Word: menials
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With a well-chosen mix of film clips and interviews, the program takes us back to the ancient 1950s, when virtually the only blacks on TV were comic stereotypes: Amos 'n' Andy, Beulah and the occasional bumbling menial. "There's no room for prejudice in our profession," Milton Berle tells Danny Thomas in a snippet from Berle's old Texaco Star Theater. But of the black stars of the '50s who had their own variety shows, only Nat King Cole lasted a full season, and he was canceled thereafter when he could not find sponsors...
...lectured the staff on the dangers of workaholism, urging them to try to spend more time with their families. Afterward a woman approached in tears to thank him. Old State Department ways die hard, however. For months Strauss tried to reverse the department's ban on hiring Russians for menial embassy tasks, but U.S. security officers insisted that for every two Russian workers there had to be one American "watcher." Says Strauss: "That didn't make any damn sense to me. And I didn't do it." Finally, the security people relented, and unskilled Russian workers are once again employed...
Emphasize the positive in an interview. One employer told students never to apologize for their concentrations. Stress the value of your liberal arts education--you have learned to think, to communicate, to analyze problems and pose solutions. Don't downgrade any menial work experience you may have had. Some work experience is better than none; at the very least, you have been part of an organization and learned how it functioned. If you worked your way through Harvard, that effort itself will win the respect of many employers...
Faced with the menial alternative of "working in a library for $6. 90 an hour." MacLean founded the Crimson Testing Service (CTS), which he described as "an innovative, individual approach to the SAT that will allow students to meet their desired SAT goals...
...away from their elders, breaking an ancient but fragile chain of oral traditions. For the elders, it is difficult to persuade an ambitious young native that he is better off hunting boar with blowpipes than reaching for the fruits of "civilization," even if those fruits might translate into a menial job in a teeming city. For the well-fed, well-educated visiting scientist to make that argument can seem both hypocritical and condescending...