Ben Wrobel: Last week Alabama’s Student Senate passed a resolution supporting the complete integration of Greek life at the university. The renewed conversation about race at the historically troubled campus began after a black female student with a 4.3 GPA was denied by all 16 of the school’s sororities. An earlier resolution supporting racial integration had failed by a wide margin. ...Although de jure (“by law”) segregation is now illegal, de facto (“in fact”) segregation is still a reality. This is true for Greek organizations, which are often nominally integrated but severely homogenous. But de facto segregation extends to all parts of American life. Entire colleges, grade schools,churches and neighborhoods are separated along racial lines, producing distinct social networks in white communities and in communities of color. This self-segregation causes inequality to reproduce itself. As DiTomaso has written, access to opportunity depends in part on the color of your skin: Help is typically reserved for people who are “like me”: the people who live in my neighborhood, those who attend my church or school or those with whom I have worked in the past. It is only natural that when there are jobs to be had, people who know about them will tell the people who are close to them, those with whom they identify, and those who at some point can reciprocate the favor. This type of discrimination is harder to combat because it is not intentional. When a business owner offers an internship to his neighbor’s son, or sends a job opening to his fraternity’s listserv, it is “bias for, not bias against.” As DiTomaso told me, “It’s not that whites won’t help blacks when given the opportunity to do so. It’s just that they don’t know them.”
Posted on: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 03:42:21 +0000
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