.
Black women are disproportionately affected by unemployment in the U.S. According to the Labor Department, the economic gains made within this country have largely bypassed black women. We aren't speaking of uneducated black women. We are also speaking of the many college educated black women looking for work in the labor market. There is still prevalent racial discrimination facing women of color but that's not all that black women are facing. Black women also face a process I've coined as "corporate steering". This is a process by which a highly qualified, highly experienced, highly educated black female is 'steered' into lower paying positions by corporate recruiters, HR Directors and Management. This happens a lot. One of the most disheartening things I've witnessed about living in the State of Texas is the high number of black women who have all of these qualifications and who are working in jobs paying a little over minimum wage. Most give up. Most know that deep down there is a strong racial component to the fact they have not been able to progress up the corporate ladder as white males and even white women, but they have learned to remain silent. They are angry although they are silent. I do believe this silent anger is driving the increase among black women into Entrepreneurship. Even with their tremendous qualifications, most find themselves earning so much less than their non-black counterparts, entrepreneurship becomes all the more alluring to them.
Personally, I have several friends and family members who have launched their own businesses and I have been proud to support their endeavors. Black entrepreneurship needs to be promoted within our communities. It has to be promoted if one day we are to turn these numbers around.
Black people need to take back our communities. It's time we started promoting and supporting black owned businesses. I am mystified why many African Americans have not been able to draw the correlation between black business ownership and economic self-sustainment. Living in Texas I have seen so many of my fellow African Americans treated like shit by these corporations. They areoften the last hired and first fired and even when working they face overt and sometimes hostile racial discrimination in the workplace as well as lower pay for equal work. If they all started suing these corporations, the courts would be clogged with lawsuits.
Something has to change. I am beyond anger and I am simply mystified at why blacks allow this treatment. We must take our dollars and spend it amongst our own. I was recently talking to a young Hispanic recruiter and in a moment of brutal honesty she told me that when black people come into the agency, they are usually offered very low paying jobs regardless of their skill set. She admitted this to me! She was a recruiter out of the Houston, Texas area. I have another friend who worked at a temporary staffing firm and she told me that blacks are usually offered all of the minimum wage jobs and the agency does not ever offer them corporate work, regardless of their experience or qualifications. She also said that when employers request workers for office positions or highly skilled positions, they also specifically request the workers by race and they ask for White, Asian or Hispanic. Never Blacks.
This type of racism is still prevalent in 2015... which is very sad. I simply don't know what can be done about this. I don't think racism will ever go away. I am not an idealist. I believe so long as we have a difference in the races (white, black, asian, etc.) the more crowded this country becomes, the more resources start to become stretched within this nation between the varying groups, racism will probably increase.
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The Infinite One
