The Life and Challenges of Minorities in the U
Proposal argument basically entails, identifying the problem, then proceeding to state a proposed solution that would be considered fair and workable. The last step involves fore casing that the solution proposed would in fact be feasible. The speaker in this article commence by describing how his family and he managed to get into the United States from their native country Mexico. He was so young when he first set foot in the states.
He later went to school and graduated with a degree in engineering, he still proceeds to mention that he had master’s as well and with the two papers, he was sought after by different companies who were paying well. The speaker mentions that he had been thinking of the American dream but then he was living it. He gives the rating of his life style as one to two percent of those living in the top. Life was good and he does not complain at all. The speaker continues to say that at Procter and Gamble, where he first worked as a supervisor, the management loved his work and even promoted him to personnel.
Favors streamed in when he was offered a glass-enclosed office while others had offices that “you could not see in”. Life was generally good. He even purports to have been living the American dream despite not being a white. “I guess as a Mexican I was more acceptable because I wasn’t really black”. As personnel, his job was to interview the blacks and his new boss asked him to check if they “were smelly”.
He admits that even during his working days, he never considered himself a minority and goes ahead to say that that was the beginning of all the troubles. There is an instance that depicted discrimination in the office. He had hired a black for a secretary and when he was on leav, the plant manager fired her without any reasonable reason.He however got fired by the plant manager and was still lucky to get another position in Blue Cross at a time when black programs were coming up and people were aware of their cultural identity and were constantly fighting for it. At this company he makes even more money than the previous one; although, he does not have a chance to participate in the decision making process of the company.
This makes him yearn for more knowledge about decision-making criteria. He points out that the reason the minorities were never making it big in business was because of “ingrained racism” and another reason being that they would have made simply a bunch of bad managers who just couldn’t cut it. Its while at Blue Cross that he discovered that: minorities were mean to other minorities just like their fellow country men (whites) were to the minorities. This was a complete blow to the American dream. There was an incidence he tried to put minorities together but the blacks misunderstood him and the group divided. The top management warned him to “fall back in line” but he chose to leave.
It’s at this juncture that the speaker realized that the American dream he had purported to be easy was becoming far much complicated than he thought. He quit his job and found another one where he met a humane, understanding and full of formula kind of guy: an executive director. He thought that he had finally got a place where he could learn and exercise decision making only in vain. The executive director changed to a character he had already dealt with. “Keep a low-profile kind of guy”.
He was pissed off and decided to quit that job again to venture into consulting business. He chose consulting just because he needed to taste the role of a decision maker. Its while in the consulting business that he realizes the American dream is not guided by education, opportunity and hard work but by power and fear. Consulting gurus had at one point excelled in their line of work, this leaves the speaker very disappointed and opts to get out of consulting business.The speaker decides to get out of the consulting business when he founds out that it’s still the same game being played only that players had changed.
“My last performance appraisal was: you can go along way in this business, you can be a partner, but you gotta know our business”. He felt very disappointed and there was no chance he was going to be disillusioned again. The solution was to quit everything and start again. He does find out that he will never quench his thirst of decision making no matter how hard he tries. After learning that his “cohorts” were leaving better life without debts, he chose to retire from the “business world” which he had run for fifteen years. He gets to understand that the American dream has become so elusive and there is nothing he can do about it.
As a major part of his solution, he opts to get himself a job as a lecturer in University of Wisconsin at Platteville. Where he lives and owns a farm. He uses the farm to grow crops for sale. This shift from the elite lifestyle to becoming a mere farmer clearly indicates that the speaker was sick and tired of chasing the American dream that was not coming and therefore he decides to settle completely at a place where he would exercise his own decisions. He does admit that in the corporate world every decision made basically has vested interests.
