Blacks Still Suffer Discrimination and Oppression

The thread recently posted in this forum on the attitude of minorities toward education inspired me to search the Internet for sources of information on just how far -- or little -- society has progressed toward American ideals of a fair and just society.

Sadly, it seems that African-Americans and other minorities are still treated poorly by whites and others who, consciously or not, unthinkingly accept destructive stereotypes that deeply corrode our societal sense of community.

(Fair Use Excerpt)

See: http://www.finalcall.com/perspectives/black_progress08-13-2002.htm

Some of that sound like BS.

For example "blacks recieve less pay" if you have two people doing the same job one black one white and the white one is getting paid more, guess where your arse is heading, THE BIG HOUSE!

There are still little tricks that the Establishment uses to assure that minorities are underpaid. One such device is the classification of jobs to overstate or understate responsibilities in such a way that it is difficult to prove malicious intent or adduce other evidence of wrongdoing.

Moreover, people are rarely, if ever, thrown in jail for discriminatory practices against minorities.

What about areas where the blacks are the majority? So blacks get suspicious of another black reading their meter or cutting lawns in the neighborhood? If all the waiters in the restaurant are black, who do they give the bad service to? The owners and bosses are black.....so which employees do they underpay?

Around here whites get the subtle "short end of the stick" more often than not. With the demographics changing so much in America, I pretty much see offenses on all sides of the racial fences, to be honest.

But in the victimhood mentality, it's only one side doing it to the other and there are no other possibilities.

"Oppression" iscomplete hyperbole in 2007.

Blacks will probably still get bad treatment and discrimination from certain people/employers, ect. But it is by far the exception and not the rule. And there are plenty of opportunities for anyone to bring themselves up and raise their status. Africans come across the Atlantic and can manage to get their shit together, coming in with a lot less than many naitive-born blacks are given.

Of that, I have no doubt.

I'd still say, on average, whites still have it made better than blacks. That being said, there's opportunities for blacks today that people a half-century ago would have died to have. It's only too bad that more people don't take them up.

The whole "X is underrepresented among CEOs" is a crock of shit.

Someone has to be on the senior management track for many, many years to become CEO of a major company. Why aren't there as many senior women executives now? Because there were hardly any junior ones thirty years ago. Why aren't there many black CEOs today? Because few blacks were getting on the senior management track in 1970.

If you want to know how women or minorities are really doing in management jobs, look at the trend.

It's my impression that the top ranks where junior executives dwell are also rather lily-white.

I haven't looked at this specific issue lately. I'm going to cite a webpage without having examined the races (faces) of the people assigned to the names. We'll learn about GM together:

http://www.gm.com/company/investor_information/corp_gov/officers.html#

[Edit] So far, I've seen that William Powell is black.

So is Kevin Williams.

So is Edward Welburn.

Ray Young is Asian.

Nicholas Cyprus could be ethnic (Middle Eastern, Lebanese?).

All right. I've looked at about 80% of the "Other Senior Leaders" and those are the minority faces I found.

That's actually not too bad.

Now I'm going to look at the top guys.

Okay. Not that good. Fourteen out of the top fourteen, including the chairmen and senior group vice presidents, are entirely white, with the possible exception of Ralph Szygenda, who might be ethnic. But he's definitely not black.

So, to recap:

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

G. Richard Wagoner, Jr.

Vice Chairmen

Frederick A. Henderson
Chief Financial Officer

Robert A. Lutz
Global Product Development

Group Vice Presidents

Bo I. Andersson
Global Purchasing and Supply Chain

Troy A. Clarke
President, GM North America

Gary L. Cowger
Global Manufacturing and Labor Relations

Carl-Peter Forster
President, GM Europe

Maureen Kempston Darkes
President, GM Latin America, Africa and Middle East

Robert S. Osborne
General Counsel

James E. Queen
Global Engineering

David N. Reilly
President, GM Asia Pacific

John F. Smith
Global Product Planning

Thomas G. Stephens
Global Powertrain and Global Quality

Ralph J. Szygenda
Chief Information Officer

All white, except for Szygenda, who might be ethnic. (Slavic?) But he could certainly pass for white (and almost for Anglo-Saxon).

These fourteen are divided from the next major category, "Other Senior Leaders," whose characteristics I mentioned at the top of this post.

I guess a case could be made that the "Other Senior Leaders" are in fact the more diverse "junior executives" mentioned in the posting above this one. However, let's keep in mind that GM is a high-profile company that attracts unusual scrutiny and therefore has much more incentive to comply with equal opportunity principles.

And still its top leadership is lily white.

They were going to check the trend, but they had to go change their tampon. Then, after all that, they really felt a craving for some fried chicken with a side of watermelon.

So, of about 50 senior management types, (at least) 3 are black? That's pretty close to the proportion of blacks in the population. (Not that I'd find it de facto racist if blacks were underrepresented.)

How many blacks do you suppose were in GM's senior management 30 years ago?

It's not as good as all that. The top fourteen, down to the level of every senior group vice president, is white or white-ethnic. The four minority gentlemen, including the three African-Americans, are all in the "miscellaneous" section ("Other Senior Leaders"). (I'm excluding Cyprus for simplicity's sake since I'm not really sure right now if he's white, or white-ethnic, or qualifies as a minority.)

Again, GM is highly visible and highly regulated, and even so, not a single minority or non-white-ethnic face is in the top or near-top ranks. Objectively, that's not all that good, considering that American Express, for example, is actually led by an African-American. Not a single African-American was good enough to be among the top fourteen? Remember: There is a dividing line between the top fourteen and "Other Senior Leaders"; what does this suggest to you?

Now think of all those corporations that are much less in the public eye than either GM or Amex.

[Edit] By the way, about thirteen percent of Americans are black; three out of fifty is only six percent.

So they must be forced to hire blacks? Half black, half white, just to be even? What about Hispanics? American Indians? Jews? Chinese? Japanese? Italians? Turks? Armentians? Greek? Eskimos? Rainmen? Hindi? Middle Easter? Arabian? African? British? English? Scottish? Welsh? Irish? Gaelic? Latin American? Columbian? Brazilian? Etc...

Well, zero out of the top fourteen does sound pretty unrepresentative. Not a single equivalent of Colin Powell was available? Large publicly held corporations are constrained by a certain level of general interest in their structures both as a legal and a political fact. That being the case, the conclusion becomes clear when we realize that, to the public at large, fairness and equity aren't just words in the dictionary.

It's not as simple as all that. Blacks might make up 8% of the general population, but corporations obviously don't pick their top executives out of the general population. Candidates have to meet specific criteria to be considered, even if that criteria happens to be marrying the bosses daughter.

You can't claim active discrimination unless you can show that blacks meeting the average criteria for such positions are underrepresented in those positions. If you can show that, then your argument is sound. Until then, it's just more of the tired "whitey is holding us back" complaint I've been hearing as long as I can remember.

I dont think that is what he is saying at all. But you can go ahead and strawman him all you want.

I would point out that the people who qualify for those positions are not in the general population either. Inner city black kids who are good enough will make it into businesses school, or have a savvy business sense at the same rate as white kids from the same socio-economic class, provided there is not something else going on.

This goes for anything. At every stage along the ladder of success.

What that something is, could be any number of things. Overt racism, internal sub-cultural influences, internalized racism, unconscious racism... what have you. It could be any or all of those, plus a few other things. But the fact that they are not chosen for those positions at a frequency that differs significantly from their proportion within the general population (as you would expect similar performance from those in similar environments) indicates that there is SOMETHING biasing the statistics.

Let's just use your premise for the purposes of this argument.

I'm going to turn your argument around and ask the following: If, in the last three decades, there truly were equal opportunities for blacks in America, why would there be any reason that they wouldn't meet the average criteria you mentioned to the same extent as any other racial group?

No points if you say, "Because it's their culture," since (a.) a perfectly legitimate point to make is to say that there exists discrimination, regardless of cause; (b.) it has yet to be shown that it's because of "their culture"; and (c.) it does not necessarily logically follow that the cause resides in their culture.

I point out once again that the concept that blacks are supposedly at fault for "hating success" is not really a persuasive argument, and at least one other poster has denied that this attitude is widespread among blacks. And I would also bring to your attention that if, in fact, there is any component of fault attributable to nonblack discrimination against blacks, then the existence of discriminatory effect, as arguable, at least hypothetically, in any breakdown like that seen in GM's top leadership (although not necessarily in that company's breakdown itself) is suggestive that this discrimination exists.

The central core of your argument that I would question is that you presume that there is justification for the discriminatory effect we've postulated for GM without having shown that such justification does exist.

By the way, I have no idea whether GM is in any way guilty of discrimination, intentional or otherwise, but it remains the case that the prima facie unrepresentative effect shown on its own webpages is real, and it is what it is. The hypothesis that this effect is discriminatory is therefore founded on the indicia it provides as a matter of public record.

[Edit] Just to be clear, blacks are closer to thirteen percent than eight percent of the population; I had corrected this figure in the original post a little while ago.

So? Even if blacks were perfectly represented in that particular selection set, there would be less than 2 of them. And since people come in whole numbers, that means there would be 1.

That you'll continue to narrow the selection set until you feel the numbers conclude racism, even if none is in evidence.

There could be ZERO blacks in GM senior management and that wouldn't in and of itself prove racism.

As I said, it's the trend that's important. Not the absolute numbers. And the trend is counter to any claims of racism.

This doesn't neccessarily mean it's caused by any sort of racism, though.

It's more obvious when there aren't many blacks at the higher levels of power, but at the same time, there are many, many whites underrepresented as well. I think it's more reasonable to say that people from specific social and economic demographics don't achieve high levels of success as often as people from other demographics.

If each of those gets at least minimal representation, the GM senior management team is going to number in the hundreds. Let's not even think about what happens when mixed ancestry is taken into account...or gender...or veteran status...or sexual preference...or...

What about Hispanics, then? Offhand, the numbers of Hispanics in this country are similar to those of blacks, I would say, or perhaps even more numerous. Not a single Hispanic. A Hispanic can be an the Attorney-General and yet not be in top ranks of GM?

On the issue of sample size, I picked GM because it was a well-known large company. I would acknowledge that, even so, GM is a very small and clearly unscientific sample from which to derive reliable conclusions of broad application. A more scientific sample would draw from, say, the top 500 U.S. corporations (perhaps the Fortune 500). Based on what we've seen with GM, what would you say was the likelihood that the top or near-top ranks of these 499 other corporations, or the average of the 500, was representative of the talent pool available across all races in the United States?

Discriminatory effect is nevertheless of significant interest and may be a jumping-off point for analysis concerning its cause.

Let's limit the issue to discrimination against blacks. The question of discrimination against other groups can be reserved for some other discussion.

Again, if a Hispanic wanted to be in the top ranks of GM today, he/she would've had to have been on that track 30 years ago. How many Hispanics were going into management 30 years ago? My guess is a damned sight fewer than are going in today.

Probably similar and for the same reasons. Most of the large corporations in the top 500 have been around many years. I would expect their management to be comprised of people who have been on the management track for many years.

The cause is usually assumed first: racism. This is because screaming racism has potential political benefits.

Because discrimination on a wide scale didn't dissapear overnight?

Blacks definitely have more opportunities now, but you have to remember that thirty years ago, people were barely wrapping their heads around the idea that minorities could even drink out the same water faucets as whites. And women being anything but housewives? Fuggedaboudit!!That sort of mentality isn't going to go away overnight. In another thirty years, I'm fairly sure we'll be seeing more Black and Hispanic and female CEOs and other positions of power, since the idea of racial equality is more or less accepted in society (after all, more blacks enrolled in college during the Nineties than any other period in or nation's history).

I guess what I'm saying is we should really revisit this question in 2037.

ETA: While I was typing this post, Paladin said pretty much everything I wanted to, in a much better way. Point is pure numbers =/= racism.

My post said that there are opportunities out there if people take them. I didn't say there were folks rushing out to get them or prop each other up when they do success.

Just speaking within my own family, I had a cousin of mine who was valedictorian of his high school class get killed at 22 for dealing drugs. I'm certain there were colleges that would throw a scholarship at an inner-city black male youth at the top of his class. But on one in his family propped him up. He got into drugs and my aunt spent the money on rebuilding her house. He's been dead thirteen years and there's still no tombstone.

My uncle's first wife was a high achiever. She was able to graduate college on time, despite having a baby at twenty-one and having a louse for a first husband. With her nudging, she got my uncle to become a correctional officer (a position he's had for twenty-one years and would have had quite a lot to show for it, if we weren't spending it on stupid women after she dies, but I digress). The family all but turned their back on him for doing this. It was bad enough that said wife was white (and considering my grandmother was half-Irish and Indian herself, this is even more retarded), but being on the right side of the law made many in the family pretty uncomfortable. My mom's youngest brother spent most of his youth in and out of juvie, one aunt had a son dealing drugs, another aunt was doing drugs and prostitution, and the other aunt's sons grew up to be wife beaters (one of them was in jail at the time of her death and couldn't even go to her funeral). My mom is the only one of that lot who keeps in regular touch with him.

When my aunt had terminal cancer last year, I talked with my older cousin. Most of them see the street life as just the way things are. They think I'm super smart for attending college. I see it as normal and functional and what everyone is expected to do where I live.

So I'd agree that raising does play a big role. But as an adult, you're on your own, and people can be a victim of their past or overcome it. My mom and my uncle chose to overcome the past, and they lived in the same 'hood as all their other siblings.

Like I said, there's little excuse for perpetrating bad behaviors.

There weren't "truly equal" opportunities for anyone over the last three decades. Blowing a whistle and declaring "Equal opportunities for everyone starting now!" doesn't magically level the playing field, because not everyone started out in the same situations. If the average black household was notably behind the average white household in terms of education and income levels 30 years ago, then the black household wasn't in the same position to take advantage of said opportunities as the white household was. Hence, they wouldn't produce high level executives at the same pace quite yet.

And even if discrimination did disappear, it takes a while for the system to produce people with the right skills.

Imagine, for instance, that women were not allowed to go to medical school or become doctors. Then, the law changes. Women are now free to pursue medicine as a career.

One year after the change in the law, someone does a study of hospitals and finds NOT ONE woman doctor on staff. Clearly, there is still gender discrimination!

Well, not necessarily. It takes some time to go through medical school. As women doctors didn't exist before the law changed, it will take time for women to go through the system to become doctors. And it may take even longer for women to truly realize this option is even open to them!

Yep. Want to know what tomorrow's executives look like? Look at today's business majors.

Attitude is definitely a big player. If you grew up in a house where college was expected (or demanded!), you probably view it more readily as an option than you would if everyone else in your family were high school dropouts.

Very true. That's what being an adult is...deciding how to confront the challenges that face you today.

That's a false dichotomy. We're not speaking of what's applicable today versus what was available thirty years ago. We're comparing the state of affairs today with what is equitable. By the way, the same fallacy applies to your argument based on the same false comparison you drew for the representation of blacks.

Moreover, if your point is that Hispanics or blacks have needed the last thirty years within which to advance, I fail to see how this is relevant, since it's a fact that it's currently thirty years later than thirty years ago.

If they're similar, then the same points I made regarding GM would also apply to them.

I want to return to the argument you made that the top leadership shouldn't be representative because it was only in the last thirty years that minorities could achieve positions on the corporate track. Assuming that this is so, I would like to know why, particularly in the age of lateral hires, you would contend that the top or near-top ranks should still consist disproportionately of whites.

To start with, let's look at the corporate biography of David Reilly, a.k.a. Nick Reilly, President, GM Asia Pacific (listed in the "Group Vice Presidents" section and one of the "top fourteen" mentioned above):

Note that Reilly started his career at GM in 1975. To cut things short, a question that occurs to me is whether there were any African-Americans who were similarly employed as late as 1975 with GM?

If there were any, how many of them graduated from Cambridge?

Stop focusing on skin colour, and try paying attention to all the other differences.

Interesting point. I'll have to think about it. But your proposed explanation raises a further difficulty: If it is true, as you claim, that there is such a severe shortage of qualified blacks or other minorities, isn't this precisely the reason that affirmative action is necessary, and if this is true, isn't this also an admission that all the claims that whites are "reverse-discriminated" against are false?

Why is Cambridge so special? It may be a highly respected school, but at this level, highly respected schools are not uncommon.

Are you telling me that, after all these supposed decades of civil rights progress -- forty years, to hear conservatives tell it -- there's not a single nonwhite, employed by GM on a long-term basis, that's graduated from a school similar to Cambridge with qualifications similar to Reilly's?

Did it "just so happen," in the top 500 U.S. corporations, that there weren't any nonwhites that graduated from similar schools with similar qualifications? Or, more likely, isn't it so that graduation from Cambridge isn't quite as special as all that?

True enough. My mom always emphasized a college education and going to school (until I actually did, then she was telling me I should have saved up and worked before going to school ), and that was re-enforced with living in a city and having peers who took college in their future for granted.

It's kind of like Async's threads last week about Madagascar and the poverty there verses in America. Poverty is far more widespread there than in america, and most people don't long to do much better because they aren't being reminded every day with TV and other media that there can be more. So missing out on college would be far more shameful to a middle-class kid than someone from Compton who barely scraped out a GED.

Sure we are. Because today's senior managers were starting their careers thirty years ago. If very few blacks, say, were going into management thirty years ago, there won't be many senior black managers today. Even if there is absolutely no racism involved.

Show me that the proportion of blacks in senior management positions is way out of proportion to the number who entered the management track 30 years ago and perhaps you'll have something. But it is foolishness to suggest that because blacks are X percent of the population that they'll be X percent of any management group. That's the kind of simple-mindedness behind quotas.

The point is this: how many blacks and Hispanics were going into management 30 years ago? If the answer is "not many," than, lo and behold, you'll get a similar response when you look at senior management today.

But if you look at business majors today, I'd bet (and, no, I'm not going to go look it up) that blacks and Hispanics are a much larger percentage in those classes than they were 30 years ago. The door is open so minorities are now pursuing these jobs. But it will take them a while to reach the same concentration in the work force.

As would mine.

Okay. One more time.

If 30 years ago, few blacks were business majors pursuing management jobs, there will be fewer blacks in the business world today qualified for senior management jobs. Period.

It doesn't matter where you try to get them from. If they were few in number 30 years ago, they'll be few in number today. That doesn't mean that doors are closed to them. Indeed, since their representation among senior management is increasing, the opposite appears to be true.

I doubt many blacks were going into management in 1975. That's my whole point. And why would just any black (red emphasis mine) be preferable to a guy with Reilly's stated qualifications? Should they have not hired Reilly if any black was available?