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| Re: A honest cultural question... (26606) | |||
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Re: A honest cultural question... |
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Posted by JPC on Fri Apr 22 16:16:37 2005, in response to Re: A honest cultural question..., posted by Train Dude on Thu Apr 21 17:39:38 2005. I'd like to see where that figure comes from. I have a hard time believing that, say, the average white person makes $100,000 a year and the average black person makes $10,000 a year. If the statement were "the average black person makes 70% of what the average white person makes" that'd square with reason, but to argue a factor-of-ten discrepancy strains credulity.But you must also look at other factors. In the academic community, for example, blacks and other minorities are substantially underrepresented, both as students (undergraduate and graduate) and as faculty members (junior/adjunct and tenured). The trouble is, if you've ever done any work on an admissions or a hiring committee: there simply aren't that many minority applicants. Even if you accepted every single minority applicant, regardless of qualification (and some of these would have qualifications substantially below the current minimum acceptable standards), and then accepted only the best of the best of the white and Asian students, you'd still have a hard time getting ratios anywhere near the population average (currently blacks and Hispanics comprise something like 20-25% of the nation's population). And in large cities, where minorities actually outnumber whites and Asians, the situation is simply hopeless! So is the fact that there is a dearth of black professors the fault of university hiring committees? Of course not! The fault lies much deeper, primarily in our elementary education system and in the lack of parental support during early eduction, in my opinion. And even if all those things changed 100% for the better tomorrow, the employment situation would only gradually improve, because those improvements affect people who will not enter the workforce for a decade or more, and people currently in the workforce, who were educated under the old system and live with its results, will be in the workforce for several more decades. So unless we're going to kill off everyone over 12, the improvements are going to take time to work their way through the system. Simply put, the reason for the discrepancy is not that employers pay particular employees less because of the color of their skin: that's illegal. Can't do it. The reason for the discrepancy is that minorities, unfortunately, often have qualifications (education and work experience, for the most part, as well as criminal record or lack thereof) that only make them suitable for lower-paying jobs, whereas whites and Asians are more likely to possess advanced degrees and have prior experience suiting them to high-paying fields. The same is true, unfortunately, for men and women - men are more likely to possess advanced degrees and have job skills suitable to higher-paying careers, although this is changing. Now, if you corrected the statistics, to compare minorities to whites working in the same lines of work (construction workers to construction workers, teachers to teachers, janitors to janitors, doctors to doctors, unemployeds to unemployeds and so on), then you'd find a virtually zero difference between wages. And if there was anyone out there who was explicitly paying someone less because they were black or female, I'd be the first person out there complaining. |
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