Naval Base Employee Fights Different Enemy : Point Mugu: The African-American woman battles racism and preconceptions in the male-dominated fields of mathematics and computers.

Ernestine Hernandez is a civilian rather than military employee at Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station, but she said she has often had to engage in combat.

During her 24 years at the base, Hernandez said, she has struggled to overcome a wide array of preconceptions and prejudices as an African-American woman in the male-dominated fields of mathematics and computers.

But she has climbed through the ranks to become director of the 60-employee computing division at Point Mugu, one of only two African-American women managers among the base’s 4,000 civilian employees.

“Racism is everywhere,” she said. “I don’t think anybody should expect this base to be different.”

Hernandez, one of a dozen women honored recently for their achievements by the Ventura County Commission on Women, said she has never felt discrimination solely because of her gender.

But she has felt people prejudge her because of her feminine appearance and demeanor. “I get that all the time.”

Slim and pretty, Hernandez wears her black hair coiffed to one side, dresses in stylishly cut suits and is strikingly soft-spoken, with a voice that is slightly melodic and carries a hint of the South, where she grew up.

In explaining her femininity, Hernandez recalled an early childhood experience when her mother took a job at a carwash in her hometown of Memphis. She said her mother wasn’t ashamed of doing a man’s job, but felt humiliated by having to wear pants on the public buses she took to work.

It just wasn’t ladylike, she said.

“Femininity is something I pride myself on,” she said during a recent interview in her uncluttered, dark-paneled office at Point Mugu. “Don’t let that fool you into thinking I can’t take care of myself. Don’t be misled.

“There’s a whole gamut of stereotypes,” she said. “On a good day it amuses me, on a bad day it really frustrates me.”

Hernandez said she has thrived by challenging such limiting attitudes, crediting her self-confidence and drive to her childhood in the segregated South during the late 1940s and ‘50s.

“I rode in the back of the bus and I drank the ‘colored’ water. I know having secondhand books from white schools,” she said.

Hernandez’s father was an auto mechanic and her mother took jobs where she found them. Together, they taught their seven children to work hard and expect life to be difficult.

The message was: “You have to prove every day that you’re as good as whites,” Hernandez said. “I am still proving it. It’s a daily thing.

“Even the people who know me still see ‘a black woman.’ I have to deal with that. I have to deal with their perception of me.”

After graduating from high school as class valedictorian, Hernandez earned her bachelor’s degree from Tennessee A&I; College, a historically black school now called Tennessee State University, where she met her husband, Rafael Hernandez.

Following graduation, the couple moved to New Jersey so that she could take a job as a computer associate with Western Electric.

Hernandez said she did well at the job but was disturbed when she realized that the company had lured her with an enticing salary and then capped her wages.

It was the early 1960s, the heyday of the civil rights movement, and corporations such as Western Electric were scrambling to integrate their work forces.

She stayed only two years. Following a stint in Arizona, the couple moved to California in 1968 for her husband to take an engineering job with Raytheon Co. in Goleta.

After applying through the Civil Service, she was hired at Point Mugu and spent her first 12 years at the base with the Navy astronautics group, helping to develop sophisticated computer programs.

In 1981, she began managing the computing division, which oversees the base’s computer operations. One project under her direction is to automate the scheduling of Navy flights between Point Mugu and its sister base, China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in the Mojave Desert.

In addition to combatting stereotypes about her race and femininity, Hernandez said she has also struggled against prejudices concerning working mothers. Hernandez kept working while she and her husband raised their son, a 22-year-old engineering student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

“I’d have people tell me, ‘Go home. Take care of your kid,’ ” she said. “The bottom line is I’m still here.”

To help other young African-American women follow her path, Hernandez volunteers her time to lead a local chapter of an African-American Sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, whose activities include running workshops on the how-to’s of college admissions.

Hernandez said she doesn’t relish the attention bestowed upon a role model.

Nevertheless, she said she feels responsible to help other African-American women become managers and succeed in technical professions.

“If it were easy,” Hernandez said in the interview, “you wouldn’t have just one person that you’d be sitting down talking to.”