Little more than a year into the job and Guilford County Manager Marty Lawing hasn’t established racial homogeneity among top management, according to Commissioner Carolyn Coleman. It’s not like the county hasn’t had other problems to deal with over the last year.
Meanwhile Commissioner Ray Trapp —whose initial reaction to the hiring of new county DHHS director Joe Raymond was ‘just another white guy’ — says kids in the county’s diverse school system need to be able to “to look up to and say, ‘Here’s the tax director. It’s a black guy or an Asian woman.” Not that your average school kid gives two thoughts about the county tax director –he might when he starts paying taxes — but at least he can look up to Superintendent Mo Green, who is African-American.
Coleman was reacting to a recent N&R front-pager making the case that local government —county and city—has some work to do when it comes to diversity. The Rhino’s John Hammer also reacts:
In fact, the N&R might want to take a look at their own glass house before they start throwing stones. The N&R has no black male reporters. The top three positions at the paper are Publisher and Editor Jeff Gauger, Editorial Page Editor Allen Johnson and Managing Editor Steven Doyle. Not a lot of gender diversity there. According to their own article, the N&R should find a way to have a little more than 1.5 of those men be women. A sex change operation or two would solve that problem without having to change personnel.
Sex change operations are expensive, so the N&R would be better served to hire a transgender reporter or two. As for Guilford County Schools — the third rung of government which of course is funded by the county —Commissioner Ray Trapp
