You didn’t seem too onboard with my answer. I’d also add that we should make further efforts to dismantle the sources of privilege, when possible, such as de-facto segregated schools and neighborhoods, modern-day sundown towns (like Vidor, TX), unfair financial practices like redlining and its descendants, and the like. As to how to measure the results, that’s a lot harder, but comparing general outcomes (educational, financial, criminal, etc.) for various groups is at least a start.
Privilege (in the “white privilege” sense) is not something you affirmative action your way out of, is it? I think its something you teach your way out of.
Yes – AA is by no means a permanent solution, IMO, merely a present-day corrective (and an imperfect one) for an unequal playing field. But it can mitigate some of the negative effects of the lack of privilege.
Tons of people in this thread have laid out ways that that awareness should shape people’s actions–I discussed very specific ways in which college admissions should evaluate students differently, for example.
You might benefit from reading this post again. I think it has the answer to your question.
Kimstu wrote a long and interesting approach about a fictional Alejandra and the discrimination she may face in the dentist’s hiring process, but I don’t see many suggestions for our dentist in there. Just “resolve to try” and ‘avoid assuming’.
These conversations are interesting. Every conservative seems to think that wealth and success are simply a matter or “hard work”. So they always seem to loose their mind at any suggestion that they might have enjoyed some advantage that others did not have.
No, I don’t think that conservatives really believe that hard work, dedication, etc., are the only cause of the wealth and success of the highly-privileged.
What they seem to believe is rather that hard work, dedication, etc., are the only causes of wealth and success that it’s polite to talk about. (At least in the case of the highly-privileged, that is. If you’re discussing wealth and success achieved by members of less-privileged groups, it’s okay to talk about, e.g., the boost they got from affirmative action programs and various government handouts. ;))
I specifically responded a while ago. I never saw a reply. Let me try again:
You said you wanted “individuals with power and influence” to "take this [meaning that in general minorities must work harder than white men to get to the same place] into account when making personnel decisions. I think that’s actually illegal for a lot of employers. How is a well-meaning employer supposed to “take into account” without breaking the law?
I think you’re wrong, but I’ve got counter-stereotypes about liberals if that’s what we’re doing in this thread now.
I think the biggest issue with the concept of privilege as applied in the thread is that too many people use it as a way to essentially downplay achievements and on occasion to advocate policies that would effectively hamstring those same people or their children.
I mean, someone who is brought up in a middle-class house, gets out of college with no debt, and goes on to make $250k a year has still accomplished something, even if he started from a higher position. To use the running race analogy, if a kid starts on the 30 meter mark and still crosses the finish line in under seven seconds, he’s done something remarkable, even if he didn’t have to run the entire race, or have a beartrap on his foot or whatever.
Another philosophical objection I have is that the concept sets the floor as having NO privilege, and everyone with something at all has some form of privilege, which is kind of absurd. Some things aren’t privileges, even if some people don’t have access to them. Like say… having drinkable water. That’s more of a human right than a privilege. When you combine this with the first point I made, it tends to demonize and downplay people for reasons that are outside of their control, or that are GOOD things, not bad ones. I mean, why would anyone begrudge LHOD for having a mother who read to him all the time? That’s a good thing, and good for him for having it. Just because someone else is less fortunate doesn’t mean anything unfair happened.
How about this? We have a person on our staff who had a horrifically stupid, unprofessional resume. It had inspirational quotes in a sidebar. It used a cursive font. It phrased everything backwards and sideways and missed it’s own point. And knowing the person who wrote it, I feel pretty confident that it was a great example of not having the privilege of anyone in her family knowing jack-shit about professional resumes. But she’s great at her job–fantastic. But there’s no way we would have interviewed her without a personal recommendation because that resume was so suck. And that would have been a mistake on our part–a missed opportunity to add a valued staff member in a hard-to-fill position. So one positive, legal step I can take going forward is not to try not to let resume format play a role in hiring decisions. It’s easy to let that sort of thing be a great “first cut”–I have too many resumes, I’ll throw out all the ones that look dumb–but that’s a great way to perpetuate privilege.
Aren’t you right back at your original misunderstanding that we discussed at the top of page 3? You are assuming that encouraging awareness of privilege issues is tantamount to a form of protected-class discrimination, and linked to a big poster from the EEOC explaining why such discrimination is illegal.
But the point is that encouraging awareness of privilege issues, on the contrary, helps us reduce more subtle forms of discrimination on the basis of race, gender, etc.
As in my “Alejandra” example, where the dentist who doesn’t think he’s prejudiced against Hispanics is nonetheless unconsciously basing his views of a Hispanic applicant on cultural stereotypes about Hispanics. Being more aware of privilege and prejudice issues would not be discriminatory on the part of our dentist friend: rather, it would help him stop being discriminatory in subtle ways that he isn’t fully aware of at present.
Notice how you’re making the privileged kid the main character in this story–how this concept shapes our view of him and what he’s done has become the point of the discussion. But it’s not the main point. No one has said it’s bad that parents are good to their kids. All anyone is saying is that other kids (and adults) face a different set of challenges, and that those challenges 1) should be acknowledged and 2) can sometimes be mitigated by deliberate action. Saying 'It helps a kid to be read to every night–but many don’t have that option" isn’t tearing down kids with that privilege–the sentence really isn’t about them. It’s starting a conversation about how we can get those same advantages to kids who don’t have them.
Since the top of page 3, iiandyiii posted these:
Do you still think he’s just “encouraging awareness of privilege issues” and not encouraging a form of protected-class discrimination? I don’t.
No, it doesn’t. That’s just where you repeated the demands for education on hr practices.
You’re approaching this from a very sneery place with tremendous hostility toward the idea of any action. What if you tried something different: given a dentist who acknowledges her own implicit bias, what do YOU think she could do? Don’t be sneery this time, try for real to answer the question.
Because it seems to me others have answered it, and you’re belittling or downright ignoring what they say. I’m not sure what percentage there is in saying it with different word combinations if you’re going to continue in that vein.
I can imagine that lots of people don’t get jobs for unfortunate reasons: their resume is unprofessional, they were late to their interview, they had a bad relationship with a former boss that gave a mean reference to the prospective employer. But if you’re a potential employer, you do have to make first cuts somewhere. Whether that’s with unprofessional resumes or people late to their interviews or people who get bad reviews from their previous employers, wouldn’t any of those “perpetuate privilege”? And if you’re not willing to cut people from your employment pool for things like that, what should you cut them for? Is a prospective employer supposed to personally interview every applicant? That’s impractical in many cases.
Of course it’s a good thing! No one in this thread has said anything that remotely could be construed as advocating begrudging anyone this. Your conclusion is exactly the thinking that rankles me with it’s apparent detachment from logic.
If LHOD pretended his wonderful vocabulary and literacy was a product of his own intellect and character–and had nothing to do with having a mother who had the time, energy, and desire to read to him–that is when he would likely earn himself a raised eyebrow. That is when someone might remind him of that his privileged upbringing should be accounted for before he judges those less well read as inherently lazy and stupid. And that is when someone might point out how book drives and reading programs aimed at kids help level the playing field between kids in literate and non-literate homes.
Yeah, all it shows is that there’s a massively disproportionate number of disciplinary actions taken against african-american students, particularly when it comes to offenses where the teacher has to make a judgment call:
The reason given for these sanctions speaks to the enormous role that individual judgment plays in disciplining kids. While there were only 119 suspensions for clear-cut violations like alcohol, tobacco or drugs, schools logged a whopping 7,479 incidents for “other behavior.”
Now, if you want, you can approach that by just assuming that it’s simply that African-Americans are more than 2.5 times as likely to commit grevious offenses than Caucasians. Just like you could assume that the reason stop-and-frisk targeted African-Americans so much is because they’re more criminal. I think that’s completely nonsensical. This image in particular is telling. Notice how for clear-cut offenses like threats of violence, the rates are pretty similar, but “interfering with school authority” is something like 50% to 6%? Weird, right?
AA is a way to mitigate the effects of white privilege, sure.
I had this professor in college. I wasn’t a star student in his class–just a solid B student. I had never visited him during his office hours just to chat, but I did make a concerted effort to sit in the first row and ask questions in class. Just like many of the students did.
Turned in my final exam and he asked if I wanted a job in his lab.
Why me? Why would he single me out of the pack?
Well, it sure wasn’t based on my grades or my abilities, because he didn’t offer jobs to the other students who were objectively smarter than me. So my guess is that he saw a black woman in a predominately white male setting and decided “What the hell. Why not?”
To me, that’s what AA enables. It allows a person to say “Well, they are sufficiently qualified and I do think diversity is important. So why the hell not?”
Without something like AA, “qualified” becomes whatever the privileged class says it is. Like, the privileged all score in the 90th percentile on the SAT, so that becomes the cut-off for keeping out the riff-raff–even though the 90th percentile doesn’t actually do a good job of discriminating good students from bad students. To me, policies like AA allow someone to say, “Now hang on just a minute. 90th percentile, for real? What about all the students that measure up in other ways? Can’t they catch a break?”
Ideally, the gate-keepers wouldn’t use rubrics that are biased towards those who are privileged. Until we can stop this, AA policies seem like a reasonable compromise.
That’s probably a fair observation. Comments like this one:
rather rankled me a while back in this thread and probably contributed to me being less polite than I usually am. I’m trying to do better.
I don’t mean to speak for others, but it seems like:
iiandyiii supports some form of affirmative action. I oppose this.
Miller shared information about a study a while back that show black-sounding names don’t get interview call-backs as often, and suggested that employers hide the applicants name. In a Fortune 500 company with a well-staffed HR department that’s probably feasible and perhaps a good recommendation for them (and not just for black-sounding names, but for all the poor underprivileged Neils out there too - which had an identical call-back percentage to Jamal). For small businesses down to the extreme case of a sole proprietorship, that’s probably not feasible. I’d oppose a law mandating such actions, but certainly wouldn’t be upset if companies voluntarily chose to implement it.
Kimstu has written long and thoughtful posts, and I’m not trying to be sneering or mean here, but if asked to summarize what actions she’s recommending, all I can find is some variations on “be more aware”. I like it. I think we should all do it. I just don’t really know how to translate that into physical actions. Here I am, trying to be more aware by reading a SDMB thread about ‘privilege’ (which is not my normal choice of entertainment)
Manda JO suggested not cutting resumes just because they’re unprofessional, which might be valuable, but what should one cut resumes for then? What are valid reasons to turn down someone for a job that don’t perpetuate privilege? (I actually asked this in the post following yours).
So … what am I belittling or ignoring?