Eric Brown is the big, gregarious black man who occupies the corner office at Pro-Line International, the Dallas-based ethnic hair care company. He's also the son-in-law of Pro-Line founder Comer Cottrell.
Pro-Line is in mostly black South Dallas. It sells products mostly to blacks. So, you might conclude that it's committed to hiring only blacks.
You would be wrong, according to Mr. Brown.
"We wouldn't be talking about diversity unless it was an issue," he said. "There would be no word for diversity if we didn't have to define the problem. Diversity is there because we have defined it as a problem."
That's evident on the floor of Pro-Line's manufacturing plant and warehouse, where workers sort brightly colored jars and tubes into boxes. To be sure, most Pro-Line employees are black. But Hispanics and whites also are present in the factory, on the sales force and in the executive offices.
Mr. Brown rejects the fuzzy thinking that he says weighs down some workplace diversity programs; for example, the assumption that black salespeople will be more successful with black customers than white or Hispanic salespeople.
"If I was to make the statement, 'Yes, you have to be African-American to sell African-American products,' then the opposite statement creates a problem," Mr. Brown said. "If I wanted to sell Clairol products or VO5 products, I cannot be African-American and sell those products [to whites], and that's not true at all."
| The Seattle Times runs "Face of workplace yet to reflect society, census data show," but one should read the unabridged version of Scott Parks and Victor Godinez's Dallas Morning News article, "Diversity on the job: a work in progress," which also comes with PDFs of gap data analysis (generated by Paula Lavigne) for specific professions and areas of impact
posted in data on September 22, 2003 3:32 AM | t (0)
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