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Back to the OP, my wife is from SE Asia and I agree with everyting charged in that post. MY wife has no sensabilities towards other races and I often have to caution her about what she says or does. Most of the time the best thing she can do is be quiet and she does that very well.
Her problem with Afirmative action is two fold. First blacks being promoted while by- passing whites and other minorities with obviously better credentials. It happens all the time because as a company that contracts heavy with the Federal governmnet AA is required. So if there are 100 positions in upper management in a community that is 22% black then 22 of those employees must be black ( whether they are qualified or not). The second problem is the reverse discrimination of AA. Asians hit the glass ceiling at upper mgt because if the Asian population is only 3% in the community and there are already 3 Asians in upper mgt then there is no more room for Asians.
Asians get the AA shaft coming and going and are naturally a little resentful about it
Back to the OP, my wife is from SE Asia and I agree with everyting charged in that post. MY wife has no sensabilities towards other races and I often have to caution her about what she says or does. Most of the time the best thing she can do is be quiet and she does that very well.
Her problem with Afirmative action is two fold. First blacks being promoted while by- passing whites and other minorities with obviously better credentials. It happens all the time because as a company that contracts heavy with the Federal governmnet AA is required. So if there are 100 positions in upper management in a community that is 22% black then 22 of those employees must be black ( whether they are qualified or not). The second problem is the reverse discrimination of AA. Asians hit the glass ceiling at upper mgt because if the Asian population is only 3% in the community and there are already 3 Asians in upper mgt then there is no more room for Asians.
Asians get the AA shaft coming and going and are naturally a little resentful about it
Do you complain when whites get promoted over minorities with obviously better credentials?
I was talking to a group of black friends about racism and discrimination and they told me something interesting. The popular perception is that most of the negative reaction towards black people is from racist White people. They say this is not true. Instead, the worst racism is from other people of color. Dark Skinned Blacks are openly discriminated against by light skinned blacks but perhaps the most racist group is Asian immigrants. They were never taught to be politically correct or sensitive and racism is quite common in their old countries. As more and more of American population comes from Asia and the Middle East African Americans will experience more racism that is quite blantent and extreme.
What can be done about immigrants who treat African Americans with contempt?
Don't forget the homies from south of the border who like to kill blacks in California.
Do you complain when whites get promoted over minorities with obviously better credentials?
I was thinking the same thing.
Also does your wife have a problem with AA when it is used for women? She more than likely is there due to AA due to being female if her company is that into AA policies.
Personally, as a black woman who does oversee some HR duties at my own position, I can say that we do not use race as a determination in regards to hiring. I don't know if any companies I have worked for do that honestly. I do feel in a lot of government agencies they might, especially in places where there are not a lot of ethnic minorities, but I have always lived in major cities with black populations I know of over 20%. Currently I live in an area with a majority black population. We like to try to find white people to hire. We also like to hire Asians and we do have some Asian employees, Koreans, due to us serving people in apartment complexes who are Korean and us wanting to have a good representation of Koreans amongst our employees. We also seek out Russians as we have an even larger Russian population.
Most of us are black though at the company, but like I said, most people here period are black. In a way both Asians and whites are overrepresented in my company compared to the general population. We only have one hispanic employee and so that is VERY underrepresentative of our hispanic population in our city.
I was talking to a group of black friends about racism and discrimination and they told me something interesting. The popular perception is that most of the negative reaction towards black people is from racist White people. They say this is not true. Instead, the worst racism is from other people of color. Dark Skinned Blacks are openly discriminated against by light skinned blacks but perhaps the most racist group is Asian immigrants. They were never taught to be politically correct or sensitive and racism is quite common in their old countries. As more and more of American population comes from Asia and the Middle East African Americans will experience more racism that is quite blantent and extreme.
What can be done about immigrants who treat African Americans with contempt?
With Asians, that mainly applies to the "fresh off the boat" immigrants. Also, it's as much a matter of naivete and ignorance as it is outright dislike.
2nd generation American-born Asian kids are, for the most part, a different kettle of fish. (Hawaii and certain other locales being an exception.) They're just as crazy about black culture as any white kids, and tend to leave behind old country provincialism as they grow up and are educated in America.
Most Asian immigrants don't have positive experiences with black and Hispanic people. I was at a Chinese takeaway yesterday in a semi-gentrified area of New York. This loud hysterical Puerto Rican started screaming at the cashier that he would "send him back to his country." So, yeah, I can see why many Asian immigrants don't respond positively to these sorts of wild animals.
Let's also not forget there was a series of black on Asian murders that were going down in San Francisco. Sadly an 80 year old Chinese grandfather was killed. A group of thugs with similar appearance to Chief Keef pushed him out into the train tracks. He died that night.
In the late seventies I was in Lithuania and really got sick of being stared at. When approached everyone assumed that I was a Cuban boxer.
It's uncomfortable to admit, but having grown up in the whitest of whitest societies - I might have stared, too. It really wasn't until I moved the US I got a taste of a multiracial society/workplace. But if you reach adulthood having seen a black person in real life perhaps four or five times, yeah - it's hard to overcome curiosity. It's not malevolent, really. (I now tremble at the thought of putting my foot in it, it's such a charged subject. Luckily I have an accent - people tend to assume the weird European means well.)
As for the larger picture, crossing myself thrice as I enter a loaded debate and admittedly painting with a very broad brush: Towards the lower end of society's ladder, the rungs tend to be very close together and the chances for advancing few and far between. Which means the competition gets vicious. To make matters worse, the US is not really offering much of a US cultural identity for those not making it into the middle class. So young people with lesser prospects make their own, and racial identity is an easy one - particularly if surrounding society doesn't see you as young man, but a young Hispanic, Asian, African-American etc. The race-based identity is right there and easy to fall into.
It's not a healthy combination.
On the other hand, I have every race and combination thereof in my robustly middle-class workplace, and nobody gives a hoot. The competition is still fierce, but now it's about getting that extra headcount from those a-holes in the mainframe department who clearly do not need it any more. And I'd have to think hard to remember the races of those involved.
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