Tuesday, August 04, 2009

The real affirmative action babies

The Real Affirmative Action Babies - Why white women are the real winners in affirmative action.”

Absolutely. I wonder why not many others have said or pointed this obvious fact before…

But for more rigorous analysis of this issue, it is not sufficient to simply point out that white women on the whole gain most in the last 30 years since the affirmative action came into being. It needs to show that white women were demographic group that was most often promoted, hired for post or selected to enter school, etc, despite their inferior qualifications, pushing aside more qualified white males along the way.

So why is it that people of color still lag so far behind their white female counterparts? Could it be that white men—who still overwhelming control hiring and promotion in the workplace—chose the lesser of two evils, if you will, in advancing white women over black men and women of color?”

In a way, yes, but remember that white women are far more likely than coloured women to be white men’s wives, daughters, nieces, wives’ friends, daughters’ friends, etc. The point here is that white women have much more and stronger connection, mostly through family connection, to white men. Not many white men have women of colour as their wives (increasingly visible exception is Asian women though), and if their wives are not non-white, their kids are not non-white either (except adopted Asian girls).

No comments: