candycorn
Diamond Member
I remember back when I lived in Houston, I was pulled over and ticketed in the suburb of Bellaire. Google the city of Bellaire and check it out. Wiki has it as being 90+% white and Asian.
Well, I wanted to fight the ticket so I went to the court which was in the evening. The court room was packed full of people there to fight their tickets as well. The racial make up should be about 90+% white and Asian if, on average, those ticketed reflect the racial make-up of the city...right?
Aside from the Judge, an attorney some Mexican lady brought with her, and another defendant, nearly every defendant in the room was black or Hispanic (very few Hispanics by the way). We're talking about 150 defendants and one of them was white, in Bellaire, where 74% of the town is white.
When I hear about White Priviledge, I think it's an antiquated notion but it still exists and, to my mind, it is most prevalent here.
On the flip side of the coin, as many of you may know if you read my posts, I do credentialing for our health system. What that means is that I check to make sure current and prospective future employees have the licenses they say they have, the endorsements they claim, and generally are telling the baseline truth about their qualifications. I get "packets" from HR about each applicant or volunteer. Recently, the packets have started to include the race-based questions we have on the end of our on-line application. The part that wants you to self-identify whether you're white, black, latino, martian or whatever.
I have purposely refused to look at this. It doesn't affect their qualifications at all (alternate languages spoke, written are covered in another part of the application). I'm not in HR but I would bet that the message down there is that they need to have our staff mirror the city of Phoenix meaning hire more Hispanics. BS...I say hire the best person for the job and have your HR staff eliminate race from consideration to the positive or the negative. If the open job has two good candidates, you flip a coin.
Well, I wanted to fight the ticket so I went to the court which was in the evening. The court room was packed full of people there to fight their tickets as well. The racial make up should be about 90+% white and Asian if, on average, those ticketed reflect the racial make-up of the city...right?
Aside from the Judge, an attorney some Mexican lady brought with her, and another defendant, nearly every defendant in the room was black or Hispanic (very few Hispanics by the way). We're talking about 150 defendants and one of them was white, in Bellaire, where 74% of the town is white.
When I hear about White Priviledge, I think it's an antiquated notion but it still exists and, to my mind, it is most prevalent here.
On the flip side of the coin, as many of you may know if you read my posts, I do credentialing for our health system. What that means is that I check to make sure current and prospective future employees have the licenses they say they have, the endorsements they claim, and generally are telling the baseline truth about their qualifications. I get "packets" from HR about each applicant or volunteer. Recently, the packets have started to include the race-based questions we have on the end of our on-line application. The part that wants you to self-identify whether you're white, black, latino, martian or whatever.
I have purposely refused to look at this. It doesn't affect their qualifications at all (alternate languages spoke, written are covered in another part of the application). I'm not in HR but I would bet that the message down there is that they need to have our staff mirror the city of Phoenix meaning hire more Hispanics. BS...I say hire the best person for the job and have your HR staff eliminate race from consideration to the positive or the negative. If the open job has two good candidates, you flip a coin.