AllyWork
Helping White people fight White Supremacy
Recent Comments
- Julia on 2007 The Year in Race, Ethnicity, and Racism: The Top 10 List of the Most Fashionable Racial Trends
- jasira on Untangling Two Myths: Tragic Mulatto is a Myth and Race is Not Culture
- Theriomorph on Qualities of an ally
- Rachel S. on 2007 The Year in Race, Ethnicity, and Racism: The Top 10 List of the Most Fashionable Racial Trends
- vegankid on Qualities of an ally
- Theriomorph on Qualities of an ally
- Skye on 2007 The Year in Race, Ethnicity, and Racism: The Top 10 List of the Most Fashionable Racial Trends
Archives
Pervasive Racial Bias in Employer Callbacks
Published by rachels | Filed under Racism and White Supremacy, Whiteness
In the thread where I outlined my views on the 2006 trends in race and racism. A few people challenged this statement:
There seems to be a sense among many white Americans that any programs designed to remedy the effects of racism and segregation discriminate against whites. This stems in part from the false belief that opportunities are equal and that racial and ethnic minorities somehow have great advantages over whites.
On my site, one commenter suggested that the second sentence was debatable, but the actual research shows fairly consistent patterns of discrimination.
Let me provide one very blatant example of racial discrimination documented by Professor Devah Pager. Pager won the American Sociological Association dissertation award in 2003 for her dissertation, which examined how a person’s race and criminal background affected their likelihood of getting job call backs. Pager created an experiment where black and white male testers with similar resumes were sent out to apply for low wage jobs. Pager assigned testers resumes with or without felony convictions, and they went into the field to conduct tests in the city of Milwaukee. You can read part of the study here (PDF)., Pager found White testers with felony convictions were MORE likely to get callbacks from employers than Black testers without felony convictions. Here is a results table from Pager’s dissertation conducted in Milwaukee:
The solid black bar represents those with felony convictions, and the grey bar represents those without felony convictions. Recently Pager and Bruce Western conducted a similar study in New York city (PDF). The findings were fairly similar, but they also included Latinos, who fared better than blacks and worse than whites. Pager and Western go on to say,
In this study, Calibrating the magnitude of the race effects to the effects of a felony conviction presents a disturbing picture. Blacks remain at the very end of the hiring queue, even in relation to (white) applicants who have just been released from prison. The results here point to the striking persistence of race in the allocation of employment opportunities. Employers faced with large numbers of applicants and little time to evaluate them seem to view race as an adequate means by which to weed out undesirable applicants upon first review.
I don’t know what evidence of racism in the workplace could possibly be more apparent. It probably doesn’t surprise people that felons fair worse than non-felons of the same race, but the fact that Black men without criminal records are viewed similar to white men with felony convictions reveals the strong impact of race in just one stage of the hiring process.
Given this evidence, what can we do to stop this discrimination?
January 24th, 2007 at 6:12 am The fact that felony conviction did not prevent the extension of job offers either to White or Black applicants indicates quite clearly that having a felony conviction was not a major criterion in the decision to extend job offers. The introduction of felony conviction is for this reason largely a red herring.
The Professors rush to judgement in their assumption that decisions are being made on the basis of racism rather than an analysis of racial behaviour is borne of a desire to support their own egalitarian assumptions.
It is just as likely that the employers involved based their judgement on previous experiences with Black and White employees and on their general non-work related experiences of Black people. Perhaps Black employees are generally less reliable, honest and hard working than White and Mexican employees regardless of qualifications? It’s also possible that employees are wary of employing too many minority workers because of a fear that any attempt to sack them due to poor work will be challenged by a potentially costly accusation of racial discrimination. It’s entirely possible that the Black applicants, regardless of the status of their resumes, were generally simply less articulate in an interview situation than their White counterparts.
A failure to examine alternatives to racism as a motivation for rejection of applicants and a failure to examine the possibility of valid reasons for discrimination on the basis of race make this crude report meaningless.