So Neat!

So neat!

Blooming Shylights

one thing I want to say today relates to my current job. (As you guys know, I’ve left off working in science labs to work an office job in sci comm. My role...

Being good to each other is so important, guys.

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Because we still live largely segregated lives, such networking fosters categorical inequality: whites help other whites, especially when unemployment is high. Although people from every background may try to help their own, whites are more likely to hold the sorts of jobs that are protected from market competition, that pay a living wage and that have the potential to teach skills and allow for job training and advancement. So, just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed. All of this may make sense intuitively, but most people are unaware of the way racial ties affect their job prospects. When I asked my interviewees what most contributed to their level of career success, they usually discussed how hard they had worked and how uncertain were the outcomes — not the help they had received throughout their lives to gain most of their jobs. In fact, only 14 percent mentioned that they had received help of any kind from others. Seeing contemporary labor-market politics through the lens of favoritism, rather than discrimination alone, is revealing. It explains, for example, why even though the majority of all Americans, including whites, support civil rights in principle, there is widespread opposition on the part of many whites to affirmative action policies — despite complaints about “reverse discrimination,” my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism. The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs. Whites who felt entitled to these positions believed that affirmative action was unfair because it blocked their own privileged access.

Nancy DiTomaso, the vice dean for faculty and research and a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School (via evanwilhelms)

I think part of this stems from an interesting perceptual effect (as well as other various forms of .defending an established worldview for various reasons). As is often commented on the privileged don’t see their privileges so they attribute the benefits they have to what they do see, ie their hard work. Which is also why all the numbers and work showing more celearly just how the obscured distributed system of education, networking, and inheritance maintains and reinforces divisions is so interesting and eyeopening..if your livelihood and self worth aren’t directly dependent upon such a system so much that its less mental effort to fight changes than to accept that those system aren’t fair and you proabaly shouldn’t have those benefits =P