Friday, October 18, 2013

Can I hide my "blackness" behind a resume?

               



            There are so many barriers and obstacles that African Americans and other minorities must do and avoid in order to get jobs, hell to even get interviewed. There is so much you must avoid or cover up as an African American to get a job such as avoiding a criminal record, a “black-sounding” name, being affiliated with historically black organizations and colleges, and the list goes on. Research and statistics, conducted by MIT economist Sendhil Mullainathan, support that people who had names that typically were a black person’s name or where affiliated with “black” organizations where significantly less likely to get called back. Discrimination continues to be a major component of the African American component.
 In many cases people who are African American are racially discriminated by employers’ way before a physical interview. You may ask “How can an employer discriminate against someone’s race if they never seen or talked to the person?” The answer is very simple, the information that is put in a resume. A person’s name, associations and/or memberships, and type of college (if historically black or not) are racially discriminated against because it tips off what racial background people are from, especially pertaining to African Americans and Latinos. What good does a four-year college degree from the University of Northern Illinois do for an African American named Rasheed? Why even go to college if as soon as an employer sees the name “Rasheed” on a resume, without seeing any of the credentials, throws the resume in a pile to be recycled. It seems that a college degree would only be good for him if he could hide or change his name all together so that he could be called back and formally interviewed, at least giving him a better opportunity getting the  job.  
The most important thing as an African American (or minority for that matter) is to not have a criminal record. In the United States when you are a minority with a criminal record your chances of getting a job is slim to none. In a study done by Devah Pager and Bruce Western, both professors at Princeton university, showed that white people with a felony conviction were still more than twice as likely to get called back than African Americans who were equally qualified and had no criminal record. What does this say about the land of the free?  Why is the United States thought of as being the land of equal opportunity?
For anyone to say that race doesn’t determine your job chances but instead your level of education determines your chances is sadly ignorant to how this insidious country truly operates. I don’t know why minorities are racially discriminated by what they have on a resume but for all of the following information that has been presented above, as an African American, I think that it is better to hide your race as best as you can when making a resume.
 

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