When applying for jobs in North America, we are greeted wit the following:
☐ Women
☐ Aboriginal People
☐ Visible Minority
☐ Persons with Disabilities
There is a disclaimer saying self-identifying doesn’t affect who is hired. But that’s not true. If it was, they wouldn’t ask. Companies are now government-mandated to hire a certain distribution. I know 50% have to be women and about 25% minimum has to be visible minorities. Therefore, if you hit those categories you are more likely to get hired.
So how does this affect your job hunt?
Has is helped you find a job?
Has it prevented you from getting a job?
Is there an advantage to being a certain gender or ethnicity?
Well now it gets interesting as anyone can claim to be a woman and it’s wrong to tell them otherwise. I wonder if I can similiarily claim to be an aboriginal. And in a global city like Toronto where white people are no longer 50% of the population, isn’t EVERYONE a visible minority by definition.
Another example of the pendulum swinging way too far. Dang liberals. What’s next, a gay/lesbian quota? Life isn’t fair, yea it never was. But trying to help 1 group always creates discrimination against another.
Yeah, except being white has given me no advantages. People assume I am rich because I am white and therefore have privliges. So there’s dealing with that. I am an immigrant like all the minorites. In fact, in Canada, only 0.06% of the population is from the same place as I am… but I don’t get to claim minority status because my skin is white… So indeed being a white male isn’t all it’s hyped up to be.
However, if I come to a job and there is a woman with the same qualifications and background as me… who will get the job? Then switch the woman for a person of aboriginal descent… who would get the job then? Does it depend on the company’s internal distribution? I wonder…
I can tell you it has never mattered in any of my hiring decisions, but that’s not to say it doesn’t matter at all. Government employers certainly will factor that in, but in the private sector people hire who they think is best. Generally that is someone who looks like them.
White privilege only works if your family is well connected and privileged. If you’re a poor white, you’re a poor white, just as there are a 800m+ even more improverished chinese people in China. Think about that.
It’s funny because when you look at high finance jobs in Canada, most of them are dominated by white people while the BO and other low paying, non client facing jobs are crewed by non-whites. It cuts both ways, you just hope to be on the right side of the curve.
Another funny anecdote. There was a capital markets scholarship/rotation program offered by one of the bulge brackets to encourage minorities to join, “for women, blacks, aboriginals, pacific islanders and asian women”. Read that twice. No white males and no asians or indian males. I had a good laugh. Too bad, it looked like a good program.
Bottom line is, stop worrying about this shit and what privileges you have or don’t have and get on with it. As a white male your chances of breaking out of the back office is already 100% higher than an indian or asian male.
I get it. And I’m certainly not offended by this by any means. But honestly. I don’t think white people have an advantage. That is a myth. Sometimes, the way distributions work is white culture promotes white people to study business admin and customer service is important in white culture so they will seek front office jobs and their skills and training will give them the jobs. Meanwhile immigrants from Asia are studying math and engineering which is important in their culture and isn’t anything to do with customer service… so… their skills and training get them back office jobs. Not everything is racist. Sometimes factors other than skin colour come into play. So yes, more white people will be client facing and more asian people will be back office, but who says client facing is better? I for one don’t like it. I like middle and back office. There is nothing low or offensive about those areas of business. So again, white privilege… I’ll believe it when I see it. Maybe it should be called rich priviledge, but people that think white people get ahead because of their skin colour are sorely mistaken.
White people always think the above, but it is simply not true. I used to think that way, until I spent many years being the only white guy in my group of friends. Then I started to notice some of the subtlities. But I still didn’t fully grasp it. If you are interested reading something I found very helpful, I’d recommend reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria/dp/0465083617
But even when we agree that being white gives us large advantages, some of which are easier to notice than others, there is still a question of what is the best thing to do about it. I haven’t thought enough about it really to have a strong stance either way; unfortunately, most people who have strong stances have done less reading than I on the subject.
Agreed with your first point. Everyone seems to confuse white privilege with the privilege of wealth as if its the same thing and means the same thing. Obviously a black wealthy family has privileges a poor white one does not. There are many different forms of priviledge and everyone is at different levels on each scale. When it comes to race clearly there are societal benefits to being white, people seems to get angry when hearing that thinking it means others are saying they have it EASY. When discussing WP people are not saying you have it easy, which you may or may not due to other privileges, who knows, you cant tell that based off of skin color alone. It seems crazy how warped some peoples perception of WP is, as it isnt the craziest concept out there. If you can not see that it is better to be white in western culutres than any other race, you clearly just have your head in the sand.