For Recent Black College Graduates, a Tougher Road to Employment

<p>(I don’t think Sally is chasing you around on the forum, the modern website update just makes it easier to see what people post.) </p>

<p>'The disadvantaged group is the law-breakers. The police departments using these practices are targeting by criminal activity not by race" [citation needed] </p>

<p>If you’re going to claim there’s no existence of racial profiling in this regard, then that in itself is ridiculous (even if the exact level of racial profiling is unknown). You don’t see an impact to the issue because the innocent aren’t being mistreatment. But in a word where racial profiling exists, there is an obvious mistreatment taking place</p>

<p>And even if success is available to all that follow the rules, the rules should be the same for everyone. You simply are responding to this by saying “Yes, but only the rulebreakers are suffering any disadvantage”. First of all, prosecuting soft core crimes in hard crime areas makes little to no sense. Giving those soft-crime offenders harsher sentences than others for the same crime based off of race, is institutionalized racism. And treating law abiding citizens of one race differently than law abiding citizens of another shapes societal expectations of races. </p>

<p>You can blame it on SES to an extent,but even you mentioned in one of your own postings that there is (considerable) overlap between the two groups. At that point even if you specifically think you can take race out of the equation by trying to control for every possible lurking and confounding variable, that doesn’t mean </p>

<p>A- That race is a factor
or
B- That LE is practicing racial profiling or some form of discrimination </p>

<p>Hanna, you are looking at this as a tlawyer and not someone who wants to improve things. Lawyers are happy as uplong as everyone is screwing up their lives equally. I’m saying its an individual decision whether drug penalties affect you, unequal or otherwise</p>

<p>The idea that justice only matters to those immediately involved is well…it’s what allows for genocide to happen. I understand that’s an extreme example, but that’s the basis of what happens when we only expect to deal with matters that concern us. Instead of saying that the law should be standardized, moooop is saying that it doesn’t matter since those people are lawbreakers anyway. The fact that blacks not only get longer sentences for the same crimes (soft and hard), but are often criminalized at higher rates due to profiling of some sort, is problematic. And at least at that point, we should all be in agreement. Nobody is saying that life has to be fair and any specific difference in experience has to be challenged, it’s just a recognition that it isn’t and that there is no just reason for the aforementioned to take place. </p>

<p>The study with the names is [url=&lt;a href=“http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf]here[/url”&gt;http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf]here[/url</a>]. </p>

<p>For those who want to discount unequal treatment of black people, how do you explain that putting a black male name on the top of a resume gets fewer calls that the same resume with a white name? It has nothing to do with grades. We’re talking about the SAME RESUME with a different name on the top.</p>

<p>How do you explain that the resume with a white name and a criminal conviction gets the same amount of calls as the black name with no criminal conviction, other than that black applicants are getting worse treatment because of their race and for no other reason?</p>

<p>“No one is “chasing you around,” marie. Your posts on various threads really just stand out. You seem to have zero interest in posting about college-related issues but a lot of interest in discussing topics that allow you to communicate your views on race.”</p>

<p>Good. I’m glad to hear it. For the record I’ve posted on a couple of topics. Two or three involving legal twists and turns evolving out of bungled news stories which is my profession so they interest me for ethical business reasons and a few others that I stumbled into and since I do have 2 kids and a 50-year old older sister in college my choice of topics to comment on is going to be all over the map. There’s a lot of race in the news lately so maybe that’s what your noticing because it’s definitely not my area of interest although I do think growing up in the ghetto makes me shake my head at some of the posts I see on here where posters seem very far removed from the experience they are commenting on and admittedly I do tend toward bluntness which does stand out and I’m trying to reign that in. Sorry. </p>

<p>I thought you said you grew up in a “decent” neighborhood?</p>

<p>Oh. It was decent when I was five but It was a ghetto by the time I was fourteen. My sister who is still in Milwaukee recently sold the house for I believe 16-thousand dollars. It was a 5-bedroom and from what I hear things continued to deteriorate in the neighborhood over the years. In other words, the ghetto grew and swallowed us up, but we escaped. Or, maybe that’s too blunt, again.</p>

<p>The assumption that fairness and equality are the only goals reminds me of the occasional story one hears about where a drug dealer gets cheated and he calls the police to report the crime. I would agree that the law should be applied equally, but its not like a zero sum game where there is a fixed number of drug arrests, and our primary goal should be ensuring they are evenly distributed. </p>

<p>marie, I am not surprised your home’s property values declined that much. (And of course without decent property values, there is less of a tax base.) Milwaukee is desperately poor in many areas. And the lack of support for services that would help people lift themselves out of poverty (i.e., public transportation, better schools, maintenance of infrastructure) is really appalling. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or maybe it’s actually more calculated than that. When one sees the seemingly intentional efforts to allow the city to decay (along with more sinister initiatives like voter intimidation/suppression), one wonders.</p>

<p>No one would describe me as a progressive but:</p>

<ol>
<li> Anyone who doesn’t believe that race still matter in this country must be living on Mars. While I believe that the problems faced by affluent African-Americans are far different from those faced by the people who live in the inner city, even high SES blacks are subject to garden variety racism on a fairly regular basis. In fact, I don’t know anyone who is not racist in the sense that their immediate reaction to a person is not to some degree influenced by that person’s race.</li>
</ol>

<p>If you want numbers, there is a large, persistent achievement gap that persists across socio-economic groups and has remained largely unchanged since the late 1980s.</p>

<ol>
<li> I am frankly stunned to hear that anyone still believes that the war on drugs is or was a good idea. Our attitude toward low level drug offense is perhaps the most important reason that the incarceration rate in this country is by far the highest in the developed world and has also contributed greatly to the collapse of civil society in the inner city. (The collapse is now being replicated in many poverty stricken white communities, but I’m not sure that the war on drugs is the cause of that).</li>
</ol>

<p>Policy prescriptions? Don’t really have any easily described ones, but we have to face facts.</p>

<p>“Hanna, you are looking at this as a lawyer and not someone who wants to improve things.”</p>

<p>There’s no overlap between those categories? I guess we can throw out Brown v. Board if lawyers’ actions don’t improve things.</p>

<p>Who needs a Bill of Rights? I guess it’s true if you believe that when the government goes after criminals, they’ll get it right 100% of the time. We didn’t need James Madison or Thomas Jefferson after all; we only needed Nancy Reagan. Just say no to crime, and you won’t need any rights.</p>

<p>U can throw all the money, all the education, all the logic , all the prisons at the drug problem, and it will still boil down to individuals saying yes or no. And I don’t care how many Harvard grads use, its still not an outcome we should be neutral on. Hanna, if u have a kid, would u prefer she sniffed coke or not?</p>

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<p>It may not be unusual names per se that affect employability. It may be that names strongly associated with particular ethnic groups affect employability, if there are enough job application or resume readers who are prejudiced against (or for) the ethnic group that the name is associated with.</p>

<p>I am really confused about the this thread. Is this a discussion about racism in general or about the data reported by OP that Black graduates have higher unemployment rates? If it is about the latter then there is insufficient information to form any conclusions about whether the higher unemployment rates are the result of racism or other factors that have nothing to do with racism.</p>

<p>We all know that all college degrees are not equal and that all colleges that award such degrees are also not the same. The linked article is short on information and long on innuendo. I have never heard of Oakwood College before, but I looked it up and found it is a low ranked HBCU that award merit scholarships to all students that have a high school gpa of 2.0 and 890 SAT. Not a very selective school. Seems it accepts everyone that wants to go to college whether or not they are college ready. So it is not surprising that a graduate of Oakwood would have a difficult time finding employment.</p>

<p>We also are not provided with the basic information of College GPA, majors, difficulty of courses taken etc. to get an idea of the quality of the graduates in the article. Blacks graduating from college are much better off than those that do not. But if anyone here thinks that a graduate from Oakwood should be on the same level as a graduate from public flagship university really need to rethink their beliefs. We also know that social science degrees have higher unemployment rates in general than STEM, health or business majors, so without more information this article is quite uninformative and just a headline grabber for racial discord.</p>

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<p>It could be the result of several factors, some of which may be directly the result of racism (e.g. resume readers being less likely to invite to interviews those with names associated with a disliked racial or ethnic background), some of which may have nothing to do with racism, and some of which may be indirect effects of racism (e.g. kinds of racism which may have occurred long in the past, and are not present in the hiring process, but may have limited someone’s achievements to below what s/he could have otherwise achieved).</p>

<p>That study with the names was published over 10 years ago. That may not seem like a long time ago, but in the world of employment it can make a difference. As people with “old ideas” retire, younger and more enlightened people take their place.</p>

<p>I saw this happen with attitudes towards women as time went on and more management-types either were women or had working wives…which was a change from a decade earlier when management was a male-bastion with stay-at-home-wives.</p>

<p>usbalumnus I think you are proving my point with your post, the information is so lacking in the article, it invites assumptions and guesses to make sense of the article. The only thing that is clear in the article is that Black graduates have a relatively high unemployment rate after graduation compared to White graduates. The article is inviting a conclusion of racism as the cause when there is clearly insufficient data to come to this or any other conclusion.</p>

<p>I also did not understand why the article referred to “Christopher Broughton, a business administration major in Mr. Ewers’s class at Morehouse, was an intern at Adobe Systems in San Francisco the previous summer, but the hoped-for job after graduation never came through.”</p>

<p>When this Black student received a job “Over the summer, Mr. Broughton, 22, said he sent at least 70 applications to large and small firms, using LinkedIn and online research. In October, he finally landed a job in Atlanta with Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate brokerage firm” less than 6 months after graduating. </p>

<p>As to the other Morehouse grad, Garrick Ewers, there was no reporting that he too sent out “at least 70 applications.” The article only states that “Mr. Ewers, who would like to work in marketing, applied to Google, Apple, BET, MTV and Amazon, among others.” Sounds like Mr. Broughton did his due diligence and Mr. Ewers did not to get employment. </p>

<p>The author of this article Patricia Cohen should be ashamed for writing an article trying to incite racism issues without clearly providing data to support such a contention.</p>

<p>So couldn’t the fact that black college graduates have lower GPAs than white college graduates be a symptom of racism in society?</p>

<p>What other phenomenon could explain that pattern?</p>

<p>It probably makes for an article of more general interest to write about example people’s life stories than it is to describe academic research studies about resume callbacks based on names with ethnic connotations and other topics regarding labor markets, even though individual life stories may not generalize to the topic in question.</p>

<p>Hanna There have been much research about the question you ask, and it starts with why Blacks score so poorly on the SAT/ACT compared with other ethnicity. In the words of Col Nathan Jessep in a Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.”</p>