From DiversityInc.com…
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Why Whites Don’t Understand the ‘Struggle’
By Luke Visconti
Question:
Why do you think white people in general still do not get the “struggle” that many African Americans still face today, especially in the corporate world?
Answer:
This is a subject near to my heart because realizing the gap between my perceptions and the reality of what African Americans go through on a daily basis is what drove me to devote my life’s work to this subject.
I concur with you. In my observation from personal experience, almost 100 percent of white people have almost no concept of the “struggle” that African Americans face today. They may think they do, but it’s not so.
I’m not ignoring bigots, but with rare exception, this lack of awareness is caused by benign ignorance. Most people view themselves as fair people; therefore, from the majority standpoint, society is fair, and they are fair, so “what’s the problem?”
This ignorance is expressed as exacerbation by white people when confronted with evidence that disrupts this rosy worldview.
For example, I watched Carson Daly and Wanda Sykes co-host a New Year’s special in 2005. After showing a Johnny Carson clip, Daly was musing over how much simpler things were back in 1963. Sykes commented on how they weren’t simpler for blacks and mentioned that she certainly wouldn’t have been a co-host in 1963. Daly wrinkled up his nose and said, “Oh, come on, it wasn’t so bad—we had Sammy Davis Jr.”
Sykes’s desire to “discuss” this with Daly was written on her face, but with 15 seconds left until midnight, she swallowed it and went on.
There’s nothing in Daly’s background or work that would tell me he’s a bigot. I’d say he typifies the average white guy: blissfully ignorant of racial issues—and decisively so!
Unfortunately, blissful ignorance is not without a cost. The majority culture blames the victim in just about every case when it comes to outcome (although the alternative is more accurate, it is understandably less comfortable for the majority and therefore avoided like the plague). However, blaming the victim costs money and decreases performance.
I recently spoke at a large technology-based firm. One of their executives asked me about a recent study, which showed that fewer black and Latino students are graduating with engineering and math degrees. I said that Department of Education statistics show graduation rates of black and Latino students are outpacing their respective growth in representation in our country.
This company was looking at an outcome and blaming the students. If they took a larger view, they would see the problem: Talented students of color are there, but they’re choosing other careers. The simple explanation is that there is far more demand for students of color from progressive companies, like those in The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity, than there is supply. Without a proper invitation, the (highly desired) students go into careers where they perceive they are wanted.
From a white perspective, this makes no sense. They’re good people; they run a “fair” company and they’ve never needed to issue an invitation to anyone. Why should they need to now?
So, bringing this back to your question, we can see that being ignorant of the “struggle” is costing this company in recruitment—and retention—because they’re not managing reality (and for those readers who are going to tell me it’s a government problem, please save your keystrokes: The government has pretty much proved itself to be incapable of managing the situation at hand).
My hunch is that this company will be OK, because unlike most companies, they understand the problem, want to control their future and are beginning to implement diversity management.
The consequence of not managing diversity (in this case) is that this company will continue to recruit from an ever decreasing pool of people as our country moves toward less than 50 percent white. In addition, what generational studies tell me is that the very management traits that define superior diversity management will also be required to recruit and retain the audience that most companies think they have a lock on: white men. To put an ironic twist on Dr. Johnnetta Cole’s favorite Zora Neale Hurston saying, older white men need to understand that many younger whites may feel that “All that are my skin folk ain’t my kin folk.”
By the way, for my white readers: There’s no better expression of ignorance than a white person describing themselves as “colorblind.”
Carson Daly = Manna White.
ReplyDeleteI’m surprised Wanda didn’t kick his ass live. I’d pay to see that.
that Carson Daly still has a show enough to create suspicion of white skin privilege.
ReplyDeleteif you haven't yet, you should read the excellent book "White Men on Race". It's a study of 100 upper-middle class/ upper-class white men and their views on a variety of racialized issues, including "colorblindness", interracial dating, affirmative action, and more. The authors do a great job of revealing the larger white supremacist structure behind the respondents' "ignorance".
ReplyDeleteIn the sociology of the left, there cannot be a wound the black community inflicts on itself that is not ultimately the responsibility of malicious whites. To think otherwise would be to "blame the victim." Only mean-spirited conservatives would even think of doing that.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, as a nation we have become so trapped in the melodrama of black victimization and white "oppression" that we are in danger of losing all sense of reality. If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn’t there a black exodus? Why do all those black Haitians want to come here? To be oppressed? In the grips of a politically inspired group psychosis, we find it natural to collude with demagogic race hustlers in supporting a fantasy in which African Americans are no longer responsible for anything negative they do, even to themselves.
If blacks constitute just under half the prison population, for example, that cannot be allowed to suggest that the black community might have a problem when it comes to raising its children as law-abiding members of society. Oh no. Such a statistic can only be explained by the racism of a criminal-justice system that is incarcerating too many blacks. Nonsense like this is proposed daily by the entire spectrum of the so-called civil-rights leadership from the racist bloviator Al Sharpton to the urbane Urban League president Hugh Price. In the intimidating atmosphere that this consensus creates, to suggest the obvious—that too many blacks are in prison because blacks commit too many crimes—is to be identified as an apologist for racism and perhaps a closet racist oneself.
That 90% of crack cocaine dealers are black cannot be seen, of course, as a moral stain on those crack dealers or as a massive social problem for the community that produces them. It can only be the result of a white legal system that stigmatizes crack as a more dangerous and more culpable drug than the powder cocaine it uses itself. Forget that the heavier penalties were originally demanded by black leaders who claimed that crack was associated with street violence in the black community and the white criminal-justice system did not care enough about its destructive consequences to make the penalties harsh. That was then, this is now. And now, lessening the sentences that were previously raised has become a crusade for "social justice" that overshadows the need to combat the crime wave itself. Because racial oppression is the main enemy, the villainy of the crack trade is transformed into yet another symbol of white unfairness.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006 report, blacks commit 54% of the homicides in America even though they constitute only 12% of the population. An individual black male is eight times more likely to commit murder than an individual white male. Thus, in the most equitable system imaginable, a black male would be more likely than a white male to be executed for murder. In fact, however, convicted white murderers are more likely to be executed for their crimes than convicted black murderers. In 2005-2006, whites accounted for 62% of the convicted murderers executed in Texas. According to statistics provided by the Justice Department, the proportion of whites presently on death row compared to the total white population is almost four times that of the comparable proportion of blacks on death row in terms of the total black population. Whatever these statistics prove, they do not prove that the justice in America is systemically biased against blacks.
It so happens that black felons commit 43% of aggravated assaults, 66% of (armed) robberies, 27% of rapes and 85% of inter-racial crimes of violence, mainly against whites (this last figure from a Justice Department report for 1993). Since juries generally don’t demand the death penalty for crimes of passion, where the victim is known to the killer, and since blacks are far more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than whites commit against blacks, the disparity that offends the Amnesty Report has a basis in facts that may not imply a racial bias on the part of prosecutors and juries. The Report does not even acknowledge this as a problem.
The defense of criminals as a civil-rights cause is only an extreme manifestation of what has apparently become the very essence of the civil-rights movement. Do black children fail to achieve in school? White oppression explains their failure. (Nothing else could without blaming the victims.) Poor black academic performance cannot be seen as a failure of black families to educate their children, or of the black community to support educational values, which are often referred to derisively as "thinking white." Black failure can only be the result of some lingering residue of the white perfidy involved in slavery and segregation. Call it "institutional racism."
reality, the failure of African American children to make the educational grade cannot be explained by any of the above factors. Statistics anyalzed by the New York Times (July 4, 1999) dispel the poverty argument by establishing that impoverished white children whose parents earn less than $10,000 a year score higher on standardized SAT tests than black children whose parents earn more than $70,000. None of the above arguments, moreover, can explain why Vietnamese children who are poor and discriminated against, whose schools are under-funded, and who are culturally at a greater disadvantage than blacks, and have even fewer "role models" to inspire them, still manage to be educationally competitive.
While the oppression theme dominates public discourse, no attention can be paid to the real problems that hold African-American children back. There is a symbiosis, in fact, between the political mumbo jumbo of the Kwiesi Mfumes and Jesse Jacksons (abetted mightily by patronizing white liberals) and the seemingly intractable social problems of the black community. The myth of racial oppression, invoked to explain every social deficit of blacks, is an exercise in psychological denial. Crying racism deflects attention from the actual causes of the problems that afflict African-American communities. Its net result is to deprive people and communities who could help themselves of the power to change their fate.
Nearly 70% of black children are born out of wedlock. A child raised in a single-parent, female-headed household is six times more likely to be poor than a child of any color born into a two-parent household. Seventy percent of youth violence is committed by males from female-headed households, regardless of race. If the NAACP and other black leaders want to end the terrible scourge of gun violence committed by young inner-city blacks, they should launch a campaign to promote marriage and family formation in the African-American community; they should issue a moral plea to the community to stigmatize fathers who abandon their children and parents who have more children than they can afford. Instead of waging war against law-enforcement agencies and supporting destructive racial demagogues like Al Sharpton, they should support the champions of public safety, whom they now attack. They should campaign for a tripling of police forces in inner-city areas to protect the vast majority of inhabitants who are law-abiding and who are the true victims of the predators among them. But to take these remedial steps would require rejecting the bogus charge of white oppression. It would mean abandoning the ludicrous claim that white America and firearms manufacturers are the problems afflicting African Americans. It would mean taking responsibility for their own communities instead.
Why does the NAACP and the civil-rights establishment perpetuate this myth of white oppression? Because the same individuals reap great moral, psychological, and material rewards for doing so. Blaming others for the failures and offenses that are your own responsibility is a predictable human behavior. When it is reinforced, as it is in this case, by a patronizing white liberal establishment, its payoffs can be irresistible. There are material rewards as well. Racial ambulance-chasing has allowed Jesse Jackson to live the life of a multi-millionaire and catapulted Kwiesi Mfume and others like him into the social and political stratosphere. Unfortunately, they have made their successes off the backs of the truly afflicted and disadvantaged African Americans their demagoguery leaves behind.
To take one example: The Shape of the River by William Bowen and Derek Bok, studied the effect of affirmative action policies at 28 elite colleges. According to Bowen–Bok, 86% of the African-American beneficiaries of racial preferences at those colleges came from households that were already middle-class or affluent, while 64% had at least one parent who had been college (a figure six times greater than the proportion for all college-age black youths). In other words, without the race card so adeptly played by organizations like the NAACP, the already privileged families of the black middle-class would have had to forego the government-provided additional privileges that the continuing specter of white oppression justifies. Among these are free tuition, rigged entrance requirements, artificially inflated salaries, set-aside front companies, and a variety of extortions too numerous to mention. These range from the outrageous sums provided to collegiate black student associations to the ransoms paid by Texaco and other companies to forestall potentially damaging racial boycotts and often groundless discrimination suits. The continued suffering of disadvantaged black communities and the continued under-par performance of black school children is a price the well-heeled civil-rights establishment is apparently still willing to pay to keep their hope alive of continuing guilt tributes from their all too accommodating "White Oppressors".