Faithful readers will recall that I published on May 31st a post entitled, “White, Non-Minority” in which I wrote of the Community Development Authority’s website
more than a bit troubling is how they describe our potential workforce, on the Community Development page entitled, “Work Force.” Here’s what it says, as of this evening, May 31st:
Our workforce is listed as “white, non-minority 95%.”
Later, on June 4th, I wrote that
I received a reply from the Community Development Authority to my open letter, and the reply related that the CDA website is in transition. There will always be some positive achievements from the past that should be continued, but other perspectives and legacies should be relegated only to distant memory.
Looking for the CDA website as of July 17th, one finds (1) a developer info link on the City of Whitewater website that leads to a parked page on GoDaddy.com, and (2) a downtownwhitewater.org site that leads to a page under construction link from Yahoo! AT&T.
It’s ambitious that they’re working on new sites, but why not just remove the odd, sad, vulgar parts of the old website? (Those would be the parts that flagged ‘white, non-minority’ as a positive feature of the community’s labor pool, as though it should ever matter.)
I have no idea what runs through the someone else’s mind, but there is one clever consequence of pulling everything down (at the risk of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face). By pulling the whole site down, it’s possible to remove offensive passages without having to acknowledge that their were specific, offensive passages ripe for removal. There was never a need to remove something vulgar; it was just a general remodel.
In a reform-minded community, the offensive passages would be removed, the rest of the site would be up until a remodel was finished, and there would be a consequent willingness to acknowledge that some passages represented a past best abandoned. Why is that so hard? Because if your primary goal is to look good, you’ll not tackle problems squarely.
Is that why the site’s down? I’ll never know. Something to think about, though.