From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Subject: Re: The perception of reverse racism (Re: Why do Americans
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1992 01:56:46 GMT

In article <ted.715621265@sage0> ted@sage0.gsfc.nasa.gov (Ted Ying) writes:
>egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) writes:
>
>	Ed, don't be an arrogant fool.  Your dripping skepticism really
>	isn't necessary.  Whereas you may not believe in its existance,
>	some of us do believe that discrimination vs. majorities does
>	exist.  I am an Asian American (Chinese by descent) and I do
>	agree that this kind of discrimination exists.  It is not nearly
>	as horrible a problem as discrimination vs. minorities, but it
>	does exist.

"Discrimination", unfortunately, was introduced to MEAN abuse of
powerless minorities by powerful majorities.  The question is whether
the meaning of "discrimination" and "racism" (which was invented to name
the bad behavior of Northern Europeans) should be expanded to include
all sorts of bad behavior between all sorts of groups.  I think not.

>
>
>	The problem is that due to AA, the historically disfavored and
>	history favored groups are not on a par.  The historically
>	disfavored group is (by virtue of being historically disfavored)
>	now the favored group.

NOT.  The very reason for Affirmative Action is that the historically
disfavored group often, even in a situation of formal equality, tends to
remain in the position of disfavor because of long-term, hereditary
disadvantages. Blacks in America are not by any stretch of the
imagination a favored group.  For example, a few years ago Americans
were patting themselves on the back because Soviet male life expectancy
was in decline; but now black male life expectancy is also in decline.
Jonathan Kozol, twenty years ago, researched the educational
disadvantages that were systematically imposed on black children.  In
his recent book "Savage Inequalities" and in a talk I attended last
April, Kozol has described how the situation he described twenty years
ago has worsened.  


  Note: I am not saying that this is
>	necessarily wrong, just that your above statement is the true
>	malarky.  To believe that preferential treatment of any group
>	for any reason is discrimination.  According to my Webster's,
>	to discriminate is to show unjust favor or disfavor.  Yes, AA

Webster's is going to try to be politically neutral and not offend.
However, actual usage (and at forty-two and with a history of being a
reader, I was there in several senses of the phrase) in the 1960s
reserved "discrimination" for systematic white mistreatment of blacks,
mistreatment encapsulated in the legal system in the early Sixties ("de
jure" segregation, for example) and persisting in social structures in
the later Sixties (including "de facto" segregation.)  There are of
course other meanings of the word, including meanings more useful in
describing art appreciation.  These meanings are remote from the
POLITICAL use under discussion.

>	the majority of people who receive assistance from AA are good
>	people who needed the chance to get in the door and prove
>	themselves, as with any broad group, this group has it's
>	freeloaders who know that they aren't going to get fired because
>	of AA and behave poorly.  However, there are always people who
>	have some advantage (say the Manager or President's child who
>	is working in the plant and can't be fired) and abuse it.  This
>	doesn't mean that the disgruntled people on the other end don't
>	have a gripe.

How convenient for those debt-burdened companies who want to destroy
jobs or ship them to low-wage countries to tell employees that
Affirmative Action has destroyed their job; yet for the most part, the
very idea that Affirmative Action affects most jobs in the private
sector is fantasy.  Managers in the private sector, for the most part,
hire who the hell they want to hire and they discriminate against people
of color and women every day, and get away with it.  Affirmative Action
has to be specifically enforced by a compliance program and it is not
enforced at the majority of companies.  Also, Affirmative Action applies
to the hiring, not the firing decision and as such Andrew's supervisor
lied when he told Andrew that AA prevented Great Western from firing the
black employee.  The black employee would have had to bring an expensive
wrongful termination suit against Great Western with little chance of
success in so conservative a state as Arizona (and Andrew had nearly
equal rights to bring a lawsuit of non-race-related "wrongful
dismissal.")

The same people who are convinced by TeeVee spots (put out by such
luminaries as Jesse Helms) that black people are taking their jobs are
the people who are persuaded that all city neighborhoods are hotbeds of
crime because they see a high frequency of crimes on the boob tube.  The
boob tube, you see, ignores or underplays the systematic, structural,
and brutal unemployment of blacks.  Against this backdrop of silence,
the boob tube OVERPLAYS (through advertisements like Helms' in which a
black takes a white's job) reversals of the normal situations because
such reversals get peoples' attention.  The fact remains that a white
skin is a massive advantage, and whereas your Chinese origin, Ted, is
not such an advantage because of lingering anti-Chinese racism, it
itself is sometimes an advantage in high tech, since (racist) employers
imagine that people from China will work hard for less money.  Then, I
imagine, twenty years down the pike you face a "glass ceiling" because
these same racist employers assume you're not executive material.

>
>	Hey, as I mentioned, I have been discriminated against in the
>	past due to being a "Chink".  But, just because I started out
>	at a disadvantage, doesn't change my attitude that I want to
>	do well and succeed.  I have seen people who believe that they
>	are being unjustly treated, sit and complain, and don't try to
>	prove themselves against the beliefs of the discriminators.  This
>	is pure laziness.  Even when I've started at a disadvantage, I've
>	worked to prove my competence and ability and have managed to
>	succeed.

What's this "success?"  We here in America learned how hollow "success"
was years ago and now Japan is learning the same thing.  Years of
"success" and the Effluent society produced by "success" produced the
current whining American electorate, wandering in the desert and hoping
(against economic reality) to be returned to the fat years of the
Fifties.  Even in Japan, "success" seems to be destroying the warrior
spirit; we see, for example, that Japan's banks must now be bailed-out
in the same sleazy manner as American banks.

I'm sure you have plenty of competence and ability yet I resist having
one particular model of "success" held up for a forced emulation.  In
this model, the only respected kind of work is high-paid work at the
fastest pace possible, producing or selling high-tech products.  Because
the work is typically so specialized, group-dependent and obscure, it
becomes necessary to consume in a particular media-determined pattern in
order to display one's virtue and success; while a physician in
midcentury (a man like my father) was accepted as a highly competent
professional or an engineer in the same period was also accorded
respect, nowadays people tend to DISCOUNT evidence of professional
competence and look instead to the obvious signs of wealth.  Physicians,
lawyers engineers and others tend nowadays to be terribly insecure about
their "real" attainments and when I worked in Silicon Valley workplace
conversation did not typically consist of theoretical or intellectual
talk of any calibre; instead it consisted of "competitive consumption"
talk (in which employees compared notes and put each other down on the
merits of various products and consumption styles) and of out and out
put-downs of the work of people not within earshot.  The BMW, not the
MSCS, is what gets respect.

>
>	A person who behaves poorly, is lazy, is counter-productive is
>	by their own achievements (or lack thereof) not worth protecting.

We don't know that Andrew's black co-worker was any of these things, for
I have raised the (as yet unaddressed) possibility that his defects of
character were created or exacerbated by his surroundings and the
resentment of Andrew and others.  And your phrase "not worth protecting"
is Fascistic; do we now starve those who are not (in your opinion)
"productive" enough?
>
>>Well, we've heard from the guys in the mailroom.  Thanks.
>
>	What makes you any better a judge than he?  This kind of arrogant
>	condescension is totally unnecessary.  Just because you work
>	higher up does not make you any more informed or better able to
>	judge than the mail room clerk.  It just shows that morons can
>	get any kind of job these days.

My point is that from the mailroom, you are not going to be privy to the
ways in which bankers, in particular, play fast and loose with the
truth.  I worked in a high-level research and development group within a
major bank, and I was shocked by the ways in which the management of
that group ignored its fiduciary responsibility.  I'm talking about
"executive presentations" that were unrelated to reality, and this
casual disregard for truth issued, a couple of years later, in the
banking and S & L scandals.  Because I heard bankers fabricating stories
for business reasons (and because you may read of Citicorp, for example,
casually loaning money to bozos in order to make quarterly results look
good), I tend to look at the story Andrews' supervisor told with a
jaundiced eye.  I don'y believe that Andrew's black co-worker could not
have been fired; it's quite possible, instead, that he was paid less and
as such represented a best buy, with or without his "bad attitude" which
again may be a figment of Andrew's imagination.

Anyway, the subject of Affirmative Action has been throroughly discussed
and I believe I have refuted the existence of reverse racism in this
group (look for the string "Affirmative Action" in its archives.)  I was
concerned to show that Andrew Ford lied when he stated that whites are
unemployed more often and for longer periods, and that you also
prevaricated when you claimed that blacks are "favored."  Since I've
done so and I don't choose to be flamebait for the various racist bozos
on this net, the discussion is closed as far as I am concerned.  Please
communicate with me by email if you wish to continue the discussion.

Newsgroups: misc.jobs.misc