Applicants of Color Encouraged to Apply

Since I'm currently unemployed, I was doing my due diligence in the fading hours of Sunday afternoon, perusing the Boston-area education job listings on craigslist.com when I saw the first entry at the top of the page.

"Director - (Cambridge, MA)," I read. So I clicked it.

Now, I'm not necessarily interested in directing any preschool, so the hastily written posting failed to pique my interest much--until I read the final sentence of the description: "Applicants of color encouraged to apply."

Isn't that sort of like saying seven footers are encouraged to play basketball? Shouldn't that be obvious enough? Apparently not, which brings up a couple of questions.

First, why do we need to alert job-seeking minorities that if they possess, among other qualifying qualities, "color," then they should apply? I'm pretty sure any job seeker intends to apply if the position fits his or her requirements, one of which ought to be that a prospective employer follows laws that preclude race from entering the decision-making process (well, at least prohibitively; Affirmative Action contradicts this decree somewhat but we'll leave further discussion of that issue for another day).

Second, does this mean a person of "color" is preferred? If so, thereby a canvass-face (Caucasian--I just made up my own hate term/adjective depending on your point of view) is not encouraged to apply.

Except for brief moments during the summer months, my skin lacks pigmentation. I'm actually half-Jewish, which should, in theory, make me a minority, but since my skin more closely resembles the manila folder lying an arm's length away from me than the brown "wood-grained" desk it sits on, I fall under the category of majority. Green Day feels my pain.

My life is not harder because of this fact; quite the opposite, actually. Light skin has certainly served me well thus far: while abroad for months on end in South America and Spain I was often afforded more respect than I would have received had my skin stood up better to the Sun, and as the resident poor kid in a rich town in "liberal" Massachusetts, you can bet being white paid off in not having to deal with the myriad misunderstandings that my few black contemporaries experienced during their time in the same town. White folks still love to emphasize when a character in a story is black, but neglect such detail when it comes to just about any other race or ethnicity America (read: humanity) has to offer.

Just last night, while I attended a friend's graduation party, a bald white man in a pink polo, whose exposed, salt and pepper chest hair hoped to make up for his shining dome's failures, entertained my sister and me with a thrilling tale of a black fitness instructor. No other person's race befell the poetic pages of his enthralling short story. After mentioning the gym employee's race the first time, he mumbled something about not having a problem with it. Phew. He then proceeded to call her "the black girl" throughout the rest of his narrative.

Now, our protagonist is far from a bad man. In fact, he's mostly enjoyable and down to earth. At the very least we know from his booze-based banter he enjoys a brew or two or a few, so we've got something in common. But, his attitude animates major issues America--and the world--have yet to overcome or even address since the sad summer of '68.

Everyone has racial issues. Everyone. Jesse Jackson once used the epitaph "Hymies" to refer to Jews, but he's no racist. Far from it. Lil Wayne freely says "cracker" but seems more racially (and socially) enlightened than most. At the same time, France almost elected an openly racist candidate just a few years ago. George Bush "hates black people," according to Kanye West. Oh, and that Obama guy, he's a Black Muslim Terrorist right?

We could all use some austere, Benjamin Franklin-like self-improvement in this regard, but, damn, do we really need job postings to alert us that applicants of color are encouraged to apply?

It's 2008, and MLK became a martyr two score ago. Will it be another four score before we learn to use parallel sentence structure and call a white man "white" just the same as we call a black man "black?"

What a god damned waste we've let his death become if we can't raise our language to match King's diction.