+1
(sorry, couldn't resist). This reminds me, though, of a weird thing that happened. When I worked in one city, which was 48% black, 47% white, with other ethnicity anywhere from 0 - ~2%.I worked on a team as the only white woman with two white guys, 4 blacks guys, 1 Indian. Manager was white man, though it has been the Indian man. The white guy was a "legacy" appointment due to the company splitting up and them needing to plant him somewhere for a couple of years until another vertical opened.
Started working in another city, about 30 miles away. The racial make up is slightly different. 70% white, 18% black, 4% Indian, 3% Asian, 3% Latino (if memory serves).
It was a bizarre experience to drive from one city to the next and even weirder for me to move from one team to the next: almost all white women, 1 white man, 1 Asian woman, and 1 black woman. (Their product division for this product was located near marketing and conceived of as more marketing than engineering, whereas the old company saw product as engineering...)
One day, on my way to work, stuck in traffic, I coined a phrase for this as the "unbearable whiteness of ___". Said something on facebook . A guy who was from that area and worked with me saw it. He was kind of quiet and hush hush about it, like you shouldn't talk about these things in the workplace when he saw me a couple of days later. He hinted around about the history of the neighboring cities in the area (typical white flight/racist stuff). And then he said that, "Gee, in the IT department there are lots of people of color: Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, and Russian."
ha. The Russian bit made me laugh.
But what was lost on him, aside from the fact that, isn't it weird that there are no black people when the area has plenty of black people!, was that all of the five people of color with whom he works are, magically, from a n IT consulting firm that provides expertise to a company that might not have it or might not want to invest permanently in it. IOW, these men are taking the well-paid (albeit no bennies), crappy IT job very few people want: live in a hotel room Sun-Thurs, fly home to family on Thursday night, work in a typically hostile and unfamiliar environment, beat your head against the idiotic wall of management at your temporary job site, and be constantly on the line to get axed if you don't kiss ass in all the right ways. It can be a horribly depressing, isolating, and acid-reflux inducing way to live.
I was, of course, pointing out that, in this city, where whites are a majority, people of color, let alone blacks specifically, do not constitute anywhere near the same % of job occupancy in IT, never mind in the whole company, as they do in the population more generally. AT this company, blacks were concentrated in two areas: help desk and maintenance. Forget accounting, forget human resources,forget business development, forget administration, forget marketing, forget legal, forget sales, forget training department, etc.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)