Ethnic discrimination and representation

After seemingly long absence from the public debate in Sweden, discrimination has once again been given some attention. Recently, the think tank FORES released a new study does indeed constitute a barrier to labor market integration for immigrants in Sweden. Meanwhile, there've been some comments concerning the case of quotas within the police department, where an ethnic Swedish man experienced discrimination because he was not considered as a recruit because of these quotas. At the same time, another study shows that most Swedish private employers have not even considered ethnic diversity in the workplace, or have to achieve it.
I'm pleased to see the issue re-appearing again. For too long, the public debate has been focused on how to demand more from immigrants, as if the root cause of social exclusion is to be found within the "flawed" immigrants.

What is concerning, though, is that even a decade after this was acknowledged as a problem, employers, both public and private, seem to lack the capacity to deal with the matter. Madon makes a convincing case that the Police seems to have been using quotas in a most blunt manner. Reducing the matter of minority representation within the staff to simply a matter of counting heads of different colours is never a good idea. What is needed is an understanding of substantive representation, that is to say, how a plural work force manages to capture the experience from many different social spaces or environments, allowing the organization to navigate competently in these spaces. That is to say, these experiences, although they maybe not formally recognized with diplomas, can still be considered skills, in the sense that the person who has them has the capacity to view the world from different perspectives, and also gives the organization a greater legimacy across different communities.

Here in Canada, the news recently noted such an example within the armed forces, Lieutenant Colonel Harjit Singh Sajjan, Canada's first Sikh commanding officer. After tours in Afghanistan, he bore witness to how his different cultural capital, his different outlook and capacity to understand more than one perspective, made him invaluable to both the Canadian and American forces on the ground. As he says: "It's not political correctness. For the Canadian forces, it's an operational necessity...".

Employers everywhere need to learn about these very concrete ways of conceptualizing competence if discrimination is to become a thing of the past.