My group members and I formally agreed on presenting information regarding workplace discrimination because of the role that it played in the book, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. This was clearly demonstrated in Citizen on various pages: “At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking with that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn’t know you were black!; “Despite the fact that you have the same sabbatical schedule as everyone else, he says, you are always on sabbatical; and “Standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for the others to arrive, you hear one sat to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation. Because you will spend the next two hours around the round table that makes conversing easier, you consider waiting a few minutes before entering the room”.
In order to successfully cover the overall issue of discrimination in the workplace, we all looked for articles that correlated with the biases that exist and the unfairness that is clearly demonstrated to this day. Claista provided us with the quotes from the book, Citizen: An American Lyric; Oren provided articles regarding discrimination in STEM majors, from USA Today and Pew Research Center; Sierra provided an article regarding discrimination based off hairstyles from The Washington Post; Mina provided an article regarding gender discrimination in the workplace from Pew Research Center and MetDaan; Edwin provided an article regarding income differences between races from AAUW; and Julianna provided an article regarding race discrimination based off education level from Pew Research Center.
I, personally, wrote about the article on Vox, “Workplace discrimination is illegal. But our data shows it’s still a huge problem” by Maryam Jameel and Joe Yerardi. The information contained data regarding how much workplace discrimination still affects Black workers collectively that are filled through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was founded during the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The EEOC is a federal agency that enforces civil rights against workplace discrimination, regarding race, color, sex, gender and more. Something that I found out was that, “Black workers are 13% of the US workforce, but racial discrimination against the group accounts for 26% if all claims filed with the EEOC and its partner agencies. A study that was done in 2003 concluded that an “…employer is more likely to consider white candidates with criminal records than black candidates with no such history; this is extremely shocking and comes to show that discrimination still occurs even though there has been a law put into place to protect the people of color from unfair treatment when going through the employment process.
We all collectively agreed that workplace discrimination is clearly demonstrated in our articles, regarding race and gender. People of color were more likely to be discriminated against than a someone who is Caucasian. What we were also able to conclude was that women of color were one of the highest percentage of people being discriminated against. To this day, discrimination in the workplace continues to be a major issue among the people of color; there are laws put into place to protect them, but it seems as if that is being ignored.
Works cited
- Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press.
