Civil Rights

As a young manager in a big company, I volunteered to be the college recruiting liaison for my department. That meant coordinating between hiring managers and recruiters, reading hundreds of resumes, setting up interviews, and reviewing feedback to help determine who to hire.It was a lot of work but a great experience until one day the department head threw me a real curve ball. He said that the human resource folks were coming down on him, that we had to hire two black engineers that year. No kidding; it was that cut and dried. Welcome to the real world.That may have been 30 years ago, but I will never forget how wrong it felt. Call me strange, but I was always pretty much colorblind when it came to race, not to mention gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, whatever. For whatever reason, it never meant that much to me. And I wasn't raised in a protected environment, that's for sure.  I actually grew up in racially segregated Brooklyn, New York. My friends and I were bussed into an...

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