Devoting equal time to federal equal-opportunity issues

The Federal Diary gets lots of mail, some of it fit to print. Sometimes letters draw a vigorous response, as did one published earlier this month. In that letter, Tom Nisbet, commenting on a column about an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report on the federal workforce, said that " 'diversity' is just a thinly veiled excuse for discrimination against straight white, American males."

In response to Nisbet, how interesting that for 50 years as a government official, he has never discriminated against African Americans but apparently did not observe the daily, systemic discrimination around him. I presume that if he has been working for 50 years in America, he is at least in his late 60s. Well, I am in my early 60s and I can tell him what that world was like. For example, I can tell him of being a 16-year-old National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist and going for an after-school file clerk job at Prudential Insurance in Chicago and being told that I failed a test to place names in alphabetical order. When I asked to see the results, I was told that was against company policy.

Some 20 years later, the EEOC charged Prudential with systemic discrimination but required [people to] provide proof that you were discriminated against. What would I have provided? And who benefited from those types of discrimination?

Does he ever wonder why blacks came to be "over-represented," as he terms it, at the Postal Service. While he was in his wonderful rose-colored world, he did not know that the post office became the one agency where blacks could take a test and be objectively rated (or were needed). Because of discrimination, if you had an advanced degree, as a black person, this was one place that you could find a job. It became the place of hire for the best and the brightest in the African American community.

I entered the University of Chicago Law School when doors were beginning to open for women and blacks ("bias against straight white men" in Tom Nisbet's world). Without the policy to seek out diversity, I would not have applied to that school. I was not unique; most bright African Americans in the past did not have this opportunity. Of course, in Tom Nisbet's world, the only reason blacks are not so represented elsewhere is their lack of education, talent and experience.

How hypocritical.

-- Doreen Thompson Washington

I'm an older white female from a low-income background. I started putting myself through college when I was 37 years old. This started my education into just how heartbreakingly bad racism still was in the United States.

After law school, I went to work for the Bureau of Prisons. While with BOP I was told by an employee in their equal employment opportunity office that they rarely make a finding of racial discrimination, not because there is rarely discrimination but because employees had no written proof discrimination had taken place. It's a proof issue, not a discrimination issue. I'm sure that, like myself, all employees of the federal government who have their eyes open have seen and heard cases of discrimination.

-- Catherine Sutter Washington