INCLUSIVITY and photography – a thoughtful response

Some time ago duckrabbit ran a silly competition offering $1000 to anyone who could successfully justify to Stan Banos why PDN set up a 22 strong all white photography judging panel.

The competition, and surrounding debate resulted in PDN putting out an apology of sorts.  Today I received this comment from the US lawyer Steven Reyes:

‘I find it very interesting that the exact same issues that have been raised here, have been raised in other contexts were there are stark disparities (or absences) of minorities in a given profession or industry. Just a few months ago, the debate was about Sotomayor. For the past several decades it’s about the lack (other than a few notables) of non-stereotyped-acting roles for minorities or opportunities for directing, etc. The same debate arises when searching for faculty at universities, or CEO’s of corporations. The claim is often made that “they are not racist, they were just selecting the best most qualified people out there.”

While I agree that folks tend to be good (and not racist), a search for talent is only as good as how wide one’s search actually is. As a lawyer, when asked for recommendations for a board position, mine might tend to be lawyer-heavy (if I don’t make a concerted effort to think outside that box and outside the blinders that I might inherently have because of the interactions I have, both socially and professionally). Often, I’ll ask non-attorneys for their thoughts to ensure that my own blinders don’t prohibit me from overlooking well qualified people I might otherwise miss. Same thing I suspect occurs when searching for PDN judges.

The fact that these institutions/industries have lower proportions of minorities in them than one might otherwise expect is partially structural. Access to some of the opportunities to gain a foothold in an industry, whether by lack of educational opporutnities or by lack of ‘contacts’ is exacerbated greatly by the fact that a benign, self-perpetuating vicious cycle continues to lock out diversity. Until affirmative action, which isn’t about quotas, but about providing an equal opportunity for qualified people to get their foot in the door, universities were largely devoid of minorities, businesses didn’t outreach to minority applicants and still focused recruitment efforts in the same non-diverse manner.

Sometimes I think that discussions like these is enough for an institution to take steps towards asking some hard questions. Other times, in the case of more entrenched gender, racial, sex, and age discrimination, unfortunately, it takes more drastic (legal) action to undue those “blinders.”

I think the whole Sotomayor debate is instructive here. One one level having her as a Supreme Court justice is symbolic and for many Latinos represents a highly-visible example of having “made it” and that person can used as a role model for our kids. On another level, as the Supreme Court itself has acknowledged and (more recently in the past decade and a half) corporations, diversity helps to bring a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to the table — whether at a law school, at a marketing meeting, at the Supreme Court, in a college classroom, or at the dinner table. Certainly, having a diversity of perspectives while judging a photography contest could prove just as beneficial.Does this mean, that the 24 judges didn’t judge based only on content, form, technical skill, etc.? Nope. But just focusing on that question ignores the broader issue of the existence of a disparity.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to see what the 2010 PDN judge pool looks like.’