“It has taken two hundred and thirty-two years and a hundred and fifteen prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. But we’ve made it. All of us,” she [Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson] said. “Our children are telling me that they see now more than ever that here in America anything is possible.”
But it is also true that the existence of these highly successful Black people has obscured the harsh fact that tens of millions of ordinary Black people suffer from high rates of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and other measures of deprivation. For example, though the U.S. is currently experiencing historic lows of unemployment, Black workers still face nearly twice the rate of unemployment of white workers. A 2021 study based on an experiment that sent out eighty-three thousand fictitious job applications with random characteristics to the hundred and eight largest employers in the United States found that “distinctively black names” reduced the “probability of employer contact.” According to the study, twenty-three of the employers were “found to discriminate against Black applicants.” In 2022, Wells Fargo was forced to pay eight million dollars to more than thirty thousand Black job applicants to settle a claim based on a Department of Labor lawsuit, which alleged that the bank interviewed Black applicants for jobs that had already been filled in order to fulfill diversity requirements. The United States is awash in racism even as some Black people have risen to the highest ranks within our country—including the Presidency."
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor @ NY-er
If living wage jobs get harder to find, and they have since at least 1980 because of anti-union gov policies, frozen minimum wages, outsourcing and neoliberal globalization, but at the same time government jobs are being filled disproportionately by Black people (as mentioned in the story) what is that going to look like to working class white people finding it increasingly difficult to find living wage work? But the living wage squeeze isn't because of gov DEI policies, Black unemployment still doubles that of whites, Taylor points out; it's because beginning with Reagan the gov gave up on supporting full-employment and working class living wages. And, really, race and ethnic divisions have always been a favorite tool of capital in dividing and conquering labor rights. P.S. Also, adding to the "cutting off your nose to spite your face" list we've been informally compiling about conservatives, turns out white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of DEI policies.
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