Thanks for the serious reply, Hippy Hollow. I’ve snipped out most of details of your posts, which seem to make sense to me, and have left only the above details which seem to be the crux of my problem.
As you correctly note, I’m not a person of color, yet most of the difficulties you describe black academics facing apply perfectly to me, and to most non-Black academics as well: ill-prepared (in my case, woefully) to compete with peers in grad school, ignored and/or incompetently groomed as a grad student, rejected (in my case for five years) in attempts to land a decent full-time job, often for no real reason one can see, overworked when is hired and compelled to serve on committees whose relevence to one’s work one can barely see (note my service on “diversity” committees and hiring committees out to diversify the department)–all this, and more, as you correctly note, is typical of academic life in general, not just for people of color.
The payoff, as you no doubt understand well by now, is considerable: a lot of freedom in what research one chooses to pursue, a lot of freedom to conduct one’s classes as one sees fit, more or less total job security (all of these manifested after acquiring tenure, of course), but no one has it easy in grad school or in the pre-tenure years, which are usually described as nightmarish by black people and white people alike. Maybe it’s tougher on the black academics as you describe, but it’s also true that they’re often cut a little bit of extra slack in institutions like mine that WANT to give them preference in hiring and tenuring. (I don’t think much of several black colleagues’ reputations as classroom teachers, for example, but no one even discusses that, as we don’t want to drive them from the university. We do, however, discuss poor teachers’ classroom reputations if they’re white, in a way that I couldn’t care less if these lazy and incompetent slobs were to leave my institution.) I’m just not seeing how Affirmative Action/EOE guidlines are helping very much since the barriers you seem to describe that apply to African-Americans is largely cultural: i.e., their families don’t get academic life, the money is better and the path to career success is clearer in the non-academic market, etc. These things aren’t going to change, are they?
Maybe I’m just despairing prematurely, of course. Maybe a generation or two or three has to be frustrated in the way I am, and things will slowly start to cook. But after almost two full generations from LBJ’s speech at Howard University, I think most academic departments are still very largely disproportionately white, and not changing very much at all, and not showing signs of change. I’d be interested if you think there’s something else we should be doing, besides trying aggressively to make bids to the few black job applicants we see.