After her kids grew up, Mitchell got a high school diploma and earned a social sciences degree from Phoenix College. In 1987, she landed what she thought was a dream job-a clerical slot with the Arizona Department of Economic Security, the state's social-services agency. "I was happy to be with the state," she says. "I thought if I worked very hard, I'd get promoted."
Despite excellent job reviews, however, she was passed over for promotions. Most of the jobs went instead to white women. Last month, Mitchell-Raibon (she since has remarried) filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Phoenix, alleging that the state of Arizona discriminates against black women.
Two other black women who are longtime DES employees, Arnita Petty Diggs and Joyce Williams, have filed similar racial/sexual discrimination complaints at the federal commission. Diane Brooks, a fourth black woman, plans to file her complaint with the federal commission later this month.
The stories the women tell are in some ways very similar. All four are self-starters and high-achievers who put themselves through college or trade school in order to climb the career ladder. All four continued on with some form of educationÏon their own time-after hiring on at DES.
All four have received superb job reviews with perfect to near-perfect ratings.
Ironically, one of the women names George Logan, a black man who until recently was a high-level manager at DES, as one of her tormentors.
The women also are angry with another black man, Sylvester Mabry, who heads the DES office that monitors how the agency treats minority employees. The women have filed racial-discrimination grievances with this office, but the grievances were found to be without cause. In another bit of irony, the women in some cases were championed by white male co-workers.
The women say their charges of racism were downplayed by the Governor's Office and virtually ignored by outgoing DES director Linda Moore-Cannon, who resigned last week amid criticism from legislators that the agency was poorly managed.
In an interview with New Times shortly before her resignation, Moore-Cannon said DES "emphasizes cultural diversity" and hires at least the same percentage of blacks that exists in the population as a whole. Only one official, Representative Sandra Kennedy, took up the women's cause. Kennedy, a black woman, also was Moore-Cannon's most vocal critic. "I most definitely believed the women. They didn't have a chance at promotion," says Kennedy.
Even DES officials acknowledge turbulence inside the huge agency.
In the past year, says Mabry, his office has investigated 78 complaints filed by employees alleging racism. He says he doesn't have statistics on the number of complaints that were found to be valid.
Mabry says the "polarization" among DES employees hinges on low morale in an agency where employees are underpaid and overworked. But he contends that the allegations of racism also may be set off by events like the candidacy of ex-Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and law professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
"Anything that polarizes society nationally spills over into our work force and affects the behavior of employees and sometimes affects management style," says Mabry.
But the DES official says allegations of racism only make things worse. "One of the best things people can do to avoid polarization is to stop inflaming our work force with allegations of racism," says Mabry.
The four women say they couldn't disagree more. They say that they want to stop discrimination. The complaints they recently filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, they say, are simply a preliminary step to filing a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Phoenix. They want to rock the boat.
Two of the women claim that they already have suffered retaliation since accusing the agency of racial and sexual discrimination. They contend that they were assigned to menial jobs once they filed grievances. Another woman says she was sexually harassed.
Sylvester Mabry says there is no discrimination against black women in DES.
"Our job is to make sure everybody is treated equally," says Mabry. "If you're an Afro-American and you represent true equality, they'll say you're an Uncle Tom or you are in with the Establishment, or that you don't have any power to change anything. They try to discredit me to legitimize their allegations."
Hogwash, says the women's advocate Bette Richards, a white attorney who is a DES hearing officer and a union steward for the DES branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
"If DES management admitted racial discrimination took place, then there would be a basis for recovery in court," says Richards. "Internal investigations for affirmative action simply delay things and discourage people from filing lawsuits against the state."
There is one thing Sylvester Mabry says that the women probably would agree with: He calls DES Ôa Mount Saint Helen's" of dissension.
That's not exactly what the four black women had in mind when they launched their careers.
DIANE BROOKS Diane Brooks is a workaholic. She proudly recalls that when her knee went out, she came to work anyway, treating it during her lunch hour with wet towels she steamed in the office microwave. She's ambitious. Because she wanted to build a career, she spent $2,600 of her own money to put herself through advanced microcomputer classes at a technical school shortly after she joined DES in 1988. She got straight A's.
The computer classes paid off. Brooks was a whiz with DES computers, according to her job reviews. When the federal government wanted DES to install a new software system, Brooks figured it out herself and then trained everyone else. That's according to her job evaluations. "Her training has saved staff many hours of frustration," her supervisor wrote in a review.
Articulate and self-assured, she took on many tasks, including editing her division's newsletter. Sometimes, though, she took to her keyboard to toot her own horn, pounding out detailed memos reminding her bosses of her recent accomplishments. In 1989, after being a roving executive secretary in several DES departments, Brooks was placed in the Office of Special Audit in the Division of Management Review, where she was an administrative assistant. The Office of Special Audit does exactly what its name implies-audits every department within DES.
Brooks' reviews from her boss, Den Krasavage were stellar. Brooks was a "self-starter who proceeds with tasks without being asked." She was "capable of running a busy office," "punctual and reports to work early, willing to change her work hours to benefit the office," "unfailingly courteous," and "accepts assignments cheerfully and willingly." "Diane's enthusiasm and desire to learn are refreshing," he wrote in 1990. "I trained her in the various aspects of my duties so that when I went on vacation a knowledgeable individual was available to respond to current tasks. Areas include: Budget, planning, personnel and accounting."
One of the tasks Krasavage assigned to Brooks was to scan time sheets and travel-expense reports for mistakes. She says she often found errors, and routinely reported them to Krasavage. In October 1990, Brooks discovered that an employee in the Division of Management Review had been paid for 24 hours not worked.
It was a routine catch, Brooks thought. But when the mistake was brought to the attention of George Logan, the black director of the Division of Management Review, he became enraged, Brooks says. The white employee who had been overpaid was his secretary's best friend, she says.
Logan, who has resigned from DES, could not be reached for comment.
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Logan put a reprimand in Brooks' personnel file for performing duties that were outside her job description-even though her boss had given her the task. Brooks was assigned to a different office and, in essence, demoted. She still receives the same salary, but she does nothing more than type documents eight hours each day. She has not been able to get her old job back. She has been told by management, repeatedly, that she is needed as a typist because of a backlog of work.
Krasavage, who is white, was also reprimanded for assigning the time-sheet task to Brooks. But he was not relegated to a typing job.
A few days after Brooks had been assigned to the typing job, division director Logan sent out a memo fingering Brooks for having scabies. The memo took the form of a public- health alert about an employee with a terribly contagious parasite, although Brooks had contracted the mite a month before, and had been cured of it.
She recalls being mortified by the memo. "People," she says, "began treating me like I had AIDS."
Brooks looked upon her demotion and the scabies memo as retaliation for her being a whistle-blower. She also charges that because she was black, Logan, another black, discriminated against her. Brooks complained to the NAACP, which filed a complaint with the DES Office of Equal Opportunity. She also filed a complaint with the State Personnel Board, claiming that Logan was retaliating against her for whistle-blowing. Logan denied the allegations of racism and retaliation.
At a Personnel Board hearing in October 1991, Bette Richards argued on behalf of Brooks that Logan, to survive in DES, sometimes had to "outwhite whitey" by coming down hard on fellow black employees.
At the hearing, Brooks was not allowed to bring up the time sheet that started the whole flap in the first place. She was not allowed to talk about the highly embarrassing scabies memo. Hearing officer Harold Merkow said there was no evidence that Brooks' allegations of racism or retaliation had merit.
Logan resigned from DES shortly after the hearing.
"Who knows why he resigned?" says lawyer Bette Richards. "I heard he didn't like all these uppity black women causing him trouble."
ARNITA PETTY DIGGS The way Arnita Petty Diggs sees things, nobody can sniff out welfare fraud better than an ex-welfare mom-which is what she is.
Diggs, now 31, grew up in the Watts section of Los Angeles. She was a teenage mom and, as she puts it, got "welfare and food stamps and the whole nine yards." Taking advantage of public programs to get mothers off welfare, she got a junior college degree, taught herself to type and began working for DES as a typist in 1984 in the Office of Special Investigations, which probes welfare fraud.
Diggs stood out. By 1987, she had become an investigator. She was a trailblazer; the office had never had a black female investigator. There were no other female investigators of any color. To her, the job was prestigious. But it was also tough. Her co-workers were mostly ex-cops and ex-military men who she claims had little respect for welfare recipients. Because she had once been on welfare, she says, she felt they didn't particularly like her, either. She claims they also didn't like the fact that she was successful in sniffing out fraud cases. They used to tell me, `Slow down, you're overachieving,'" she says.
There was another kind of hassle, one that was harder to take. She was often the brunt of sexual jokes. One co-worker put a lollipop in her cleavage at a DES Halloween party. When Diggs complained to an upper-level manager about the sexual teasing, he chastised the investigators. But a few weeks later, Diggs says, he himself tried to kiss her.
Eventually, she says, the stress of the sexual jokes got to Diggs, who left DES in 1988. She says she resigned because she thought she could get her job back-Diggs says she was told by several officials at DES that she had two years to reapply for her job, and that she would be given "every fair consideration." She knew of other DES employees who had taken similar breathers and had gotten their old jobs back.
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ROCKING THE BOAT FOUR BLACK WOMEN CHALLE... v2-05-92
