Nice, or not nice?

FYI Boeing in Charleston, South Carolina has a higher proportion of black people demographically

C2 - thanks for the respectful reply.

You will have to understand my skepticism of overly relying on academic research in this domain. The very first place where I was consistently told that I was “oppressed” and a “victim” was…the campus of Columbia University, as a freshman in 1999 (if I was “oppressed” by anything, it was the Columbia tuition bill!) The grievance caucus was around back then, but I can only imagine what students today are being taught. These professors who publish on nothing but race-related topics do not even cache their bias, and much of their work is heavily influenced by critical race theory, a legal-sociological doctrine which I reject.

And yes - I do believe that individual agency virtually always wins, at the end of the day. I simply have to look at my own family, and other black families I know, for the proof. There is nothing exceptional or historically privileged about any of us. Same ancestral lineage, same history of distant ancestors suffering through the brutal Middle Passage, and in modern times, same schools, same neighborhoods, etc. And yet there are wide disparities in outcomes. Myself and a small handful of others in my extended family made it into the 1%. Most have respectfully solid middle class lives, albeit under the same pressures roiling the entire American middle class. A few are blue collar/working class and struggling. And then a regrettable number are essentially fully disengaged from work, in and out of jail, having 6 babies by 6 different women, and doing god only knows what to get by.

In other words - people with the exact same resources and culture at birth, ended up with vastly different outcomes. It’s not racism, it’s choices. I could have accurately told you 25 years ago which of my cousins were not likely to amount to much, because they were already making shitty life choices as teenagers. They were among the ones obsessed with how I was “acting so white that I might turn into Michael Jackson.” Now they occasionally ask me “how I did it” and I’m tempted to tell them “simple - I saw the shitty choices you were making as a teen, and I did the opposite.”

That all might sound harsh, but it’s a simple reality folks need to hear if we *legitimately* want to break this cycle of underachievement in African American communities. It is the message I always pass to the young black men I mentor. Nobody else is going to fix your messes for you in life, and we must stop pretending that African Americans are so uniquely hobbled by the past that it is impossible for us to chart a better course forward.

Life tends to be, yes

IBM1 what group do Indians see themselves as part of? I don’t see too often Chinese/Korean/Japanese saying they are being grouped together with Indians and SE Asians

Nobody suggested quotas. Stop playing into the false dichotomy of black vs. qualified. The simple fact is there are plenty fantastic black engineers, sales, marketing, and BD folks, administrators, and others to staff the entire company 100x over.

Representation is a complex issue that requires interventions all along the talent pipeline from primary education to executive hiring/promotions, and reducing the voice of those who want equal opportunity to “they just want everyone to implement quotas immediately” is an asinine dogwhistle that prevents any constructive conversation about how to ensure opportunity