Re: Andre Carson: Tea party wants blacks 'hanging on a tree' Read more: http://www.p
I know this is kind of counter-intuitive, but yeah, that's true. Overall the market gives whites a massive preference. If a white job applicant and a black job applicant apply for exactly the same job with exactly
the same resume, the white applicant is a shocking 2.4 times more likely to get called up for an interview. That is a massive, overwhelming, disadvantage blacks face, and advantage whites get, just because of the color of their skin.
Wrong conclusion. This is class discrimination against a small cross-section of the black community, not race discrimination. Look at all of the names that the researchers assigned to blacks. Let's call them ghetto names. Look at all of the names the researchers assigned to whites. Let's call them middle class names.
What do we discover when we look at the leadership of black professional societies? What kind of names do these black leaders have? Do they have ghetto names or do they have middle class names.
Here are the board names of the
National Association of Black Journalists:
Gregory Lee, Errin Haines, Bob Butler, Lisa Cox, Keith Reed, Cindy George, Dedrick Russell, A. J. Ross, Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig, Dawn Roberts.
Here are the names of the leadership of the
National Association of Black Accountants:
Calvin Harris, Jr, Gregory Johnson, Shariah Dixon-Turner, Wayne Lee, Veda Stanley, Walter J. Smith, Ronald P. Walker, Celia Thompkins, Tina O. McIntyre, W. Delores Lewis, Sheila Taylor-Clark, James Brown, Arica Harris, Monica Y. Brame, Charles V. Daniel, Carriea Flowers, Robert Dunlap, Steven L. Harris, Kenneth Cooke, Nora Ramzy, Uso Sayers, Manuel Torres.
Clearly, even blacks are discriminating against blacks.
What's really going on is not discrimination based on race, but a sorting based on class. The human resources departments operate on this heuristic because they look about them and likely don't see too many Lakishas and Jamals amongst their black executives and from past experience they've learned when they analyze the resumes of the Lakishas and Jamals, that these applicants were clearly not qualified.
Even the researchers
make note of this alternative explanation, but to know this you'd actually have had to read the study rather than relying on the biased media coverage of the study:
One simple alternative model is lexicographic search by employers. Employers receive so many resumes that they may use quick heuristics in reading these resumes. One such heuristic could be to simply read no further when they see an African American name. Thus they may never see the skills of African American candidates and this could explain why these skills are not rewarded.
