Re:Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers S...
by jeremyjh on Friday July 12, 2013 @04:57PM
(#6035152)
Yes exactly and this is why we need to read these kind of things. It seems one of the more challenging aspects of racism today is that is so subtle that most people with racial bias are not even really aware of it themselves.
Re:Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers S...
by burgerz on Friday July 12, 2013 @06:49PM
(#6035814)
>my fellow white people began the search for every possible explanation
contrary to your idea of white people having white guilt or whatever and trying to justify this, the posts in this thread indicate (rightly) that discrimination exists and that you deal with it and get over it.
Her experience is exactly in line with previous studies on this. E.g.:
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
And plenty of other people have stories like this to tell. For example, this white guy with a gender-ambiguous name who suddenly got a lot more attention when he added "Mr" to his resume:
http://qz.com/103453/i-understood-gender-discrimination-afte...
And it's not just resumes. Bias also happens in real-world auditions:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/
The truth is that most of us are unconsciously biased against and for all sorts of people. I sure am. I didn't used to admit that, even to myself, but then I took some of the Project Implicit tests:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
The question isn't whether white people have some sort of in-group bias. People have all sorts of in-group biases, and white people are people.
The question is what we do about them. More specifically, the question for you is what you, as a human, are doing about your biases. And the question for me is what I'm doing about mine.