SH wrote:
Quote:
You are creating a false dichotomy. It's either "pennies on the dollar," or "everyone will get paid the same because capitalism fixes racism." What you are neglecting is the degrees at which both racism and desire for profitability play. Just because someone would be willing to hire a black person, or a woman, or a gay person, etc. for pennies on the dollar, doesn't mean that they'll be willing to fire them for exactly the same rate as a straight white man. They may be willing to do it at 90% the rate. Or 80% the rate. Etc.
Your argument also assumes that hiring a black person won't impact profits. What if their position is, for example, sales, or as a model, or spokesperson, and they are in a community/industry where people would just rather interact with a straight white male?
Better points, but let me explain why you're not right here. I see a lot of emotions get roiled up when I talk about people, so let me give an example with stocks and once the concept is clear, we'll transfer that back to people.
The stock market finds prices for stocks. Let's take Amazon for instance. There may be a lot of people that hate Amazon. There may be a lot of people completely ignorant of Amazon. There may be a lot of people without the accounting and financial chops to evaluate Amazon. And all those groups could be a vast majority of purchasers for all I know. But the stock market will still find a "correct" price for Amazon and other stocks that have proven to be largely impossible for the best fund managers to consistently beat. (And there's plenty of debate as to whether the best are simply the luckiest, because as we are constantly reminded -- past performance is not an indicator of future returns.) People can buy stocks and lose money. People can still buy stocks and make money. If you had one type of stock that ALWAYS made money then you would buy it up until it got to a price where it would make and lose money largely as other stocks would expect to.
This same phenomenon happens in the work place all the time. People get employees for "pennies on the dollar" all the time. They're called good employees. People get ripped off on employees all the time. They're called bad employees. Really the pricing model suggests that people are paid what they are expected to be worth. If it was obvious that one race, sex, or class of employees was just as good as the others for a cheaper price (or any other mathematical configuration of the same concept) then employers would swoop them up. Swooping them up, of course, until the price goes up.
And this is like stock pricing in that the majority by-standers are largely irrelevant.
You keep answering as if you believe racists think rationally. The very nature of bigotry of all kinds is that it is not based in reason and logic. It might be perfectly logical to hire "x" group. But people bigoted against x's are not making rational decisions based on sound economic principles. They often think they are being perfectly reasonable in discriminating against them, x's are unreliable, lazy, steal, do drugs, customers don't like them, ... Market forces are not going to correct that.
And just because a small subset of employers do make a rational choice does not make up for it. We have a very long history of racism and sexism to fall back on for reference points that illustrate this. We aren't just speculating.
I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.