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The black and white of being black or white
Apparently there is a black man in the White House.
How he got there is a bit of mystery, given the findings of a new survey that reinforces an old and sorry truth.
The survey by business researchers, including one from B.C., concludes a white man is still considered more capable and trustworthy, never mind his performance.
The researchers at the universities of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, British Columbia, Michigan, and Washington and at West Point found that white males, whether they are doctors, bookstore employees, or working at golf courses, got higher customer satisfaction ratings than women or people of colour.
These findings were also borne out through more than 10,000 medical patients' ratings of their doctors. Patients who received e-mail from their doctor were more satisfied with their doctor's competence and approachability, but only if the doctor was a white man.
“What it says to me is that if you’re a woman or a minority, you’ve got to be at least 25 per cent better than the white male to be seen equally. It’s like putting a price tag on people,’’ said the astonished study’s lead author, David Hekman, of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in U.S. media reports.
Co-author Karl Aquino, said: “What’s unsettling about our study is that when women and minorities perform better, they actually get lower performance ratings and are perceived more negatively. And we don’t yet really know why. They even judged the overall environment [of the doctor’s office, bookstore, or golf course] more negatively.’’
This survey has shocked some people.
But sadly, for many of us, the conclusions are hardly surprising.
Growing up in a world where blackness is attached to badness, our stereotypes have been honed to such a degree that very few can recognize the colour of our prejudices.
Just reach out to a dictionary and you can see how the word black is used as a negative intensifier to denote the malignant, the evil, the defamed and the people of lesser Gods.
The semantic broadening of black to denote bad has continued unabated over the centuries inculcating a deep suspicion of anything and everything to do with the colour.
On the other hand, when it comes to the word white the root definition revolves around purity, goodness, truth, joy, stainless, spotless, and innocent.
Hence, the ways we look at black people, or for that matter anyone not white.
Perhaps the cruelest manifestation of being black or a woman employee as shown by this survey is the experiment with customer satisfaction ratings.
This experiment showed that if you were not a white male, it did not matter how well you dealt with your customers.
In service industries where over 60 per cent of employees have their remuneration tied to customer opinions, the ramifications of this in-built bias can be devastating.
Some people say that being black today is an advantage.
Just look at Obama they say.
For many of us, and as this study has shown, that is just a white lie.
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