Affirmative Action. Quotas. Pick yourself up by your bootsraps. Good Old Hard Work. Increased education funding.
These are all various proposed methods over the decades for dealing with our nation’s history of racial, gender, and class disparity in politics. These proposals, all with important elements, completely ignore a key enforcer of inequality: the disparity among social groups in access to informal networks. We know what forms these disparities take place. The mens’ locker room job offers, suburban community center social nights, having that family friend who secures for you the internship you’ve always wanted. These opportunities are rarely seen as advantages by those who already have access to them. In fact, Barack Obama, one of the greatest beneficiaries of informal networks of all time, failed to see this point recently:
"Does the White House feel like a frat house? The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players... The technical foul over the all-male game has become a nagging concern for a White House that has battled an impression dating to the presidential campaign that Mr. Obama’s closest advisers form a boys’ club and that he is too frequently in the company of only men — not just when playing sports, but also when making big decisions.”
Barack Obama has presided over many precedent setting appointees for women and racial minorities, from African-American Attorney General Eric Holder, the first black Attorney General in American History, to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first latina Supreme Court Justice. Considering diversity in high level appointees is an admirable decision to be encouraged. Indeed, such appointees almost always have more than qualified professional credentials to stand on their own as candidates. Attorney General Holder and Justice Sotomayor no doubt benefited from informal networks of their own, however they remain the exception rather than the norm for many in the communities they hail from. Individuals from underrepresented communities often have to work twice as hard to get the same amount of recognition that their colleagues “in the club” do with more ease.
Rob Cross and Laurence Prusak, in a Harvard Law Review report titled “The People Who Make Organizations Go- Or Stop”, offer suggestions on how to increase access to and the productivity of informal networks. I’ve adopted and modified 3 of those suggestions, for the political field, below:
1. Bring it Out Into the Open Social Network Analysis
The first step is admittance. By being cognizant of the informal social networks around you, you gain a better understanding of ways not just to help yourself, but to proactively create opportunities to widen your informal social network by diversifying it. President Obama took this tentative first step when he scheduled a game of gulf with some of his leading female advisors, among them his domestic policy advisor Melody Barnes.
2. Target Information Aggregators
The social networking site twitter is dwarfed in size when compared to fellow networking site facebook. Twitter however has a much higher concentration of people who are what is called “information aggregators”, the people who other people or organizations turn to for news, industry-specific information or opinion. Building connections with information aggregators in diverse communities is an essential component to creating equitable social networks and a more competitive business plan. This is why so many corporations in the past few decades have stepped up contributions and professional relationships with celebrities, tele-vangelists and radio hosts, as well as also organizations like the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Womens’ Business Enterprise National Council.
3. Incentivize New Working Relationships
When companies, non-profits and politicians think of diversity, they often think of reaching from outside their current place of employment. They try and create an informal network with marginalized communities from scratch, which is a difficult task even to propose on paper. Privileged members of informal social networking circles actually have many opportunities in their day to day lives to diversify their networks. To get people to take advantage of those opportunities, new working relationships, formal and informal, need to be incentivized. For example, directors of political campaigns could create rewards not just for the number of volunteers recruited by field coordinators, but also the diversity of local, politically-inclined volunteers. With a diverse set of volunteers and the right trainers in place, sustainable connections can be made to local communities. It’s a Win-Win situation, with volunteers receiving crucial experience and networking opportunities in their field of interest and a political campaign with a stronger connection to the communities they are campaigning in.
I liked your adaptation of the business-minded articles to relate to the political field. I would caution against one thing, however. Creating incentives for diversity has often been very necessary to bring women and under-represented groups into the political conversation throughout recent history. However, these incentives can fail to accomplish their goals if the selection of a certain group actually creates a negative public image of entitlement for that particular group.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great point, and also the million dollar question left over from the Civil Rights movement. As a nation we are not having one conversation on race, but a dozen simultaneous soliloquies in the same theatre.
ReplyDeleteAnd the same goes for other national dialogues on gender, class, etc.
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