Let’s be generous. Generous in the extreme, perhaps. The decision of the STF that equated homophobia with racism has some good intentions. The idea is to protect a historically oppressed minority. And noisy. And whose cause not so long ago had the sympathy of the population. Hi. Despite the disagreements, no one wants to see a homosexual subjected to any type of violence – for being homosexual or for any other reason.
But the Supreme may have exaggerated the dose. And, as always happens in these cases, a well-intentioned decision, but based on dubious, if not false, premises and statistics, harms precisely those it tries to protect. Reality, when faced with this type of situation, tends to impose itself. In addition to the positivist belief in the power of the law to shape society.
A sign of this was a conversation I had with some entrepreneurs recently. A very heterogeneous group. There’s even a PT in the middle. And, amazingly, there are even homosexuals. Between canapés and glasses of wine (I drank water because I was driving), between laughter and some conversations that threatened to turn into discord, but always ended up in hugs or a polite “excuse me, I need to see if I’m on the corner”, we talked about the difficulty of finding manpower in some areas. Or rather, they talked and I listened.
A namesake whose surname I will obviously not mention was disgusted not only with the decision of the STF, but also with the very virulence of the identity groups. Before explaining why he did not hire anyone who could appear to be an identity militant, he said that, in the middle of the decade of 1980, he refused to fire an employee “accused” by other colleagues of being HIV positive. .
Fearful of being mistaken for a real homophobe, now the namesake refuses to hire people he sees as “walking legal liabilities”. That is, people whose victimizing and belligerent posture in private life may pose some threat to the company’s legal and financial security. “It’s a shame”, concludes the regretful namesake who faces difficulties in hiring young people.
In the same conversation, F., also a businessman, but openly PT, says that unfortunately does not give opportunity to young gay men and who is wary of hiring young black men. Nothing to do with sexual orientation or race, he assures me, and I have no reason to doubt it. After all, F. is gay and black and has some very heavy stories to tell about what he went through when he was younger.
The justification is the same as the namesake: walking legal liabilities. People who have the potential to take legal action or, worse!, social media justice because of a joke, a word or an order given in a tone that the employee may find offensive to their sexual orientation, race or political preferences. When someone counter-argued that it was enough to avoid jokes or take care of the tone of voice, opting for efficient silence or the very professional objectivity of an e-mail, F. explained that in practice the theory is different. “The drop in the productivity of other employees, working in a hostile environment and imposed silence, is not worth it. The account just doesn’t add up”, explained F.
But it’s not just progressive identity that harms job seekers. In the current scenario of political polarization, businessmen have also avoided hiring staunch Bolsonaristas and PT members. “It affects teamwork. I don’t want people who hate each other for politics involved in the same project”, another businessman told me whose initial I will be in debt because I don’t know him and, when I asked him, he had already left.
Unintentionally being more boring than I am, I asked the entrepreneurs what the solution to this Gordian knot would be. The unlikely reversal of the ultimate mess would help, but it wouldn’t solve a problem that is individual. “This generation will have to understand that it is not the center of the Universe”, said the namesake. Who, by the way, is older and loves to say that this generation this, this generation that. F. sees the solution in what he calls “measured politicization”: the ability to take an ideological stance without politicizing and/or judicializing every aspect of life. That is, nothing that can be done overnight or solved with a pen stroke.
