So everyone on my social media is all about #BlackLivesMatter and being #woke and shit. But I kind of feel like it’s all mostly bullshit. Like it’s not like I don’t believe they legitimately aren’t into equality and diversity and whatnot. But realistically, what can they do to promote it.
I grew up in a 90%+ white suburb. I then attended 90%+ white colleges (where I was in a 90% white fraternity) and then went to work at 90% white corporations.
I guess what I’m asking is at what point would I be in a position to actually make an impact on “equality”? Who would be in a position to make those decisions?
Vote for Democrats in the general election and for the left leaning Democrats in the primaries. In particular vote for those Democrats who will do as much as possible to reduce the power of or even eliminate police unions, who seem to be the source of a lot of the current problems with regards to police brutality.
More generally the ideas from the left would work if they were actually implemented. The only reason they haven’t been is because there are too many Republicans in congress. Imagine a congress with a comfortable D majority in the house and 70 D senators. That congress could enact legislation that would truly change things. They could override any presidential veto and impeach and remove any SCOTUS justice who struck down their laws on partisan grounds.
It depends on what you mean by “equality”, of course.
Personally, what I think equality means is not just eradication of racist behaviors, but increased shares of social, political and economic influence for black people (and non-white people in general, but mostly black people).
So we need more black educators, black politicians, black homeowners and business owners, black editors, black generals, black diplomats and black scientists. It’s not enough just to get everybody to stop saying racist things on social media (as though we could): it’s about making progress in genuinely sharing power and prosperity.
And there are proven ways to encourage that progress. For instance, campaigning for black political candidates whose views align with yours. Promoting hiring recruitment policies that reach out to potential black employment candidate pools. Supporting black-owned businesses and black content creators. Advocating for anti-racism reforms in, say, certain local police and fire departments where racist attitudes are still rife. Supporting a summer STEM program for inner-city students.
The idea that we can’t “really do” anything to change our society is a powerful force of inertia, but we don’t have to just helplessly accept it.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but when I read that, I hear “Support Affirmative Action. If you don’t, then you continue the problem.”
I mean, if a black guy comes to my office to interview for a job, he gets the same consideration as everyone else. Exactly the same. But I’m not going to give him a bump because he is black. That foments hatred from the white guy that didn’t get hired, but otherwise would have, because of the color of his skin, and for what?
So he can sacrifice a job opportunity on the altar of affirmative action? How does that help his family? He doesn’t see the 400 years of wealth accumulated on the backs of blacks reflected in his bank account.
I just think such a policy is needlessly divisive. Sure vote and hire all of those people you mentioned, but only do so if you believe they are the right person, and give them an equal hearing. Affirmative action has always been about special privileges and I object to it.
As I’ve said in other threads, people are here and right now ready to listen. But if you tell them that their kid is going to get bumped for a minority kid because of past wrongs that neither the parent or the kid ever did, then that’s a non starter. Come up with something with universal appeal; it’s here for the taking.
How do you campaign for black political candidates? How do you support black-owned businesses, or a summer STEM program for inner-city students? Um, well, have you tried googling it?
I mean, surely the concept of campaigning for a candidate or patronizing a business or supporting an academic enrichment program isn’t totally foreign to you. Why should those things become unattainably remote and mysterious when they involve black people?
Well, like I said, it depends on what you mean by “equality”. It also depends on what you mean by “Affirmative Action”.
Leaving aside the issue of whether it’s likely or even possible for white people in a historically racist society to give “exactly the same” consideration to candidates of different races, it’s worth noting that the path to your office door may be, on average, longer and harder for a black guy than for a white guy. Notice that I spoke not of giving any individual black job candidate “a bump”, but rather of being more proactive in recruitment policies to reach out to potential black candidate pools.
If you increase the chances that black job candidates can reach your office in the first place, you’ll naturally find your pool of potential employees getting less disproportionately white—and consequently your overall hiring record getting less disproportionately white—without giving any “bumps” to individual candidates in ways you consider unfair.
Nowhere did I suggest that you should hire or vote for or otherwise support anybody you don’t consider “the right person”. I’m just pointing out that if you make a little more effort to look beyond the highly segregated communities and workplaces that most white people, intentionally or otherwise, still inhabit, you will eventually find that an increased proportion of the potential “right persons” happen to be black.
And yes, that means that the potential “right persons” who happen to be white won’t have such an overwhelmingly disproportionate advantage as they used to. And a lot of white people automatically regard that loss of advantage as intrinsically unfair. But, you know, it actually isn’t.
Are they willing to listen to the fact that minority kids are still “getting bumped” for their kid because of longstanding structural advantages built into the system that they benefit from? Advantages that neither the parent or the kid ever actually earned, but just inherited with our society’s traditional baked-in preference for white people? Do the minority parents and kids get to declare that situation a “non starter”?
For someone who claims to object to “special privileges”, you sure seem pretty comfortable with leaving undisturbed the special privileges bestowed on the favored majority group by our societal legacy of racism and preferential treatment for white people.
Sadly, there is no way that any proposal to diminish the unearned special privileges automatically accorded to white people in a historically racist society is ever going to have “universal appeal”. As the saying goes, to the privileged, loss of privilege feels like oppression.
msmith537, have you looked at what the schools you’ve graduated from are doing to help minority students? As an alumnus, you might be able to target your donations to those programs, including scholarship programs that your school might offer to underprivileged students. That’s just one way to help even the scales.
At a fundamental level, I think we become a less stratified society through positive relationships with other people. I’ve always had positive relationships with white folk because I’ve always been around white folks. My parents made me attend integrated schools. I chose a career path that was predominately white. I probably hold some implicit bias against white folk, but I don’t think I’m nearly as biased as I would be if I had stayed in a predominately black bubble my whole life.
The other day I was talking to my dad about current events, and I opined that even though I know racism is still a problem in our society, there’s no way in hell I’d volunteer to go back to the 1950s and 1960s. My father told me that being a black person in the 1950s and 1960s was easier in some ways, because segregation had made it so that middle-class folks lived in close proximity to the working class. He grew up working class poor, but he knew doctors and lawyers through the community center, church, and school. He never lacked for positive role models. These people showed him that it was possible for him to achieve and made him feel like he’d have a support network to rely on if he ever needed it.
Now, I think he may be overly romanticizing that period because he was a child back then and thus did not experience a lot of the shittiness that grown folks did. However, I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed by others. When people live and play together, they can’t help but to feel care about each other and help each other out. They are also less likely to see be in a “us” versus “them” situation.
Society today is not only racially stratified, but class stratified. It is perfectly rational to want to live in the “best” neighborhoods with the “best” schools, but there’s a cost to this privilege. I think we will always suffer from the ills of inequality as long as people believe that the downsides of having the" best" are outweighed by the benefits. It seems that we have to have widespread riots and protests every generation to be reminded of this, but the lesson never seems to stick for very long.
I guess I’m not going to campaign for a candidate or go out of my way to patronize a business just because the person is black. I would pick a candidate whose policies promote equality though.
This is really what I was referring to. I see a lot of my “woke” friends on Facebook who, like me, grew up in an environment where there wasn’t a lot of diversity. Other than interviewing individual candidates, I generally haven’t had much input on where they come from or how they are recruited.
Goodness, nobody AFAIK is suggesting that you support a candidate or a business completely at random just because the person in question is black. That’s how people end up voting for Ben Carson. :eek:
But what is wrong with casting your net a little wider than usual, when it comes to your political activism or commercial consumption, and keeping an eye out for people whose policies or products appeal to you who happen to be black?
:dubious: Okay. Dude, if what you’re really asking is “What can I do to promote equality without ‘going out of my way’ to change any of my habitual behaviors in my disproportionately white social environment whose largely segregated nature is fundamentally rooted in severe inequality?”, the answer is likely to be “not very much”.
I mean, I’m not talking staging sit-down strikes for diversity hiring (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But if you really want to help make things a little more equal than they are in our society, you’re going to have to make some kind of effort in some direction.
Unsympathetic query: Is this about you actually wanting to make some such effort, or just about you being reassured that your more “woke” white friends liking slogans on Facebook aren’t really accomplishing anything more than you are in this regard?
Well, for example, there is a writer, Brit Bennett, who in consequence of the new release The Vanishing Half is being compared to Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. Which is great, as a writer I would not at all mind being compared to Morrison. But I think it’s weird that this black writer is only being compred to other black writers.* Nella Larson and Langston Hughes were also mentioned. Why is that? Would this be what the writer wanted? I mean sure, better compared to Toni Morrison than to James Patterson.
*Note: I have only read one article that did this.
Join your local NAACP chapter, and read anything they send you. Sponsor scholarships. Evaluate your business for adverse impact. Go to a black church. Buy novels and memoirs by black authors. Go to community events with an equity focus and listen.
The problem is, you might be biased when hiring even while thinking you are totally not biased.
This brings to mind how people used to be hired for an orchestra.
In the old days people would show up for an audition to become a member of the orchestra and sit on a stage and play for the judges/hiring people. All that mattered was the person’s ability to play their instrument well, so one would think. As it happened orchestras were very male and white dominated.
Then they moved to a system where people did their audition for the job behind a curtain. All of the judges could hear the music but not see the person. They truly had to decide on ability only…there was nothing else they could use to decide.
All of a sudden women and minorities became much more likely to be found in the orchestra pits.
Mind you, the people hiring before being blind to the person playing I am SURE would say they were not racist and that race played no role in their decision making.
But the results tell a different story. Were they lying or just unaware of their own bias?
I think my question is less about what I personally can do and more about what can be done more generally to promote racial equality. For all the good will and intentions that most of the people I know seem to have, I kind of feel like it doesn’t matter. We all go back to our mostly white communities and institutions.
Does he really get the same consideration? Or when it’s a black candidate, is it all of a sudden every i has to be dotted and t crossed? There is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. Everyone ahs growth areas. So often the interview shows their bias by what they let slide and what they don’t.
I’ll give you an example. My wife and I own a rental property that we typically rent out to young couples or single professionals. They usually stay for a couple of years and then move out to the suburbs. There’s always a steady pool of people like that moving into the area, so we never have trouble renting it out. We don’t really even care if they ask to break the lease since we can always find someone new in a month.
One time we are trying to decide between two candidates:
A young black woman with a professional job in the city
A young white man with a wealth CEO father and some silly job that one might expect from someone with a trust fund.
One could go back and forth on which candidate would be better. A more conservative landlord might favor the white man from a good family. My logic is that I would rather have the young professional who will pay the rent on time, black or not, instead of some trust fund kid who might throw parties every night and rely on his dad’s wealth to bail him out if any issues came up. So we ended up renting to the black woman.
Anyone, the point is that a lot of people say “they give the black candidate the same consideration” when what they really mean “we give the black candidate highly scrutinized consideration so long as there isn’t a white candidate”.
But then it becomes a self-fulfilling belief. If it comes down to a choice between mostly equally qualified black and white candidates, if I choose the black candidate, then I get a pat on the back and credit for being diverse, but if I pick the white candidate then I have let my implicit biases get in the way.
So without even knowing me, knowing the candidates, or knowing their qualifications or my reasoning, it is always pick the black candidate good, pick the white candidate bad or else I will be subject to the charge of racism. That cannot be the solution.
If what you’re demanding is some kind of guarantee that there will never be any suspicion of racism when you “pick the white candidate” (unless you do so in a way that’s obviously racially discriminatory), well, sorry, but I don’t think you’re going to get that guarantee, and I don’t think you’re automatically entitled to it.
This is the reality of living in a historically and persistently racist society:
A lot of people still hold racist beliefs.
A lot of people who don’t hold racist beliefs are still thoughtlessly accepting and engaging in racist behaviors.
And a lot of people who don’t hold racist beliefs and are actively trying to avoid and condemn thoughtlessly racist behaviors are nonetheless sometimes going to be suspected of racist attitudes and actions, because there are so many racist attitudes and actions still out there.
Of course, white people being sometimes unjustly suspected of possible racism is not a good thing, but it’s not very high on the list of Things That Are Bad About Historically And Persistently Racist Societies.
On average, white people in the US have had, and are still enjoying, a long free ride since about 1980 or thereabouts on the cultural lie of a “post-racist” society. Black people have still had to deal with plenty of racism (though not as openly or as severely manifested as in the days of Jim Crow, natch). But self-identified “non-racist” white people have been able to ignore racism and pretend it had nothing to do with them, all the while continuing to benefit in innumerable ways from its continued existence.
If those days of the free ride are now coming to an end, that will ultimately be a good thing for everybody in the long run.
Basically, for each fatality, there are 30 minor incidents, 300 near misses and 300,000 unsafe acts or acts of concern.
For an effective safety culture, I have found organizations that promote a culture of discussing, reporting and analyzing the unsafe acts have the best safety record.
Don’t concentrate on the top of the pyramid, look to the bottom. It’s a knee jerk reaction to fix the fatalities but that is a symptom.
Drawing the parallel to equality - look at the acts of concern. Actively discuss them with your family, friends and teams. Basically, it boils down to:
As far as employment goes, a lot of larger companies use the Four Fifths Rule to make sure their hiring practices aren’t having an adverse impact on minority candidates. Under the Four Fifths Rule, a selection rate for group which is less than 80% of the rate for the group with the highest rate will usually be regarded as evidence of adverse impact. It’s a little confusing and I’m terrible at explaining it but here’s an example.
Globicide has 13 open positions for technicians.
100 males apply and 10 of them are hired. Hire rate = 10%
50 females apply and 3 of them are hired. Hire rate = 6%
Because women were only hired at 60% the rate that men were, it’s considered evidence of adverse impact though it’s certainly not a definitive test. It’s just evidence that Globicide needs to make sure their hiring practices are not discriminatory.
You talking today or this week, or over the course of a lifetime?
It’s your lifetime behavior that makes the real diff. And it’s all about communication. Bringing a few more people over to your perspective, which in this context means a #BlackLivesMatter relevant perspective (and etc)
I reject the premise. I mean, you are free to call me a racist if you like for hiring the white candidate, again with no knowledge of me or the underlying circumstances, but people reject such a determination from someone without knowledge. I certainly do.
What it boils down to is that the black candidate MUST be hired at the expense of the white candidate. It matters not if the black candidate grew up in an upper middle class household and the white candidate pounded the horse shit off of his boots after escaping his trailer in Boone County, WV. It is the outward appearance.
And frankly I choose not to perpetuate racism. I’m as saddened as anyone by slavery and Jim Crow, but I’m not going to continue to view people based upon the color of their skin to somehow make up for shit that happened before either them or I was born. Nope. Not happening. You guys have to come up with a different idea.
How do you campaign for black political candidates? How do you support black-owned businesses, or a summer STEM program for inner-city students? Um, well, have you tried googling it?