The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
December 22, 2018

When last did you apply for a job online? A year, month or week ago? Was it yesterday or today? Whatever the timeline might be, I have no doubt that you, too, have gone through the tantalizing rituals of the online application here in the United States, especially its so-called diversity questions. Typically, a job is advertised on those numerous mega-platforms and job boards, such as indeed.com, Linked-In, Zip Recruiter, Simply Hired, et cetera, et cetera. All those job search platforms usually placard detailed job descriptions and the requisite years of experience, among others. Applicants are further instructed to upload their resumes.

In some unexplained instances, applicants are required to fill in forms with the same pieces of information that are already contained in the resume`, as if there was no need for posting those resumes. After going through all the time-consuming rituals, one is then impelled to arrive at the seemingly inescapable “diversity questions.” The series of questions absolutely have nothing to do with a potential applicant’s competence or qualification. It is obviously not about one’s orientation or suitability about a particular job. Instead, it is explicitly about an applicant’s racial identity, which comes in order of implied priority, or prominence, as solely determined by corporate human recourses departments of the various mega-corporations here in the United States America and around the world.

The questions typically come in the form of whether the applicant is “white.” Of course, in my particular case, that is a big “NO.” Put it unequivocally, I’m not “white”, neither do I have any remote lineage, whatsoever. Even if one thousand genealogy/DNA experts were to chorus in unison to me that I had a remote ancestral affinity with the “white” race, I won’t be convinced in any shape or form. The point I’m attempting to drive home is that if this particular question is meant for an applicant who might answer in affirmative to score an advantageous point in gravitating towards possible employment, that would definitely be a non-starter for me; it would be a no contest, for all intents and purposes.

Following the “Are you white?” question, comes the second layer of the not-so-subtle racial inquisition. That is, whether one is a Hispanic or a Latino/Latina. For those who might not be aware, Hispanics are Spanish-speaking people from North, Central and South America. Of the 35 countries in the Americas (both North and South America), Spain, a Western European country, had colonized 18 of them, beginning from the 15th century. All the former Spanish colonists, including Mexico and Argentina, obviously speak Spanish, even though the Spanish they speak is slightly different from the Spanish spoken in Spain, just as American English is not exactly the same as the English spoken in England.

Besides that, Portuguese, which is spoken in Brazil, is a linguistic first cousin of Spanish and therefore, falls within the Latino domain. Against this backdrop, the question, “Are you Hispanic?” simply means “Are you from one of the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas?” Technically, someone might argue that the second question is basically linguistic, not racial in nature.

I humbly submit that for all intents and purposes, “Are you a Hispanic?” is inherently racial with a racist undertone. Here is why: When Spain colonized the Americas, Spaniards left Europe in droves and immigrated to the so-called New World, in search of economic fortune; eventually, most of them culturally cut off their umbilical cords from the European continent and never went back. Even though there have been racial cocktails, in terms of interracial marriages over the years, there are still hardcore Caucasians, “white people” or better still, people of direct European ancestry all over in Latin America. In other words, when human resources managers in corporate outfits pose the intimidating, “Are you ‘white’ or “Are you Hispanic” questions, they already have a tentative racial roadmap in mind, or a racial blueprint on hand.

Moreover, the “Are you Hispanic?” coming right after the “Are you white” is like saying even though you are not “white”, are you one of our distant cousins from the Americas? What really are the motivations of those racially sensitive questions? Do corporate human resources departments subscribe to stealth, an undeclared racial quota system? If so, why not make it transparent from the onset? For example, the recruitment experts could put a bold notice that for a particular job, “No white per should apply for this job, or “This job is off limit for Black people.” In such a case, as outrageous as it might appear, potential applicants would not waste their time going through all the painstaking rituals of the job application process. Such a brutal honesty would also spare human resources gurus, who often pretend to be looking for the most suitable candidates, sufficient time to ply their trade.

Following the second tier question, we then come to the final question: “Are you Native American, black or African-American?” From my perspective, answering this particular question is akin to signing one’s personal death warrant. Please pardon my hyperbolic flourishing, but my point here is that the mere fact that all these racially sensitive questions are usually posed by human resources department bureaucrats whose faces the applicants don’t see, in order to critically assess their body language and visual disposition, tends to put a typical applicant in psychological anguish.

Because the corporate bureaucrats at those human resources departments are aware of the multiple laws against all forms of discriminations, or because they are usually pricked by their conscience for posing such racially sensitive questions, they take the extraordinary step of explaining that answering those racially sensitive questions are “optional”; that answers to such questions would not determine, or play any key role in determining whether one is hired or not. For me, I am not convinced that those questions are redundant fill-outs that have no relevance, or functions in determining the employability or non-employability of an applicant. If those questions have no relevance, or their functionalities are extraneous to an impartial human resources department’s decision-making process, then why pose such questions in the first place?

By posing those so-called diversity-driven questions, the human resources departments seem to be implying that in spite of the unassailable qualifications, competence, capability, the experience of typical applicants and suitability for a particular job, they want to know whether an applicant satisfies a given human resources department’s racial benchmark. They seem to be saying to a typical applicant that even though your credentials are impressive, or impeccable, we, however, want to know whether you meet our racial pre-requisite or racial preference. Besides that, why those three questions systematically come in the same format from one human resources department to another all the time? That is, from one job board to another, “Are you white?” always comes first. Are the human resources departments implying that those questions are in order of priority? If not, why can’t they be posed randomly? For example, why “Are you Hispanic?” never precede “Are you white?” Can someone convince me that such systemic questions would not inflict psychological assault on a potential applicant?

Any time I reflect on such questions, I often wonder whether endemic culture can be legislated. I’m aware that laws, however rigid, robust or impartial they might be, certainly have their limitations. Unless an action is conspicuously egregious, or blatantly despicable, acts of discrimination are, to a large extent, very difficult to pinpoint and apprehend, because they fall within the realm of intangibility. Just imagine a scenario in which a guy self-serving claims, “I’m the least racist!”, thus openly admitting that he’s actually a bona fide racist, except that he perceives himself as being “the least” among all the racists he knows.

In such a scenario, should such a sanctimonious opinion be taken with any grain of salt? If so, what would be the metrics for measuring his rate of racism, or discrimination in order to determine which, or who is the least and which or who is the most? In the case of recruiting qualified and competent agents to ensure effective corporate functions, I strongly believe that doing away with cunningly embedded subtle discriminatory queries in the so-called diversity-driven questions and mustering a progressive foresight of adopting a holistic, color-blind approach to corporate recruitment of human capital is the best way forward.