So I'm going to tell a personal story about white privilege and hiring practices. I've had urges before to post this but the people most likely to read it are probably the people who I'm not really speaking to and I also don't want people to feel any guilt, shame, or pity. However, white privilege and hiring practices have been brought up itt, so I'm going to go with it. This might be long as this is complete stream of consciousness.
So I have always been of the opinion that in some ways I have got to experience some form of white privilege because of where I grew up. I mean I had to deal with things like my girlfriend's parents once calling me to their house to have dinner and to tell us about how miserable our lives are going to be because they have friends and neighbors that would kill their daughter's boyfriend if he were black and that no one wants zebra babies and I will never be able to be able to support a family because no one in Kansas will hire a black to do anything but manual labor. But because I didn't grow up around black people, other than my family of course, I learned to assimilate with the people around me, it wasn't even assimilating but it is just all I knew. So when I got older and I was around white people I didn't feel terribly uncomfortable because that was and has been my life. I grew up in Kansas and as an adult I lived in Carrollton, TX, Maine, Boston, New Hampshire, an rural Iowa. So when I meet black people who have to interact with a majority of white people when they haven't to this point in their lives I feel a twinge of guilt.
So there were two times in my life, obviously there have been more, but these two times I am going to talk about were times when white privilege slapped me in the face and both were job related. The first concurred when I was in high school, it was the summer before my junior year and I had a job but I wanted another one because I wanted to save up to buy a car. At the time there were five black boys at Garden City High School out of nearly 2000 students, I was good friends with two of them. Me and one of the other black guys, who also had a job but was looking for another one at the time decided to apply for a job at Meyers Ice, I think they are still around. Anyway they advertised that they were looking for high schoolers for seasonal help. Me and my friend that went in to apply, we didn't go in together, had both had work experience. I had a job non stop from the time I was 12 until now, and he had the same job for three years before we applied. Well the gentleman hiring at Meyers Ice didn't hire either of us, he ended up hiring three white kids, two of which were good friends of mine, none of them had ever had a job before, two of them were physically significantly smaller than us which is odd for a job that required you to move blocks and bags of ice all day. As if there were any doubt that we weren't hired because we were black, all doubt was removed when the guys were told that some niggers tried to get that job.
Some of you may know that I am a camp director. I have worked in this field for 15 years. I used to work in New England, for those of you that don't know the camping field, working at private camps in New England is like coaching football in the SEC, it's undoubtedly the best of the best. I spent 7 years working at a coed camp with tuition of $10,000 a summer. I was the head counselor which at this camp is essentially the offensive line or quarterbacks coach. When you work in private for-profit camping a lot of your time in the offseason is spent with recruiting campers, again very similar to coaching football. After seven years at this camp I got the opportunity to go to a similar camp, but all boys to be the assistant director; essentially the offensive coordinator. I happily took the position as it put me one step closer to becoming a director. After about six months on the job it was very obvious that although I was the offensive coordinator, one of the people working under me, 10 years my junior in age and experience, was essentially the director in waiting. Now this person was the current owner/director's daughter so I wasn't completely pissed but I couldn't stay at a position that I had no chance of advancing in. After two years I decided to start looking for a director's job. I was point blank told that as a black man I didn't stand much of a chance of getting a job in the liberal northeast because it would be tough for parents and referral agents to send their kids to me. I also failed to mention that I was also told by one of these directors that I was the "whitest black guy they have ever met," this happened in a professional setting. I had great references and recommendations from some of the most well thought of people in this industry yet I couldn't get an owner of a private camp to believe in me, all because of the color of my skin. Now I am the director of a non for profit agency camp in Iowa which is the equivalency of being the head coach of a division three school.
The point of all of this is that white privilege absolutely exists no matter how some people want to deny it's existence. Look at college and pro sports coaches, these are the most public of jobs you can have in this country. Look at the opportunities black coaches get, look at what happens when they fail then compare that with white coaches that fail. There simply isn't the same opportunities afforded minority coaches and the same amount of rope given to succeed, this isn't even in doubt. So if it is this way with the very public hiring and firing of sports team coaches, how do you think it is in the private sector where there is no attention, no scrutiny? There is simply no way it can be better.
Thanks for listening.
