During yesterday's NorCo Council Personnel Committee hearing, attended by five Council members*, a list of 13 nominations for the newly established Human Relations Commission was considered. Since I can only go by phonetic spelling of some of these hopefuls, I'll forego naming them until tomorrow. Things were going smoothly until member Nadeem Qayyum decided he had some questions.
Qayyum, who has a very annoying habit of refusing to use his mike, decided he wanted to know how many of these selections are persons of color and wanted to know details like religion, etc.
Zrinski, who is increasingly getting irritated by questions that Qayyum has written out in advance because his English skills are so subpar, said she declines "to specifically identify who is ... who is a person of color, who is Muslim, who is gay, who's trans. I am supposed to identify those individuals on this list? I would think that that is almost discriminatory."
I'd say it is definitely discriminatory.
"For the record, I need to ask these questions," explained Qayyum.
"Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure sure," responded Zrinski. "For the record, I'm not going to specifically identify people."
In the desire to be inclusive, we often make the mistake of being exclusive.
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* This meeting was attended by Council members Nadeem Qayyum, Jason Boulette, Tom Giovanni, Dave Holland and Kelly Keegan.
2 comments:
Necessary corrections on errata:
"...questions written out by his wife in advance."
"For the record, I must ask these questions because my wife told me to."
Kudos to the Commissar on her reaction.
I'm inclined to agree.
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