“Society is like a parent, a baby doesn’t question which is his own.” But society does.
October 21, 2009I was just watching a documentary on ethnical discrimination in recruitment processes in France: The Glass Ceiling by Yamina Benguigui… Very well made, enraging by the situations it describes and the stories of the people featured: the stark, unacceptable truth about insidious (and most of the time unconscious) discrimination.
One point struck me particularly though. A woman explaining that having immigrated as an adult she thought her own struggles were due to the cultural gap, to having been raised abroad. But that her kids, born and raised in France, would feel at home. To ensure that they got the best education she sent them to private schools and to good higher education institutions to get masters degrees.
But when time came for them to find an internship they struggled for 6 months, were rejected everywhere. Nothing had changed. Worse. They were struggling more than if they had had a lower diploma… Because they had risen up the ladder and were now looking for management positions. Because their family had successfully integrated itself in the french society and system.
How vicious is that circle? They are amongst the best integrated people of immigrant origin; they have fully assimilated themselves; they have no doubt as to which is their country (as one of them put it, “society is like a parent, a baby doesn’t question which is his own”); they are considered foreigners in their parents’ country of origin… And that’s when society hits them back the hardest and says, “sorry, my clients/ employee base wouldn’t be comfortable with it… But I hope you’ll find your dream position soon!”.
Unfortunately for some of them such letters keep piling up…. One young man was explaining that in a year and a half he had gotten 600 rejection letters, 10 first stage interviews, and nothing more.
So some change their name, others accept lower qualification jobs, “anything to set a foot in a company”,… and all of them swear that for their own kids, sons and daughters of french people, “it will be different”.
I sure hope it will. We owe it to them to make it happen.
