Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
From: mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman)
Subject: Re: Pessimism
Organization: Oracle Corporation
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 21:12:17 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by an unauthenticated user
              at Oracle Corporation.  The opinions expressed are those
              of the user and not necessarily those of Oracle.

In article <1992Sep25.190754.3705@cas.org> cwm54@cas.org writes:

>	In a capitalist society there are always going to be fewer jobs
>     than workers. 

Why?  Ever hear of a labor shortage?  For example, Miami has one right
now.  

>     It is the nature of competition. If I "pull myself
>     up by my own bootstraps" I necessarily displace someone else down
>     to my previous position. 

Depends on how you define position.  If you mean rank order of income
in population, then certainly.  If you mean income and standard of
living then no.


>     When I open a restaurant someone else
>     goes out of business because there are only so many dollars to be
>     spent on entertainment. These are the cold hard facts. But you NEVER
>     hear those with a voice explain this reality. This is the core of
>     the problem.

Actually, they don't explain this 'reality' because it is not reality.
If it was then our average standard of living would be the same as it
was 2,000 years ago - after all, how could it possibly improve if
every success was accompanied by an equal and opposite failure?

You see, the key is that if we can produce more toys with less
resources then we have more toys to go arround for everyone and
everyone's standard of living goes up.

>      Those of us who are "black professionals" know
>      that no matter how educated,how rich,how nice the suit, you're
>      still just a n....

Well, that may be true at Chemical Abstracts Services but it's not
true where I work.  In a competitive environment you can't afford to
have that attitude.  I'm doing new product development right now so I
don't have people working for me, but a year ago when I was a
development manager for one of our financial products I was barely
hanging on by my fingernails.  I guarantee to you that the only things
I worried about in the people who worked for me was how much work I
could get out of them and how good it would be without making them
decide that their salaries just weren't worth the pain.  I didn't give
a damn what sex or race they were.

If people at CAS have time to worry about that kind of irrelevancy
maybe you are overstaffed.

>      I have seen so many people ruined by thinking
>      that they "only need that piece of paper" and being devasted when
>      a white high school graduate with less senority, who they trained
>      becomes their boss.

Well, if they think that that piece of paper is all they needed then I
am hardly surprised that they didn't become managers.  A diploma gets
your foot in the door.  That's it.

Your attitude also shows some real problems.  Do you really think that
seniority should be a factor when it's promotion time?  Maybe in
places like IBM, but not in companies that are growing.

When I became a manager I became the boss of a guy with a year and a
half more experience than I who had trained me when I joined the
company.  Nobody said that was racist because we were both White.
Would matters have been different if he was Black?  

>      I no longer am one to stress education as the
>      key to equality. We should be educated to be better informed but
>      we should not delude ourselves into thinking we "can be anything
>      we want to be".

You should tell that to some of the Blacks (not n...'s) I know in the
software industry... like the woman I went to college with who is a
year younger than me, who is working for a bank software company, and
who keeps teasing me because she's making more money now than I was a
year ago...  Or the guy I know at another company who doesn't even
have a college degree but demonstrated technical competence as a
consultant, and then joined the company and proved that he was also a
grade A manager.  This guy is only three or four years older than me
but I'll need three promotions in that time to match where he
is now.

>       As long as racism persist 

Well, in that case you mean forever and you might as well curl up and
die.  The people I know who have succeeded don't give up that easily.

>	  In short if everyone in this country has a college education
>      then college grads will be cleaning toilets and sweeping streets,
>      and guess who that will be. Until Americans admit that because of
>      our economic system(I make no judgements on the right or wrong of
>      it),"the poor will always be with us" and because of racism the poor
>      will always be disproportinately black; and poverty breeds
>      violence.

Mind explaining why I can't substitute Chinese for black in the
sentence above?

>      When I go
>      to a store or a restaurant and still get "the look" I can understand
>      why.

You'll get the look as long as crime and poverty are
disproportionately black.  These are chicken and egg problems.  The
only way to beat them is to work on both at once.


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