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Saying that powerful people want X and I think that it is prudent to
go along with X so that it doesn’t cause me any issues is a fair
position. It might not be the most principled on paper but it is
justifiable in terms of self preservation, assuming you can be sure of
the impact of your actions. I also find it to be more honest than trying
obfuscate your true intentions and concerns. Be direct and drop the
pretense.
Related to the first point, when someone complains about hiring based
identity(1), depending on their identity, they may move from a state of
impossibility to highly improbable. If MegaCorp says, I’m going to hire
6 green people and 1 purple people, if you are the 7th green person,
you might be upset about the purple person’s job. Put more directly, you
are upset about MegaCorp’s decision to hire a purple person instead of
one more green person.
Sounds good?
There are at least two issues that I notice. The first is that is it,
in most cases, impossible to know if you are the 7th person. Outside of
some cases in academia, you can’t really know if you are person 7 or
person 777. Leading from that point, the second part is what happens
next. Suppose you aren’t, person 7 but person 777 or just person 10, you
still don’t get the job. Nothing has changed for you. You might feel
that you have been beaten more fairly but you still lost. This is sort
of a zero sum game or musical chairs. If you lose a chair you could
never have due to your identity or if you lose a chair you could have
had but you just weren’t good enough, the result is the same.
Of course, because of what jobs and what they represent (0:
Livelihood 1: Quantifiable measurements of the market value of your
labor, time and morbidly your life at a time slice in a particular place
according to a particular set of people, the employers) perhaps losing
“fairly” matters to certain people. Perhaps it satisfies something
outside of the economic. But, for green person 7 or green person 777,
doesn’t it initially make sense to go after green people 1-6? Is the
idea that those green people *ought* to occupy those jobs and it is
*only* the purple person that is out of order? I mean, that’s fine but
it doesn’t change anything for your situation.
In my lifetime, I’ve applied to many, many jobs and held quite a few.
Conservatively, I can say that of the jobs that I’ve applied for, I’ve
been hired on for maybe 20% of them. In my particular field, I can be
sure that most of the jobs I didn’t get went to white males. Does it
really matter to me? Of course not. Why? Because it makes no difference
if the job went to a white male or a black woman, a gay vet or whomever,
the pressing matter is that *I* didn’t get it. Of the jobs I have
applied for and received, the only thing that really matters is that I
got it. I don’t know how many people applied for the same jobs that I
got but I got it. If any job I applied to was limited only to black
males, my mentality wouldn’t change. I’d still have to beat the
competition. Shrinking the sample size or raising the amount of jobs
might raise your probability on an individual level but it doesn’t make a
difference if you “lose.” You are in the same boat either way.
*When people talk about identity it’s often just a stand in for race
but it doesn’t have to be. For an example, Starbucks pledged to hire
10,000 vets but I don’t think anyone complained about that. From my
perspective, it doesn’t matter if you lose a job because of a Vet, to a
gay person, to a black person or to a woman. The economic state is
exactly the same. You lost. Now, I’m not saying that without compassion.
I’ve been disappointed about not getting a job I wanted before. But,
from my perspective, it doesn’t matter if you lose to someone who looks
like you or someone who doesn’t. A loss is a loss and seeing how the
people are selected, the real animosity should be turned towards the
selectees imo. I, of course, have a major caveat to this but I’m
strictly talking about philosophy at this time.
In summation, what I’m really saying is that sometimes these
conversations get extremely group oriented when the reality is, they
should be focused on individuals. I’m not saying that group action isn’t
justified nor am I even saying that collective outrage isn’t required
from time to time. What I am saying is, once you’ve eliminated the job
for the purple person, are you sure you are the green person that will
be selected? If not, an internal dialog needs to happen with the
external conversation.
Edit: Don’t mention starting your own business on this. Yes that’s a
third option but that’s not what I want to talk about on this post.
