I realise this is a sensitive topic and I have no desire to offend so please bear with me before hitting the nuclear-release button. I personally have no strong feelings on the subject itself apart from the belief that the best person should be given the job regardless of their personal background and I’m happy to work with/under/over anyone who treats me with the same respect I afford them.
I was mulling this over today because of a semi-related story on a website where an ethnic-minority lady was lamenting her problems in finding work. I’m going to use the scenario of a black minority in a predominately white society and use male pronouns but thats just for conveniences sake.
Say 100 people are applying for a job, its a 95% majority white society, so there are going to be 95 white people applying for the job and 5 black people, assuming all parties are equally qualified and suitable for the post then with no discrimination on anyones part then surely the black person is less likely to get the post by sheer fact of being in a minority of the population?
This was something that I wondered about after reading an interview in a newspaper with (I believe, it was some time ago) the first Muslim General in the British Army, he was asked by the interviewer did he feel he had been discriminated against in his career progression because there were so few Muslim soldiers of high rank, he pointed out that Muslims are a minority in British society and a smaller minority in the British Army so statistically there weren’t going to be many Muslims of high rank for that reason and he felt he had been treated fairly throughout his career.
I do realise my scenario is overly simplistic but it was a train of thought started by the aforementioned General in his interview, surely said minority is going to have a more difficult time getting the job by sheer statistics without the necessity for active negative discrimination, but then again although a white person is more likely to get the job it doesn’t do any individual white person much good because he’s going to be up against as many competitors as his black peer.
I realise thats somewhat incoherent, apologies, I put this in IMHO because its probably not something that has any factual answers.
Let’s say there is a black guy named Bob and a white guy named Tim. Do Tim and Bob have an equal chance of getting the job? Probably not because people hire who they are comfortable with there are many whites out there who are not comfortable with blacks.
Yeah, but what if the business owner is black? Would Bob still have an advantage? Black/minority people do own businesses, you know.
Seems you are assuming the business owner/person doing the hiring is white, right?
That said, to the OP…theoretically if 90 percent of both business owners and potential hirees are caucasian and the remaining 10 percent black, then ideally 10% of new hires will be black, all else being equal. And of course the vast majority in this scenario would be white.
No cite, but I do believe that the military has a more egalitarian and even-handed approach in hiring than the private sector.
Not to mention, not all white people hate black people. Some white people even like black people enough to marry them, have children with them, adopt black children, etc. Some white people actually do see black people as just normal people and treat them accordingly. It’s not the 1950s anymore.
Of those white people who do harbor negative views against minorities, there’s also the possibility that they may realize those feelings are socially/legally unacceptable and over-compensate for it by going out of their way to NOT do anything that can be construed as racist. In that scenario, a black person might be more likely to get hired because of a conscious or unconscious fear of being called racist.
In fact, just recently someone I know was telling me about how at the store he works at, there was an accusation of racism because they didn’t hire a particular guy who happens to be black. The guy who wasn’t hired called corporate to complain that he was being discriminated against based on race. However, the person who made the hiring decision is a black woman, so it really doesn’t seem like race was the issue there.
I’m not explaining myself very well but that’s kind of what I’m trying to say. I was struck by that interview because by the tone of the interviewers question he was trying to get the General to agree that it was appalling that there were so few Muslims of high rank in the British military and the General made the common-sense point that the reason for that is that a relatively large Muslim population in the UK is a relatively recent thing (within past few decades) and its still a small minority within UK society in general so there quite naturally aren’t going to be many Muslims of high rank but there isn’t anything nefarious or unfair about that.
Even with an egalitarian and even-handed hiring policy there aren’t going to many minorities in a given position because, well, that’s what a minority is, its a subset of a given population. Everyone finds it difficult to get a job at the moment, if a post is more likely to be filled by a white person in the above scenario it doesn’t necessarily mean the black applicants are being discriminated against (in the real world they may very well be but in the scenario given the recruiters are simply taking the best person regardless of background) its just that more white people are applying overall than black people.
I have no particular dog in the fight about racism beyond that its a bad thing and everyone should have an equal chance of success, I’m from Northern Ireland, racism has never been a major issue here, sectarianism has been (and remains to lesser extent) the issue of choice, but I do read about the controversies across the water in England where race is a major issue.
But again I just used black/white as the basis of the scenario but I suppose I could, and perhaps should, have used minority/majority instead.
I know it’s anecdotal, but I knew this guy who had a Native American blood certificate. He would get hired one day, get fired a few weeks later, then have another job by the end of the week, then get fired from that later in the month. I wonder whether he got the jobs so quickly because he qualifies as a minority hire which is good for image and statistics.