Re:The Unemployment Rate for People Like You
by btakita on Saturday November 07, 2009 @01:35PM
(#928145)
Having a criminal past is also a huge factor.
This is anecdotal, but my neighbor's son is a black 35 year old male lacking a high school education and had a BS drug charge. It is very difficult for him to find a job, after all, who wants to hire an ex-con?
Also, his social network makes him very likely to be harassed by police.
I think the decriminalization of drugs will help the inequality, or at least fix a symptom.
Re:The Unemployment Rate for People Like You
by btakita on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:38AM
(#930464)
Update, just found out my neighbor's son got a job working at the Port of Oakland for $8.50/hour. He also has a high school education (not that it has a big bearing on the employment rate of his peers).
Re:The Unemployment Rate for People Like You
by catzaa on Saturday November 07, 2009 @08:34AM
(#927825)
What I have seen is that there are a lot of white people doing well without college education. But this doesn't mean that they do not receive any education.
A lot of white people (in my part of the world) learn their parent's occupation. A good example is farming - a farmer will learn his sons how to farm. Or estate agents.
So they have an aweful lot of skills transferred to them (just through a university that doesn't grant degrees ;) )
I would guess that the important factor is instead your real-life social network. Most of those young, white, uneducated men are found in rural areas where there is a strong sense of community and people help out and get jobs for each other.
Whereas the young, black, uneducated men are more likely to live in urban areas where they have a weak social network that can't help them get jobs, so the best thing they can do is to become friends with people who have jobs, and if you flunked out of high-school, that's very, very difficult.