Better people than I have written about privilege. Yet it seems that discussions of privilege nevertheless arise (and often) in these, the interwebs—often with disingenuous trolls but, sometimes, with well-meaning people who simply do not understand …

I had the opportunity to sit in on some interviews for a new hire to the group I was working in. It was a desirable job, and we had a lot of applicants. My manager had sifted through all of the resumes to come to the most qualified candidates on paper. There were 5 of them. They were all white guys. I don’t think that was intentional on his part. I know that the HR policy is that the manager had to explain to HR why they choose not to interview any minority candidates that apply. (They also have to show that they’re not being arbitrary. If the job requires a MS why didn’t the description say so? If you’re just giving preference to people with an master’s degree because it’s better are you letting any non-minorities through without one? Did your last hire have a masters? Is it really necessary? HR does not want us to discriminate.)

There was some brief instruction from my boss not to ask personal questions but no official training for me.

So I sat through 5 separate conversations, asked questions about work history, projects, and how they’d handle things I’d had a hard time with in the last year. By the third candidate I had my questions down pat. At the end of it my boss and i discussed what we thought. There were 2 candidates that were clearly worse. Between the remaining three it was a coin toss. They seemed equally qualified. So we talked about what we thought of their personalities and communication skills. One guy was cut because he seemed to have a hard time explaining things and we made the final decision based on personality. The person we picked seemed nice and like someone we’d enjoy working with. The person we didn’t pick had seemed cold and unfriendly. My boss thought about it some more and than made his choice for the ‘nice’ guy. (turned out i did enjoy working with him)

I’m know that everything was handled fairly. But once education, work experience, professional accreditation were all normalized there was more than one ‘best fit’. And what we thought of them made the difference.

Maybe you can ignore what others think of you if you have a 4.0 from MIT, a PhD, and a string of success that no one else can match. But for the other 99.999999% of the population that’s not the case. What other’s think of you will be important at some point. I’ll also say that after the interview I did two things. First I started trying to be nicer to everyone I worked with. Second I started thinking about how much more difficult it would be to seem like I’m ‘nice’ and would ‘fit in’ if I were a black lesbian from a low income neighborhood (just to illustrate).

We already have that dialogue. When we talk of the black crime rate, and all the chicken-and-egg scenarios and self-reinforcing stereotypes that that entails, we are talking of black males - perhaps immortalized in the unfortunately true line from American History X, ‘one-third of all black males under 30 are in some stage of the penal system’. Racism is not a monolithic entity, and there are aspects of it that adversely affect black men especially. College admin officers, who you are clearly implicating most directly in this statement, would have an extra prejudice against black males that has no counterpart for black females. The mistake, I think, is in assuming that prejudices against a group must necessarily affect all members of that group equally.

The dialogue you’re looking for, on the other hand - the one that says that Political Correctness has created a liberal culture that oppresses men while privileging women, and the blacker the better - can probably be found at a local Republican voters’ mass meeting. Perhaps you’re just not looking hard enough. Maybe you could argue that partisan-conservative outer ring suburbanites don’t a ‘nation wide’ make, but it’s certainly looked like that in many ways for about 25 years. Take what you can get, man.

“Who is oppressing the black male youth of today? Well, it’s not the dead slaveholders from 1865, and it’s not whites as a group, so who does that leave? My speculation is that the welfare policy that lead to the breakup of black families in the 60s and 70s is largely the issue, as it created a matriarchy in the inner city that’s not serving the needs of the male children very well. The prison numbers fit a similar pattern, of course. Boys need fathers to teach them self-control, male pride, and ambition, moms just don’t do it.”

You sure about that “whites as a group” part? Because in between self-sacrificing in the name of political correctness and absurdly tilting the college admissions game in favour of black girls, whites as a group can occasionally display these characteristics. (It’s a personal page, I know, but I had it forwarded it to me recently and it’s certainly relevant here.)

I actually agree that boys need fathers to teach them those things - particularly male pride, because it is a particularly emasculated and insecure man who ends up being the molesters, woman-beaters, and rapists of today, though there are always just plain crazies - but how do we address without burdening, explicitly or implicitly, only one-half of the population? That’s the real issue.

“So the tragedy of racism is that it oppressed both blacks and whites, as that sort of thing usually does.”

This isn’t a tragedy of racism, this is a tragedy of slavery. An aristocratic economy based on cheap, menial labour will usually do that for you, and would do so no matter what criteria - and there always is one - a society uses to designate the immutably-genetically inferior underclass that is to do all the said labour.

“To return to the analogy, the road needs to be fixed rather than simply making cosmetic adjustments. Because I don’t really specialize in public policy, I really don’t know how you make up for a group that made up a servant class for the first three hundred and fifty of the four hundred years that it was present in America. But a lot of what is currently in place is a stop-gap–better than nothing, but inadequate to address the full depth of the problem. Of course, I don’t even really know if the road *can* be fixed by state actors.”

Perhaps the most intelligent statement made here apart from those of Amp himself. An emphasis on that last part: the state is by nature a ham-handed, slumbering institution, and as such is best equipped to hammer ham-handed, institutional nails. Curb carbon emissions, and tackle corporate malfeasance. But reknitting the very threads of a culture with a history of forced servitude (including economically, in the case of Mexicans) that has left them antagonistic toward a bureaucracy-based white paper economy? The state would be hopelessly inept and hogtied.

“I think her example does prove that anybody can get rich in America if they work at it hard enough.”

Perhaps. But they’ll have to prevail against the countervailing weight of anachronistic laissez-faire ideology that is turning America, relative to Europe and Canada, a class-based society. Think how much more successful a woman of Oprah’s ability and drive could have been in, say, Sweden, where people are sensible enough to realize that helping the impoverished is, well, helping the impoverished, rather than a violating of Natural Right.

“The solution we get, though, is that the SAT has been made easier several times.”

True and untrue. Making such a value-to-value comparison ignores the fact that one of the subject tests, the Writing, has been added as part of the overall Reasoning test, lenghtening the test by 70 min and adding a devious little essay section that, while not being overly difficult, tends to be the most unpredictable in terms of marking.

“Richard, if that’s how you’re looking at data, the comparison you’re making isn’t a single-characteristic phenomenon either, because it doesn’t separate high-school completers from non-high-school completers. (If we look , the college participation disparity between black women and black men is much smaller).”

Slam dunk, Amp. Richard is trying to imply an active bias in favour of black women over black men from the point of view of college admin - which no doubt through sundry contortions would have ended up a pity party that exalts the martyrdom of the middle class white man - but college admin can’t get their reverse discriminatory freak on if black men are more likely to be INELIGIBLE for consideration in the first place.

I applaud you for your kiddie glove handling of the 1974-1991-2003 dating dispute. I’m sure that you know as well as I do that Richard picked up a number that was at least plausibly defendable if the feces squished into the fan, which he was betting was not going to happen by assuming that the casual reader would not follow the link. (It happens all the time. In fact, I even didn’t follow the link myself, and would not have known that Charles’ point was in fact valid, nor would have receded the point for Robert in my mental scorekeeping, had you not brought attention to it. His quibbling over a two-year education versus an associate’s degree (remembering that an associate’s degree requires, you guessed it: two years) doesn’t seem like a believable reason behind his creative omission. We all know what’s going on here.

I haven’t talked politics in a while and have a lot of pent up blogginess to exude, but I fear losing all I wrote so I’ll splice it here.

I agree that 1.8:1 - or even the 42% to 32% Charles’ data showed - is a legitimate reason for real concern. No one here has said otherwise.

So, why don’t you write about it?

Sigh… you were the one, Richard, who made “double” the magic number.

Yeah, because a 2:1 ratio is so different from an 1.8:1 one.

As a black woman who willingly sacrificed her social life as a girl to earn full academic scholarships through college and graduate school so that she would never HAVE to depend on black male support in her alleged community, as she looked around and saw that the black men around her and the black men she met as she attended school out of state and the black men she read about in national publications were too busy continually whining about what they didn’t have to be concerned about mutual community support, I feel that I have earned the right to say to you:

if you PERSONALLY are not dedicating, at minimum, 5 hours of your time per week and 5% of your annual gross income to the education of African-American boys in your personal community (however you define it, around the block or around the world),
SIT DOWN and SHUT UP.

I have this experience in computer stores. I’m a systems engineer, and I look like a perfectly normal middle aged woman. Recently I replaced my lap top. The poor sales boy (who couldnt have been much more than 21) started out telling me I got two sales guys for the price of one, since he was training someone and they were both named Josh. To which I replied “So is my exhusband.” The conversation went downhill from there. He tried desperately to sell me things I didnt want, and refused to understand that I might have a clue as to what I was talking about and that I knew what I wanted. I finally had to do what you did, pull out the technojargon. Took about 30 seconds of watching him grow increasingly pale before I got the giggles. Once he realized I was way, way beyond his technical knowledge, he calmed down, gave me the laptop I wanted at a much better than advertised price, and gave me a rebate I didn’t really qualify for. I think all that was by way of an apology for his erroneous assumptions based on age and gender.

Yeah, which is the main reason I brought my dad along. I suck at it. If it had been like buying any other expensive piece of machinery, I would have simply done my research, gotten a few opinions from people I trusted, and bought the damn thing by myself.

But that’s also why I think so many women feel at a disadvantage when buying cars. Unless you have the expertise that Mendy has (rather than just the capability of knowing how it all works) the car dealers are more likely to assume you are at at even greater disadvantage than normal and go in for the kill.

It also make sense that they would be less likely to do this to men. Falsely assuming that the person who is buying from you knows less than you, and letting them know it, puts the you - the seller - at a disadvantage when bargaining. So if, on average, men know more about cars than women do (and I think everyone can agree they do - or at least that most people have that perception) then it’s more of a risk to pull something like what the salesman did to Mendy on a man. Thus, even men who don’t know much about cars benefit from gender stereotypes, while women like Mendy derive only a marginal benefit from not fitting the stereotype.

Same goes for any kind of technical repairs - whether it’s cars, plumbing, electrical, or anything else. One doesn’t exactly bargain for repairs, but it’s harder to get a list of set prices and it’s much easier for the repairperson to lie.

There’s a reason that car salesfolks, as a class, are roundly despised. It has to do with the athmosphere of the places & the way they make people feel (like they’re fucking with you just to fuck with you). When somebody finds a dealer that doesn’t make them feel like shit, ever notice how much they praise said dealer? Because, in the American experience, a good dealership seems to be awfully uncommon.

Usually, that straightens them out. If that doesn’t work, then my looking under the hood and chasis normally does. I had one dealer lift the hood and exclaim, “My isn’t that an impressive engine.” To which I answered, “Nah, but it is one impressive looking engine cover. I can see three of the six coil packs, but that’s it. Now you wanna get me a ratched and socket set and I’ll show you the engine?” He stopped the whole sexist “little lady” attitude after that.

I battle sexism in the market place with my pocket book and information. Well, that and my rather blunt personality. Hey, it works for me.

Hah! Fair enough. But in this particular case it WAS a couple.

And going to the doctors and having them refuse to explain things or give me obviously half-assed answers.

I worked directly with the female member of this couple. One day she came to me quite distraught. Seems she went to the doctor for back pains and was told that she had a “tipped uterus” and that it had to come out. Understand that this woman was in her early 30s and it was not beyond question that she might have more kids. And she was in excellent physical shape. Damn good shape, in fact.

She came to me because she knew that I was studying for my MS in Biochemistry at a medical school (I spent downtime at work studying physiology, etc.). I told her that “tipped uterus” was a bogus and non-medical term, and that she should get another opinion. She did so, and came back with another story about a doctor telling her she had “female troubles” and that she needed a hysterectomy. She was very upset, as you could imagine.

I told her that hysterectomies were a big money maker for surgeons who specialized in them, and that something other than medical concerns for her health might be driving both doctors. I then went to school, told my story to the Dean of Medicine, and asked him for a referral to someone dependable. He gave me a name, I gave it to her, and she went to see this doctor.

The end point of the story was this woman, with a perfectly functioning reproductive system, showing me a jar containing gallstones. So I can quite sympathize with your story.