The Melting Blog

Abercrombie & Fitch Settles Discrimination Lawsuit

Sweet karma. This one brings a smile to my face. WASP clothing brand -- Abercrombie & Fitch -- has actually decided to settle their lawsuit, and will pay out a hefty sum of $40- to $50-million to former employees who levied a myriad of discriminatory labor practices against the apparel company. From the New York Times:

Abercrombie & Fitch, one of the nation's trendiest retailers, settled race and sex discrimination lawsuits yesterday, agreeing to alter its well-known collegiate, all-American - and largely white - image by adding more blacks, Hispanics and Asians to its marketing materials.

After a federal judge in San Francisco approved the class-action settlement yesterday, the two sides announced an agreement that calls for Abercrombie & Fitch to pay $40 million to several thousand minority and female plaintiffs. Abercrombie also agreed to hire 25 diversity recruiters and a vice president for diversity and to pursue benchmarks so that its hiring and promotion of minorities and women reflect its applicant pool.

In an unusual step, the settlement calls for Abercrombie to increase diversity not just in hiring and promotions, but also in its advertisements and catalogs, which have long featured models who were overwhelmingly white and who seemed to have stepped off the football field or out of fraternities or sororities. Plaintiffs' lawyers said they insisted that the company agree to add more diversity to its marketing materials so as not to discourage minorities from applying for jobs.

Maybe their catalogues will start to resemble a reality-based America in contrast to those fetishized Anglo images and representations they've become renown for (see image above)? I don't hold out a lot of hope that this episode will fundamentally transform their business culture and marketing practices, the reasons for which I'll outline in a blog entry later on. But in this day and age, you take what small measure of righteousness you can get. In the meantime, click here to listen to the NPR story. More on this later.

America's New "Face To The World"

While I'm as disheartened as the rest of you Blue Americans -- all 48% of you -- who hoped for a referendum on the President's administration (Sorry Everybody!), I do think that Andrew Sullivan raises a good point here on Dubya's appointment of Condoleeza.

This Blogging Stuff

Friggin' A, it's been nearly a month since my last blog entry, and it took me a good six tries today before I successfully recalled what my movable type username/password combination was. See what old age, sheer busy-ness, and a looming, drama-laden wedding ceremony will do to you? One of these days I may actually make good on my threat to start-up a personal blog to document the ongoing drama/cross-cultural-intergenerational conflicts that is my personal life. Sharing such thoughts generally require me to shed the good taste and decorum necessary to maintain a corporate-friendly blog such as this one.

The reason for my lack of blogging can be attributed to a myriad of reasons -- but really it's really due to the fact that I don't spend the greater part of my days thinking/writing/analyzing about race and ethnicity issues -- even if it is what New American Dimensions is all about. Okay, maybe a greater part of my day is consumed by these things, but only because our business demands it. Ethnic marketing is our livelihood and the stuff that pays our bills. So a mental vacation from this stuff is in order from time to time.

Business has been bangin' by the way. Luckily, we are now at a point, staffing-wise, where we're no longer as overstretched in our operational capacity as earlier this year. Personally, I was pretty tapped back during the summer -- just really burnt out. Do I have a point to all this rambling? Not really, I guess I'm compelled to offer an excuse for my bloggin' idleness. Okay, rant off. Onto the news...