Story Of Racism
The Untold Story of Racism My friend Rhonda is an African American female living in New York, who has a masters degree in accounting, in addition to a law degree. One day, as she was surfing through the internet looking for jobs, she came across a law firm that had a single job position open for a lawyer specializing in financial cases. This job intended to promote an existing employee. Rhonda decided to apply for that job. The following day she was called for an interview. On the interview day, she notices, one of candidate present along side of her was a White male with a bachelors degree in accounting. The white male asserts to have had experiences on advising the firm on such cases for about four years. The firm considering his level of experience promotes the white male candidate, thus altering the position to allow a junior attorney to work under him. This left Rhonda disheartened. When Rhonda finally
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decided to go home after her long working day, she came across a notice board at the center of the law hall which consisted of 12 lawyers names and their pictures posted, out of which she noticed six of them were White males, four of them were white females, and the remaining two were from the minority groups. The first glimpse of the notice board put Rhonda in a state of shock, assuring that she was not offered this job based off her race, and not due to lack of qualifications for the job. If I had to narrate my friends story in short, I would say she faced an individual discrimination, which meant that being a black women worked in her disfavor, in comparison to a man who came from a white dominant society.
Not hiring a person on grounds of his or her race and ethnicity is an example of individual discrimination (Fitzgerlad 11). In addition, considering the number of white dominant population in that law firms, puts me to thought that the company was promoting some kind of institutional racism (Fitzgerlad 11). It is very easy easy to notice someone as being flawed but it's a lot more difficult to view the system as being flawed. And it can be discomforting to believe that police, judges, prosecutors, government companies are treating people differently on some attributes that people have no control over. Thus, this story gave me the opportunity to express my views on how individual and institutional racism both contributes to bring about an overt and covert behavior in individuals and
groups. On a recent gallop poll, public opinions indicates that Americans today are much less likely to view discrimination as a major problem as were their counterparts in the 1970's. In fact, more than three quarters of the general public believe that blacks are treated the same as the whites in the society (Pager, Western 1). The election of president Barack Obama is one such example which led to immediate claims that United States is a post racial society; meaning that the society has moved beyond race. Media claims that Obama could not have won the presidency without a significant number of white votes. But the fact that majority of votes for the presidency came from the racial minority groups and only 43% of votes came from the White dominant group was a little shocking. (Fitzgerlad 4,5). The president Barack Obama's elections gives us the desire to believe that we are a post racial society, but what has been very apparent in the last eight years is that these issues of racism and discrimination are very much still with us, and they divide how we see the world. Pager and Western are two sociologists from Princeton University who adapted an experimental audit approach to identify patterns of discrimination in the low-wage labor market of New York city. They used matched teams of individuals to apply for entry level jobs, and this helped them to identify how the extent of race or ethnicity in the absence of other disqualifying factors reduces the employment opportunities among equally qualified applicants (Pager, Western 1). Their first set of experimental results come from a team consisting of a White, Hispanic, and a Black tester who applied for the same set of employers possessing identical qualifications. For each set of visits, they recorded whether testers were offered the job on the spot, or, at some later point which they refereed to as positive response. At the end, they calculated that call backs or job offers were significantly higher in whites with 23% positive response, followed by 19% positive response in Latinos and lastly 13% positive response in blacks. The proportion of positive responses depended strongly on the race of the job applicant. Thus, this demonstrated a strong racial hierarchy, with the Whites on the dominant end and Blacks trailing far behind. These results suggested that blacks are only slightly more than half as likely to receive consideration by employers relative to equally qualified white applicants. Latinos also face a penalty for minority status, but they are clearly preferred relative to their Black counterparts. Apart from these numerical outcomes, the experiences reported by testers during their course of their interviews with employers were also revealing of the racial dynamics at work. In some cases, our minority testers received clear feedback that they were not welcome or appropriate for a particular work environment (Pager, Western 2,3). This experiment clearly showed that discrimination continues to represent a major barrier to economic self sufficiency for those at low end of labor market hierarchy. Blacks, and to lesser extent Latinos, are routinely passed over in favor of Whites for the most basic kind of low wage work. Indeed, discrimination has not been eliminated in the post-civil rights period but continues to remain as vital component of a complex pattern in racial inequality.
The paper continues.....
decided to go home after her long working day, she came across a notice board at the center of the law hall which consisted of 12 lawyers names and their pictures posted, out of which she noticed six of them were White males, four of them were white females, and the remaining two were from the minority groups. The first glimpse of the notice board put Rhonda in a state of shock, assuring that she was not offered this job based off her race, and not due to lack of qualifications for the job. If I had to narrate my friends story in short, I would say she faced an individual discrimination, which meant that being a black women worked in her disfavor, in comparison to a man who came from a white dominant society.
Not hiring a person on grounds of his or her race and ethnicity is an example of individual discrimination (Fitzgerlad 11). In addition, considering the number of white dominant population in that law firms, puts me to thought that the company was promoting some kind of institutional racism (Fitzgerlad 11). It is very easy easy to notice someone as being flawed but it's a lot more difficult to view the system as being flawed. And it can be discomforting to believe that police, judges, prosecutors, government companies are treating people differently on some attributes that people have no control over. Thus, this story gave me the opportunity to express my views on how individual and institutional racism both contributes to bring about an overt and covert behavior in individuals and
groups. On a recent gallop poll, public opinions indicates that Americans today are much less likely to view discrimination as a major problem as were their counterparts in the 1970's. In fact, more than three quarters of the general public believe that blacks are treated the same as the whites in the society (Pager, Western 1). The election of president Barack Obama is one such example which led to immediate claims that United States is a post racial society; meaning that the society has moved beyond race. Media claims that Obama could not have won the presidency without a significant number of white votes. But the fact that majority of votes for the presidency came from the racial minority groups and only 43% of votes came from the White dominant group was a little shocking. (Fitzgerlad 4,5). The president Barack Obama's elections gives us the desire to believe that we are a post racial society, but what has been very apparent in the last eight years is that these issues of racism and discrimination are very much still with us, and they divide how we see the world. Pager and Western are two sociologists from Princeton University who adapted an experimental audit approach to identify patterns of discrimination in the low-wage labor market of New York city. They used matched teams of individuals to apply for entry level jobs, and this helped them to identify how the extent of race or ethnicity in the absence of other disqualifying factors reduces the employment opportunities among equally qualified applicants (Pager, Western 1). Their first set of experimental results come from a team consisting of a White, Hispanic, and a Black tester who applied for the same set of employers possessing identical qualifications. For each set of visits, they recorded whether testers were offered the job on the spot, or, at some later point which they refereed to as positive response. At the end, they calculated that call backs or job offers were significantly higher in whites with 23% positive response, followed by 19% positive response in Latinos and lastly 13% positive response in blacks. The proportion of positive responses depended strongly on the race of the job applicant. Thus, this demonstrated a strong racial hierarchy, with the Whites on the dominant end and Blacks trailing far behind. These results suggested that blacks are only slightly more than half as likely to receive consideration by employers relative to equally qualified white applicants. Latinos also face a penalty for minority status, but they are clearly preferred relative to their Black counterparts. Apart from these numerical outcomes, the experiences reported by testers during their course of their interviews with employers were also revealing of the racial dynamics at work. In some cases, our minority testers received clear feedback that they were not welcome or appropriate for a particular work environment (Pager, Western 2,3). This experiment clearly showed that discrimination continues to represent a major barrier to economic self sufficiency for those at low end of labor market hierarchy. Blacks, and to lesser extent Latinos, are routinely passed over in favor of Whites for the most basic kind of low wage work. Indeed, discrimination has not been eliminated in the post-civil rights period but continues to remain as vital component of a complex pattern in racial inequality.
The paper continues.....