Cicero, Illinois: "Discrimination Suit Alleges Black Temp Workers Passed Over for Hispanics"
12/08/2016
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From the Chicago Tribune:
Discrimination suit alleges black temp workers passed over for Hispanics

Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz

A group of African-American men filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Chicago federal court alleging systematic discrimination by a temporary staffing agency and several of its clients they say passed over black applicants in favor of Hispanic workers.

The lawsuit against Personnel Staffing Group, which does business as MVP Staffing, is seeking class-action status. …

The alleged discrimination took place at MVP Staffing’s Cicero branch office, which the lawsuit claims was directed by clients not to send African-American workers to their companies for assignments.

Those wishes allegedly were communicated using code words, according to testimony from former dispatchers and on-site representatives given in prior cases and attached to the filing as evidence. For example, according to the lawsuit, “guapos,” which translates to pretty boys, would be used to refer to African-Americans to suggest they don’t want to do dirty work. The terms “feos” (translated to mean “dirty ones”),” “bilingues” (bilinguals) and “los que escuchan La Ley” (referring to people who listen to Spanish-language radio station La Ley) were used to refer to Hispanic laborers, the lawsuit alleges.

This lawsuit sounds pretty plausible considering it’s about the defendant’s office in Cicero, Illinois.

Cicero adjoins the west side of Chicago. (Cicero’s upscale Oak Park neighborhood, where Frank Lloyd Wright and the young Ernest Hemingway lived, seceded from Cicero in 1902.) Al Capone took control of Cicero’s government in the 1920s in case the politicians in Chicago got uppity. When I moved to Chicago in the 1980s, Cicero was notorious for being anti-black. But it wasn’t anti-Hispanic. It’s now 90% Hispanic.

Last spring in Taki’s Magazine, I wrote about a new Stanford database of public school testscores by district:

The only large towns where Hispanics outscore whites are Detroit and Cicero, Ill. Cicero is the anti-Evanston: A working-class suburb of Chicago just south of Oak Park, it was taken over during Prohibition by the Outfit. The late neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol was disillusioned out of his Trotskyism by having to go through Army basic training with Cicero hoodlums:

About half of my original group seems to have come from Cicero, Illinois, which was Al Capone’s hometown, or at least his criminal base…. I looked at them and thought, “You know, I don’t think we can create socialism with these people.”

[Comment at Unz.com]

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