In other words, when whites critique affirmative action, we typically ignore everything that came before such efforts — and which unjustly skewed the historical balance of power and access in our favor — and even that which continues to favor us
now, from funding and other advantages in the schools that mostly serve our children, to preferential treatment in the housing market, to ongoing advantages in employment.
For instance, with black and Latino students far more likely than whites to attend concentrated poverty schools, and
with the typical black or Latino student attending school with twice as many low income students as the typical white student, and being
twice as likely to be taught by the least experienced teachers and half as likely to be taught by the
most experienced, it is more than a bit disingenuous to suggest that it’s black and brown kids receiving “preferential treatment” in education.
With companies
filling up to half of their new jobs by way of recommendations made by pre-existing employees — a practice that benefits those persons connected to others already in the pipeline, who will disproportionately be white — and with
informal, typically white-dominated networks providing the
keys to the best jobs in the modern economy, and with research indicating that employers are
more likely to hire people they’d like to “hang out with,” than those who are necessarily the most qualified (which will tend to replicate race and class homogeneity), and with blacks
significantly underrepresented in management positions, even and
especially in work settings that include large numbers of blacks, it stands as uniquely craven to complain about how persons of color are receiving unjust head starts in the labor market. That even middle class blacks, relatively protected by their economic and educational status from overt mistreatment,
still suffer disparate rates of job dismissal (even when their performance indicators are comparable to those of whites), lower mobility when compared to similar whites, and regular harassment on the job, makes such arguments all the more repugnant.
With people of color
significantly more likely than whites to be steered to subprime mortgage loans — even when their
credit scores and incomes are
comparable to (or better) than their white counterparts — makes it downright indecent to argue that it’s whites who are getting the shaft and people of color who are reaping the benefits of some iniquitous system of preference.
And yet, that’s what one can hear,
over and again, from the very white Americans who regularly bemoan what they call the “victim” mentality of black folks and other “racial minorities.”
As in, “If I were just black, I’d have gotten into Harvard!” Or, “If my buddy John had been named Juan, he’d have gotten that construction contract,” which arguments brazenly ignore that whites still far outnumber blacks at places like Harvard and white owned businesses continue to receive
over 90 percent of government contracts (3). Oh, and such idiocy also, and conveniently, ignores one more not-so-minor matter: namely, that if one had been black, or if one’s friend had been Latino, one’s life and that of said friend would have been
completely different, and not only on that day that you or he applied to Harvard or for that particular contract, but
every day before that.
Whine Merchants: Privilege, Inequality and the Persistent Myth of White Victimhood
