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Relationships - Reaching Out To African Nation Reminder Of Problems At Home

Relationships - Reaching Out To African Nation Reminder Of Problems At Home image
Parent Issue
Day
24
Month
February
Year
1997
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Copyright Protected
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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RELATIONSHIPS

Reaching out to African nation reminder of problems at home

Ann Arbor City Council last week adopted a sister city in Dakar, Senegal, a western African nation that sits on the Atlantic coast.

Richard Ross, a longtime Ann Arbor resident instrumental in cementing the deal, said the “African descendants who live in Ann Arbor and the U.S. need to foster an understanding relationship.”

City council should be commended for its action. However, if we take a closer look at what’s going on here at home, we’ll see that we haven’t fared as well in fostering understanding relationships with each other.

One of the best places to gauge the misunderstanding and bitter disputes between men and women, employers and employees and people of different races is the Washtenaw County Circuit Court.

It is there that local people who feel they have been discriminated against, harassed and falsely accused hope to find justice from a jury of their peers.

Judging by some of the court cases handled over the past two months, juries have found what they believed was evidence of misconduct and tried to remedy the problems as best they could:

■ In January, a jury awarded $360,000 in damages to Jill Stokan, a former Domino’s Pizza, Inc., employee who sued the company in 1995 after her job was eliminated while she was on medical leave due to a pregnancy. The jury found the company did not discriminate against Stokan because of her pregnancy, which Stokan had claimed in her lawsuit. But the jury found in Stokan’s favor on her claim that the company violated the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Domino’s Pizza denied it violated the federal law and discriminated against Stokan because she was pregnant.

■ Earlier this month, a jury awarded a total of $356,718 in damages to three former University of Michigan Dental School employees, who are black. The jury also found the U-M guilty of racial discrimination.

The two women, Dawn Mitchell and Theresa Atkins, and one man, Delano Isabell. worked as dental processors, meaning they sterilized the dental instruments used by the students and faculty.

The three testified during the trial of being unfairly treated by their supervisor and other white employees. The three said they were frequently referred to as “you people” a term offensive to blacks; Isabell was called “a boy” - a term offensive to black men - and one white employee called them “lazy and slow.”

The university maintained throughout the trial and after the verdict that there was no discrimination even though the jury believed otherwise.

These two cases are only examples of similar cases frequently filed in Circuit Court. While we may not hear the outcome of all such cases, we do know that the reason for these cases started with conflict between individuals. When communications break down and problems go unchecked, the situation escalates and takes a turn for the worst.

It would behoove us to re-evaluate our relationships with each other and remember to respect each other’s differences, not be divided because of them. Let’s deal with our problems head-on before they end up in a public arena.

Ann Arbor is touted by some as a liberal, tolerant community and to some extent, it is. Reaching across the ocean to develop a friendship with another nation is proof.

But evidence still remains that we need to reach out more to each other here at home. We’ve made some progress, but we still have a long way to go. We must keep working at it.