It always bugs me to see “All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply, including minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and protected veterans.” It’s 2022. Nobody has excluded women from applying for jobs or awards in a century.
I’d also remove ‘minorities’ because nobody knows who’s a minority anymore. I’m a Ukrainian but I’m never a minority when a Hispanic person, who belongs to a gigantically more numerous group in the US, sometimes is. But not always. And nobody knows exactly when or why.
This becomes particularly funny when an Argentinean of Ukrainian-Jewish descent counts as a minority and I, also of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, do not. I’m always reminded of the novels by Faulkner where people are tortured by the knowledge that an ancestor lived in Jamaica and hence they might have “a drop of non-white blood.” The Argentinean is assumed to have lived somewhere in the approximate vicinity of “people of color” and automatically becomes “not fully white.” Of course, everybody should be free to choose their sex but nobody is ever allowed to name their own ethnicity because Americans can’t tolerate any infringement on their one-drop rules.
Clarissa's Blog 
You’re a Canadian citizen, right? And didn’t you live in Quebec? Quebec should count as Latin America, seeing as how they speak a Latinate tongue.
Congratulations, Clarissa! You’re Latinx!
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Huh! This is a good one! Now I’m totally a minority.
Seriously, though, why is a Mexican a minority in the US and a Quebecois isn’t? There are definitely fewer Quebecois in the country. Is it because the Mexican is assumed to be “a person of color” irrespective of how he feels about it? Is it “race assigned at birth”? Or, rather, at the moment Americans felt like assigning it?
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Because many Mexican immigrants in the US have appearances that contrast with the white majority and most Quebecois don’t. But rather than at least being consistent in our obsessions and classifying by color, we switch this one to language. So my pale colleague from Galicia is a person of color and a darker-skinned former colleague from Southern Italy was white. Never mind that the Italian guy had a name that could easily be mistaken for Spanish, and is at least as Latin as anyone out there
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Reply to “All Qualified Candidates”
You wrote “Nobody has excluded women from applying for jobs or awards in a century.”
This is not true. I have heard in faculty meetings in the 1970’s men argue that “we don’t want a woman in the department.” Also, Help Wanted Female and Help Wanted Male advertisements in newspapers at least until the late 1970s. Also, many jobs in the US Armed Forces were explicitly male only until much more recently than that. There are more examples.
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As much as I’d like to forget this, the 1970s, the decade of my birth, were a long time ago. :-)))
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” the 1970s, the decade of my birth”
Progressives often get caught in a trap where they think it’s still the 1950s and the civil rights movement or womens movements never happened…
I’m not sure why this is…
“many jobs in the US Armed Forces were explicitly male only ”
I generally support that… (makes me a horrible person I know) but I don’t want women to be combat grunts (for example) and some military jobs aren’t really feasible for those who haven’t been grunts at some point…
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That makes us two horrible people. 🙂 I don’t want women in the army either. And I’m so old, I still remember when it was a mainstream feminist position.
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“I don’t want women in the army either”
I wouldn’t go that far, there are lots of necessary jobs there that can be done by women just as well as men but I don’t want them in the combat track and I have real reservations about things like co-ed ships in the navy…
And I do think that some defensive training is a good idea (since war in the real world does involve women and sometimes in indirect combat type positions) but training to be a grunt with a gun….. no. just… no.
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Heh. It seemed like nearly all the young butch lesbians in my hometown were air force plane mechanics…
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…and assuming they were good at their jobs, it seems like an excellent fit, career-wise.
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Trust me, they were.
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