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By GWEN HUNNICUTT

Charles Davenport Jr., in his May 3 News & Record column, derides as religious zealotry what is in fact a sophisticated public philosophy of diversity.

Davenport erroneously assumes that high standards -- in this case, in the Winston-Salem Police Department -- must be abandoned to achieve diversity.

Davenport finds fault that Winston-Salem Police Chief Scott Cunningham has rightly noted that his department can better reflect his community.

I am quoted in a Winston-Salem Journal article about the situation. Some of my comments are repeated in Davenport's column.

I'll speak for myself in this space.

First, the numbers.

According to the most recent figures, 82 percent of Winston-Salem's sworn officers are white, 14 percent are black and 3 percent are Hispanic. Further, in the current class of 30 police recruits, only about one-fifth are female, black or Hispanic. Only three are women.

African Americans comprise 34 percent of that city's population, women, 52 percent, and Hispanics, 12 percent.

That isn't relevant to Davenport.

He dismisses our public creed, which acknowledges the heterogeneity and manifold talents of the population. Davenport seems unable to see the importance of diversity in public institutions.

Diversity is important because "underrepresentation" in public institutions is the legacy of a cruel past. Exclusionary practices may still be perpetuated in the present by standards and screenings that may seem fair but may be beset with conscious or unconscious biases. Our present goal of diversity in public institutions seeks to take positive remedial action. The practice of diversification does not offer advantages to unqualified people. Nor does it impose "quotas" that might lead to reverse discrimination.

Diversity is not marginal zealotry, as Davenport claims, but is good public policy, good for our communities, and good for the nation.

Davenport seems particularly concerned that diversification will compromise standards. Equalizing opportunity is fraught with paradoxes and dilemmas, no doubt. But Davenport presumes what he needs to prove.

Diversification does not involve diluting standards, as Davenport implies. If anything, the movement toward diversification has allowed us to critically reflect upon employment standards. Standards that masquerade as "fair" may in fact be engineered to favor some groups over others.

Ever since the Supreme Court ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), public and private employers have had to contend with the fact that some tests might "disparately impact" women and ethnic minority groups; such tests must be "reasonably related" to job performance and often are not.

Women have been disproportionately affected by the politics of exclusion in policing. Legislation passed in the 1970s has increased opportunities for female officers in police departments that were previously closed to them, and yet departments around the country have been unsuccessful in recruiting more female officers.

Davenport assumes that the low percentage of female officers in Winston-Salem indicates that women aren't "suited" for the job. On the contrary, women make excellent police officers. In fact, the two previous police chiefs in Winston-Salem were an African American woman, Pat Norris, and a white woman, Linda Davis.

It is the institution of policing that has worked to keep women unwelcome, marginal and excluded. Scholarly research shows that female police officers have to contend with harassment, resistance, hostility, stereotyping and "gender slander" in the workplace.

Female officers must struggle daily against a false and rigid ideology that only men can be crime fighters. These myths become institutionalized and fossilize our ideology so that we begin to take them as "truths."

Thus, female police officers struggle to gain the acceptance of their male peers. Sex-typed occupations, such as policing, perpetuate a belief that only males or females can adequately perform in a particular occupation.

In the case of policing, women are often not respected as "real" officers, but instead might be regarded as tokens or deviants. Aside from the hostile climate that female police officers might face, the low representation of female police officers is also connected to recruitment, hiring practices and biased testing. Police hiring practices and physical tests have historically worked to disqualify women.

Is it really necessary to be able to bench press your own body weight to be a good police officer? Or has that standard been used to ensure a male-dominated institutional design?

Police departments vary widely in recruiting, testing and hiring practices, and these institutions have made tremendous progress since the 1970s. Yet it is important to critically examine public institutions, while also praising those earnest efforts to make our institutions reflect and serve our society.

Such vigilance reinforces our core public philosophy of equality.

Gwen Hunnicutt is an associate professor of sociology at UNCG. She can be reached at gwenhunnicutt@uncg.edu