Being in the job hunting market at the moment I have once again become accustomed to filling in countless application forms. This isn't a bad thing in itself, since one merely has to fill in the same basic facts, in addition to lying through one's teeth. Where my grudge lies is with that little section that is often attached, commonly bearing the name 'diversity monitoring'.

Now these always come with a little disclaimer, usually something along the lines of 'this information is not taken into account in our decision making process'. Bollocks it isn't. Why have it on the application form? To monitor diversity you say? Why? If 1 in 9 of the UK population is non-white, does this necessarily mean that 1 in 9 of any companies workforce should be non-white? Of course it doesn't. As I understand it, the thinking behind this 'diversity monitoring' is to make sure that companies and employers are employing people on their merits and not on their race, therefore ensuring that there is no racial bias within a workforce.

Of course, the break in logic here lies between bias and consequence. Sure, a biased employer would probably lead to an unrepresentative workforce; but does an unrepresentative workforce necessarily represent a biased employer - of course it doesn't. Let's suggest that in an interview situation, of four candidates, half were White British and half non-White. Now let us suppose that both White candidates were far better qualified for the only two jobs available - would it be racist of an employer to favour them? No.

And there lies the crux of the issue, for me at least. If we want a true meritocracy, we should accept that by the laws of natural probability, some workforces will be unrepresentative of the general population - is this an issue? It shouldn't be. Surely it is equality of opportunity we should stand for, not forced equality whereby a person can only get a job if they fit an exact specification for race, gender, sexuality, etc. and thereby fill the employers quota. It is on this principle that I oppose 'positive discrimination' - the concept on which blog's title mocks - in all forms. Take female MPs; naturally I have no opposition to having more female MPs, but at the same time I am not biased one way or the other. Quite frankly, I don't care one way or the other for the gender of my MP. To my mind, as long as both genders have an equal chance to get selected for seats, the outcome is irrelevant. The same applies to race, which is and always has been non-issue for me.

So hopefully this should go someway to explain why I was particularly annoyed at having to tick the 'White-British' box on my application form. Arguably I could have left that bit blank, but unless I change my name to Muhammed Khan, It's quite unlikely to pass as that of, say a British Pakistani. On a side note, I couldn't help noticing the strange subcategories under 'White'. They were:

-British -Irish -Bosnian -Kosovan/Albanian -Roma

Seems an odd little selection to me. British, representing a good 65 million people is a very broad category compared to say Kosovan. I don't know how many Kosovan/Albanians there are in the UK, but I'd hazard a guess that they aren't in the top 5 largest White population groups. Surely Yugoslav, or just Slav, would be more inclusive? Maybe my local council feel that Kosovans are under-represented in its local services are therefore more deserving of being given jobs.

Maybe I'm just bitter at not scoring any minority points in the application form (If they'd included sexuality of course, I could have ticked all boxes...). But to be honest, I just don't like feeling that I'm ruling myself out of employment by being white. I don't like knowing that my potential employer will be able to turn me down because I don't fit in their race quota. To me, equal rights should be equal - there is nothing positive about discrimination; and I don't just call it discrimination. No, equality is a two-way street, to me, this is racism.

'Ciderite'

Fresh from writing this post, I was quick to enlist the help of a local primary school child to develop an improved version of this type of diversity monitoring survey. The winning design comes from Dwain Pike of Scumbag Street Primary - not chosen by merit, but simply because Dwain was decided to be the most diverse member of the class (his mother being something of a 'loose woman' known for producing children rarely of the same colour of her husbands at the time). His pitiful attempt is shown below.