A Santa By Any Other Color...

For me, most discrimination suits are pretty cut and dried. It is wrong, wrong, wrong, to deny anyone employment based on their race, color, creed, age, gender, etc. Always.

Except, maybe...

Today, while reading Offbeat News on Netscape's web site, I read a thought-provoking article about a man who is suing an Austin, TX, shopping mall for discrimination when management failed to hire him. He alleges this is because he is black.

Provided he could prove that race was an issue, this would be a pretty easy case to settle. But I suspect we'll be hearing about this for a while. And why? Because the job he was applying for was that of Santa Claus.

If you read http://my.netscape.com/news/OddlyEnough/... , you'll see that the man alleges he was told outright that the mall had no interest in hiring minority Santas. Management denies he was told any such thing, and that no such policy exists.

But, for argument's sake, let's say he was denied employment due to the color of his skin. This would be illegal, clearly. If, indeed, the man can prove his case, I believe the larger argument will be over whether the decision was "wrong." Maybe it's just me, but I see this as being a case of such enormity that it will shake up much of the way America does business.

Turn on the TV for longer than 30 minutes this time of year, and you'll probably see a couple of Santas. And I venture to guess that every last one of them will be white, the "right jolly old elf" of our childhood memories. Read A Visit from St. Nicholas. He's white. Look at the Coca-Cola ads, the old Saturday Evening Post covers. He's white. Santa is white, period, end of story. Or so he is in the American mind.

So, I would suspect that the defense here (again, if indeed this mall had such a policy) would be that (1) the whole point of a mall Santa is to make children really believe they are talking to the one and only Kris Kringle, and (2) no kid is going to believe that the bearded black guy they're talking to is real. As for the first point, I have a hard time supporting it. Sure, on one hand I wanted my kids to believe they were talking to the Santa. On the other, they were probably no older than four before they started trying to figure out how Santa could be at KMart one minute, at Target the next, then just happen to be at the mall when we went there 30 minutes later. You could see the cogs turning in their heads; when they hinted that Santa just might be a stalker, I had to explain that these were actually Santa's helpers. Most parents I know have had to switch to the same story at some point.

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