Hierarchy of identity groups within State Street Bank picking apples

Happy Fall Harvest Season to everyone.

State Street Bank had a private event going today at a local pick-your-own apple orchard. The company is Certified for “Global Inclusion”, according to the top/big banner for the “Black Professionals Group”. Underneath this group are the following:

• Asian Professional Alliance
• Indian Employee Network (Indians aren’t Asian? Or they are Asian, but not “professional”?)
• Jewish Professionals Network (because it is difficult for Jews in finance to find other Jews who work in the American finance industry?)
• Asian Professional Alliance (there is only one Asian “professional” (note singular), but the alliance needs to be listed a second time)
• Latin American Professionals Group
• Working Parents Group (why not simply “parents group”? if this is for State Street employees, don’t they all work?)
• Black Professionals Group (again)

 

This was in the western exurbs of Boston, home to roughly 50 Black Lives Matter banners for every person who might identify as “black.” Despite the primacy given to the Black Professionals Group, we didn’t see an unusual number of African-Americans among the trees.

I wonder if a State State employee who was childless, white, non-Jewish, and non-Hispanic would have been able to join and skip out on paying $20/bag for the privilege of laboring in the orchard. As the event was fairly small compared to the 36,643 employees (Wikipedia), I think the answer is “no”.

Also unanswered:

• Is the “Latin American Professionals Group” for people who specialize in investments in this region of the planet? (maybe the real experts shorted Venezuela when Hugo Chavez was elected and they’ve retired to the beach?) Or for people who have some ancestry from this region?
• Where was Senator Elizabeth Warren to protest the lack of a “Native American Professionals Group”?
• The U.S. Census Bureau considers “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” to be a race. Why is there no group for these individuals among the 36,000+ State Streeters?

Related:

• Boston Globe article on Harvard study that found Boston suburbanites developed anti-immigration once they had three days of exposure to Spanish-speaking immigrants vaguely near their neighborhoods (Enos and his staff took to Craigslist to enlist pairs of Mexican immigrants, mostly men in their 20s, to wait every day on platforms on the Franklin and Worcester/Framingham line. The immigrants were instructed to stand at the platform, but were not told what to say to one another or that they needed to speak at all. “Because we are chatting in Spanish, they look at us,” wrote one of the Spanish-speaking riders in a report to Enos. “I don’t think it is common to hear people speaking in Spanish on this route.” … Compared with initial survey responses, the routine riders who had noticed the new Spanish-speaking riders for three days were less enthusiastic about increasing the number of immigrants in the United States, less willing to allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, and more likely to believe that English should be declared the country’s official language.); see also the original paper