When we look at another person, what is it that we first perceive, and react to? The clothing that they wear? The cadence of their voice? Or, is it instead the color of their skin, or the shape of their eyes?
Being inherently biased against someone on the basis of their skin color may seem like something we have left long behind in the past, a foregone notion replaced by internationalism and a “blindness to color”, but in reality, that sadly is not the case. In fact, research has found that racism is not skin-deep – in fact, even the perceived race of one’s name can give someone a variety of different impressions.
So, let’s start off with the first: In a 2003 study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers found that resumes that were assigned a more stereotypically Caucasian name, such as say, Leslie, were at least 50 percent more likely to be called back for an actual interview rather than those prefaced with stereotypically Black names, like perhaps LaKisha. Were the resumes all of the same quality? No, but the relationship found between the quality of the resume and the frequency of callbacks varied wildly when accounting for differences in race.
With a better resume, “White” applicants (or at least those with white-sounding names) were 30 percent more likely to receive a callback. With “Black” applicants? A whopping increase of 9 percent in the likelihodo that they would be offered an interview.
This “name discrimination” might seem to be something that has no direct correlation to real life, but it signals a much larger problem in our society: that of subtle racism.
While it is easy to see the effects of explicit racial and social discrimination, as in such incidents like the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, in which Gray died due to both the negligence and actions of police officers leaving him in a coma for which he did not receive treatment, but bias still lies under the surface, and “microaggressions” are only part of that problem.
But, let’s back-step a bit, and look at some…macroaggressions, for lack of a better term.
Thousands of immigrants walk for miles to the Mexico-US border with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their feet are hardened by the sand they walk under, throats parched by the blistering heat of the Chihuahuan desert. They have left their lives in Central and South America behind – jobs, homes, perhaps even family, small children that they hope will be able to lead better lives than themselves; who are not forced to under take this trek towards an uncertain future.
Many don’t make it. Lost along the way to dehydration, fatigue, or a bevy of other reasons, their bones are found scattered in the sand by border patrol agents, unrecognisable to even their loved ones.
The lucky few who do survive the trek, are then greeted with coldness and cruelty by a country that once professed that it was home to all who shared in the American Dream, locked in cells with nary but a prayer, stuck behind a gigantic door on which all they can do knock and hope for better days.
The American Dream may have once represented the collective desires of the American people, displaying how anybody could become somebody through hard work, but now, that same opportunity seems as if it isn’t being offered to certain people.
It is alright to be scared – normal, even, to be frightened of that we don’t actually know or understand. However, it isn’t alright to become complacent in that lack of knowledge, in that lack of awareness about the greater world around us. By calling those who are merely looking for a way out of the horrid situation they are in invaders and undesirables, we lose the empathy that we need in order to actually understand new experiences and accept people with practices and traditions vastly different from our own.
More simply, by placing an entire nation into an “us vs. them” mentality, we are willingly taking part in the dehumanization of a, at least for the most part, wholly innocent group of people who have committed the crime of searching for a better life for their families. It is risky to cross the border, perhaps even foolish to break the law in the hope that what you will find a better life on the other side. But, that does not mean any single person who has done so has forfeited their right to be human, to be alive, and most importantly, to make something better for themselves.
While it would be easy to say that the American Dream was an absolutely perfect ideal, the cycle that successive groups of immigrants have needed to go through in order to be considered truly “American”, for whatever that means, is deplorable at best, and an absolute affront to human rights at worst.
Just as quickly as they are blamed for taking jobs from “deserving” Americans, Caribbean and South and Central American immigrants have demonstrated a willingness to take on the jobs that no one else will, the ones that everyone deems below them. In California, over 50 percent of all farmworkers are undocumented – toiling hours and hours each day in the field, fighting for their meager earnings, so they can send at least a tiny fraction of it back home to help sustain their families.
However, it isn’t just in the orchards that uncodumented migrants make up most of the workforce – in the rapidly expanding home health care industry, there are over a million immigrants working as home health aides for elderly, a number which doesn’t include the tens of thousands who may be DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) receipients, or those who had TPS (temporary protected status) as immigrants.
In America, the so-called “undesirables” may be ballooning, and taking away jobs from potentially hard-working Americans, but they are the ones who harvest your crops, take care of your ailing grandma, and really, do everything that everyone else considers below them. Essentially, the social status of these immigrants is already on rock-bottom, and each action is yet another kick to the face while they are already down.
That’s not to say all immigrants in the US are doing poorly, of course. As a whole, Asian-Americans continue their trend of being “model minorities”, boasting a far larger contribution to the work force than their share of the population would suggest (5% of the population to 12% of the work force), and on average attain are more educated than the average American, but it is important to note that this is on average, and does not even account for the wide socioeconomic differences between Asian and Pacific Islander ethnic groups in America.
While East and South Asian Americans, including Chinese and Indian-Americans among others do indeed tend to boast educational achievement above the average, the same does not hold true for many Southeast Asian groups. In fact, around 36 percent of all Southeast Asian American adults do not hold a high school diploma. However, due to the broad generalization of Asian Americans, these underperforming groups often do not get the resources that they need, trapping them in a cycle of poverty.
However, that doesn’t mean that Asian-American college-educated professionals gain any more success working than their Caucasian counterparts. While hired in greater numbers than African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans in the San Francisco area tech industry, Asian-Americans were also the least likely to get promoted, due to a perceived lack of leadership qualities.
While on paper Asian-Americans seem to be doing better than ever before, deep economic inequality lies in the most opmitistic of statistics, with whole swaths of communities left underfunded and overlooked.
America may be a nation made up of immigrants, but it seems as for those who are not Caucasian, becoming “truly American” still remains a large obstacle.
From African-Americans, to Hispanic-Americans, to Southeast-Asian Americans, whole communities are left behind in a century in which everything is prized on speed. “In today’s world, the internet must be quicket, transportation must be quicker, progress must be quicker – but at what cost?” Progresss is great, but only when the gains of that progress are shared across social strata. Inequal progression only widens disparities that have long been present, yet still ignored. If equity comes at the cost of absolute speed, then the world will be all the better for it. We must be measured, we must be thorough, but above all, we must be kind, and willing to sympathize with those we may not fully understand. Hear out their concerns, listen to their struggles, and most importantly, keep their stories in our hearts.
Minor Differences 