>CB: Since the white workers do not do the hiring and firing, it is the
>racism of the bosses , who do, that creates discrepancies between white
>and black employment. The white workers have no "rational" need to be
>racist themselves. Any advantage can be had by only the bosses being racist.
ack. most black men and women work with other black men and women and white men with white men and white women with white women. and when it's "mixed" it's highly segregated. look at academia: professors in the sciences are mostly white and male. professors in the humanities are mostly white, larger numbers of women. what was it, only 1% of all professors are black -- whether men or women -- and then they tend to be segregated with more of them employed in 'professional schools', etc. the clerical staff is largely white women. the maintenance staff is largely black men.
and there the problem often is that you don't even have grad students in the pipeline in order to be part of the candidate pool when hiring -- especially when you're hiring for a generic position that isn't specialized. my friend, R, did her diss on how the pipeline of black grad students in academia has been shrinking over the past decade. much of it was racism in the way we often think. but it was also because, having few economic resources to draw from, they tended not to even choose academia as a viable option in the first place: they need to earn money sooner, the professional degrees offer far more money sooner (typically), they had more family members calling on them for assistance and felt a bigger burden so couldn't perform as well as they might like. (there's some research on this, i can dig it out)
a guy i really like at my alma mater got denied tenure. they said it was because he hadn't published enough. but part of the reason why he hadn't published enough in the right journals was because he had taken on the position of dept chair. now, this was a silly thing to do -- but, he did it and i don't know why former mentors didn't discourage him -- mine sure discouraged me from the opportunity to edit a book! and his colleagues didn't recognize it as a bad idea either! i don't know why. but then good mentoring is in short suply too, as is the notion of solidaristic comradery among colleagues. so, he spent a year as chair of the African American studies department and was a great teacher. a *really* great teacher. but none of that was redeemable for tenure points in the end.
that's a form of structural oppression: the standards of what counts as "good" scholarship are biased to what i fondly call the upper middle class white male who has someone to wipe his butt for him and no one else to worry about. (a wife, a live in girlfriend, family that's there with financial support or job connections, family well off enough not to need his contributions---material and emotional--to the family coffers, etc)