I spent 25 years in the so-called meritocracies of open source and Silicon Valley. When you look around and see almost exclusively white men, your meritocracy is self-evident nonsense. In a structurally racist, sexist, and ableist society, hiring strictly from credentialist pipelines is exclusionary, unethical, and bad for business. Overcoming diversity and inclusion pipeline problems requires adopting structural ideology and restorative practices in education and work. Do more than blame pipelines, and stop propagating deficit ideologies and meritocracy and bootstrap myths. These myths are mental health destroying gaslighting writ large.
There’s nothing more euphemistic and exploitive in education than the myth of meritocracy.
“There’s nothing more euphemistic and exploitive in education than the myth of meritocracy.”
1. Money doesn’t have to be an obstacle
2. Race doesn’t matter
3. Just work harder
4. There is a college for everyone/everyone can go to college
5. If you believe in yourself, your dreams will come true
Taken together, the five assumptions listed above can be dangerous because they reinforce the deeply held American belief that success is individually created and sustained. “If I could do it, so can you” is an echo of the “just work harder” assumption. It is the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ethos to which so many generations of Americans adhere. Yet data repeatedly show how poverty, social class, race, and parents’ educational attainment more directly influence an individual’s success and potential earnings than any individual effort. We clearly do not yet have a level playing field, but this belief is all but impossible to challenge. Whenever we hear of another bootstraps story, we want to generalize. We disregard the fact that luck often plays a major role. And in generalizing and celebrating the individual nature of success, we disregard the imperative to rethink social and economic policies that leave many behind.
Nathan, Linda F.. When Grit Isn’t Enough: A High School Principal Examines How Poverty and Inequality Thwart the College-for-All Promise (p. 6, p. 8). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
“Meritocracy” was widely adopted as a best practice among open source projects in the founding days of the movement: it appeared to speak to collaboration amongst peers and across organizational boundaries. 20 years later, we understand that this concept was practiced in a world characterized by both hidden bias and outright abuse. The notion of “meritocracy” can often obscure bias and can help perpetuate a dominant culture. Meritocracy does not consider the reality that tech does not operate on a level playing field.
Words Matter – Moving Beyond “Meritocracy” – Mozilla Stands for Inclusion
Focus is often given to the “pipeline problem,” allowing tech companies to address diversity without making changes within their own organization.
A huge amount of diversity effort and money is focused on “the pipeline problem.” Not enough young people get interested in technology, so they never enter the pipeline, so they never get CS degrees, so they never are available to hire as programmers, so these tech companies never get their “fair share” of diversity. It is simultaneously the excuse many use for issues with diversity and their best hope to improve it in the future.
The monomaniacal focus on this narrative does a disservice to underrepresented people in tech in the present and future. A pipeline has many entry points and continues on for a distance. Focusing solely on a single entry point leaves the rest to disrepair. The metaphor is so broken that many have added their own sardonic twists: The pipeline is leaky and full of acid. The pipeline leads to a sewage treatment plant. The pipeline ends in a meat grinder.
In popular conceptions of the “pipeline”, the single entry point is the traditional computer science degree. Companies ignore other methods of entry like apprenticeship programs, hiring self-taught programmers, or transitioning staff from related roles like QA and support. Many small and midsize companies aren’t even willing to invest in junior engineers who do have a traditional CS degree. Companies simultaneously claim they care about diversity and hiring the best engineers, yet their “meritocratic” methods for identifying the latter often are in conflict with the former.
Many companies ignore large portions of the pipeline once you leave the beginning. They’re not sharing their attrition numbers. You’re unlikely to hear about how they’re addressing toxic environments. The most you will probably hear about is addressing issues related to babies (e.g. maternity leave, freezing eggs). I’ve heard more than a few stories about leaders largely blaming motherhood for the lack of diversity in tech despite studies to the contrary. Ultimately, it’s easier for people to point at the “pipeline problem,” allowing them to wash their hands of investing in change within their own organizations in the here and now.
Source: Diversity for Sale by Anonymous Author | Model View Culture
White supremacy runs on the staunch denial that white privilege exists, as if the deep inequalities in our world were simply the result of a meritocracy.
White Supremacy Runs on Denying the Existence of White Privilege
The world is not a neutral place and meritocracy can actually entrench privilege.
The end of ‘meritocracy’ at Mozilla | Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel
Inclusion must be embedded in all aspects of the hiring process, and beyond. “Pipeline” rhetoric has polarized the way tech companies recruit, interview, and hire. Focusing on gender allows companies to temporarily absolve themselves of responsibility with respect to age, religion, race, experience, disability, sexual orientation, and other aspects of diversity. Inclusion training must be included with all new employees from day one, while giving employees from historically underrepresented groups access to internal resources and support.
Technical organizations often struggle with the idea that if they diversify their hiring pipelines, attract candidates from underrepresented groups, and support them in the workplace, this will lead to “lowering the bar” or hiring less-qualified individuals. This assertion has no basis in reality, and is inherently both racist and sexist as it assumes that candidates from underrepresented groups must, by definition, not meet the hiring qualifications.
Source: Employee lifecycle
Several signs point towards the potential for positive change. We now have a deeper understanding of bias and the cognitive processes behind it. We have more technology tools to mitigate bias at scale. We have data that show there is both a pipeline problem (e.g. access to Computer Science classes is inversely correlated with underrepresented students of color and low income students in public schools) and a leaky pipeline problem — in other words, the myriad of subtle and not-so-subtle barriers and biases that begin with media messages and teacher expectations and progress all the way through hiring biases. However, companies still employ a check the box approach that prioritizes mitigating liability and improving public perception over building an inclusive workforce. Internal policies have been shaped more by lawyers and risk mitigators, focused on avoiding lawsuits and excluding those who truly understand the ways in which companies can build inclusive cultures and processes.
Furthermore, the meritocracy myth continues to persist. Tinkering with systems predicated on this belief is seen as social engineering or “lowering the bar.” Companies blame the pipeline and unconscious bias for lack of diversity without addressing their own internal failures to be inclusive. We find these behaviors racist and sexist.
Defining culture
Though startups are making an effort to implement diversity improvement strategies, the reality is that most are taking limited, potentially harmful actions, including one-off training, blaming the pipeline, using language like “lowering the bar,” and describing the current state of the tech industry as a “meritocracy.” Unfortunately, we have seen tech culture become even more exclusive and less diverse over the last five years.
About Project Include
In computer science classrooms across high schools and universities, minorities are excluded and exit early in the pipeline. Along with the pressure to keep up with our “exceptional” peers, we face the pressure of being a model minority or a success story. Like it or not, being regarded as exceptional is a privilege, not proof of a meritocracy.
Undergraduate computer science education is the most common and traditional way people enter the pipeline, and the concept of exceptionality is baked into students early. In freshman year, the “geniuses” are separated from the proletarians as there is a huge pressure to assert your talents and capabilities. The exceptional students, the ones that have already contributed to open-source projects or won programming contests, emerge as the people everyone else should aspire to be.
Collaboration is usually not permitted in CS classes, in part due to fears of plagiarism. Although students inevitably collaborate, they submit their work independently. As a result, the pressure to be an exceptional programmer is greater. In the industry, programming is communal and collaboration does not taint intellectual property, and engineering teams thrive when their programmers are able to work well together. Collaboration allows for people to learn from one another and value each other’s work. In contrast, group assignments are often only done in senior CS courses, ensuring that individual achievement and exceptionality are centered over teamwork and collaboration early on.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating talented programmers, but only privileged men and occasionally people who are seen as model minorities are being recognized. Students are entering the industry with false and dangerous assumptions about gender, race, sexuality, success, and education. These assumptions lead to certain groups being treated as exceptional and others being excluded, and eventually leaving. Rather than focusing on discovering exceptional programmers, there needs to be more initiatives to support gender, racial, and LGBT inclusion in the pipeline.
Programming is no longer an exclusive club for computer science-educated men, but capable programmers are still being pushed out of our industry because they lack racial, gender, and academic privilege — and it starts early in the pipeline. Whether it’s a programming contest, bootcamp, internship, or computer science education, many paths into tech jobs are intimidating or unaccessible to beginner and underrepresented programmers. And whether they took a traditional or nontraditional path to the industry, programmers are expected to be ready-to-go with all the necessary skills for employment once they enter the field. This places a huge pressure on programmers to be perfect, which makes the pipeline painfully competitive.
Source: Exclusion and Exceptionality in the Pipeline by Julia Nguyen | Model View Culture
Although there has been a recent call to abandon the “leaky pipeline” metaphor, it gives us a clue of how we think about education and career development: fluids in pipes start somewhere and end up somewhere else. They don’t flow backwards, they don’t stop at some point in the pipe and hang out for a while, and they only branch at predetermined locations. The pipeline models success, growth and end states in a manner that implicitly assumes an unencumbered white male, with access to adequate financial and emotional supports, unharmed by structural oppression, with few external drivers competing for his time, and the ability to progress smoothly ever-forward. And as a metaphor, the pipeline envisions attrition as a one-way, absolute process; the people who leave almost waste material, lost forever.
One of the things that is common across most STEM disciplines is that they are all-consuming. Dedication is proven by sacrificing everything else, or fitting “life” into the niches left after an 80-hour (plus) work week. The training period is long and likely to be supported on student loans, or paid below subsistence level. As we have broadened the recruitment pool at the front end, we have more people in the system who experience real structural conflicts between identities, some of which result in their choosing to abandon their technical careers. “I cannot balance these things. Something has to go, and it can’t be my (aging parents, children, outstanding bills, mental health) any longer. It will have to be the dreams of (science, code, mathematics, a corner office).”
Maybe it is time to abandon the leaky pipeline metaphor, and reclaim our own skills and talents, rather than accept a role as raw materials to be moved around at whim by a system. Or worse, to contort and diminish ourselves in order to fit in the pipes.
Source: Re-Recruit From the Leaky Pipeline by Seonaid Lee | Model View Culture
Creativity – as an expression of originality, experimentation, innovation – is not a viable product. It has been priced out into irrelevance – both by the professionalization of the industries that claim it, and the soaring cost of entry to those professions.
Today, creative industries are structured to minimize the diversity of their participants – economically, racially and ideologically. Credentialism, not creativity, is the passport to entry.
“What the artist was pretending he didn’t know is that money is the passport to success,” she writes. “We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have, are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures.”
But creative people should not fear failure. Creative people should fear the prescribed path to success – its narrowness, its specificity, its reliance on wealth and elite approval. When success is a stranglehold, true freedom is failure. The freedom to fail is the freedom to innovate, to experiment, to challenge.
To “succeed” is to embody the definition of contemporary success: sanctioned, sanitized, solvent.
To which the 30-something, having spent their adult life in an economy of stagnant wages and eroding opportunities, takes the 20-something aside, and explains that this is a maxim they, too, were told, but from which they never benefitted. They tell the 20-something what they already know: It is hard to plan for what is already gone. We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.
If you are 35 or younger – and quite often, older – the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay rise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.
In the post-employment economy, jobs are privileges, and the privileged have jobs.
Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience”. The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity – and quality – in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.
Education is a luxury the minimum wage worker cannot afford. This message is passed on to their children.
Young Americans seeking full-time employment tend to find their options limited to two paths: one of low-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of poverty; another of high-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of wealth. America is not only a nation of temporary employees – the Walmart worker on a fixed-day contract, the immigrant struggling for a day’s pay in a makeshift “temp town” – but of temporary jobs: intern , adjunct , fellow.
Post-recession America runs on a contingency economy based on prestige and privation. The great commonality is that few are paid enough to live instead of simply survive.
In the post-employment economy, full-time jobs are parceled into low-wage contract labor, entry-level jobs turn into internships, salaries are paid in exposure, and dignity succumbs to desperation.
The problem in America is not that there are no jobs. It is that jobs are not paying. America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups – minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class – are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.
During the recession, American companies found an effective new way to boost profits. It was called “not paying people”. “Not paying people” tends to be justified in two ways: a fake crisis (“Unfortunately, we can’t afford to pay you at this time…”) or a false promise (“Working for nearly nothing now will get you a good job later”).
In reality, profits are soaring and poorly compensated labor tends to lead to more poorly compensated labor. Zero opportunity employers are refusing to pay people because they can get away with it. The social contract does not apply to contract workers – and in 2013, that is increasingly what Americans are.
American ideology has long tilted between individualism and Calvinism. What happened to you was either supposed to be in your control – the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach – or divinely arbitrated. You either jumped, or you were meant to fall. Claims you were pushed, or you were born so far down you could not climb up, were dismissed as excuses of the lazy. This is the way many saw their world before it collapsed.
They cut and blame us when we bleed.
When people are expected to work unpaid for the promise of work, the advantage goes to those immune from the hustle: the owners over the renters, the salaried over the contingent. Attempts to ensure stability and independence for citizens – such as affordable healthcare – are decried as government “charity” while corporate charity is proffered as a substitute for a living wage.
Faust’s is an inspiring tale – and one beyond the comprehension of most young graduates in America today. “Don’t trust the boomers!” warned Paul Campos in a 2012 article on the misguided advice the elder generation peddles to their underemployed, debt-ridden progeny – including gems like “higher education is always worth the price” and “internships lead to jobs” – and Faust’s rebuke proves him right. What is most remarkable about Faust’s career is not its culmination in the Harvard presidency, but the system of accessibility and opportunity that allowed her to pursue it. Her life story is a eulogy for an America long since past.
Participation in these programs and internships is often dependent on personal wealth, resulting in a system of privilege that replicates itself over generations. McArdle compares America’s eroded meritocracy to imperial China, noting that “the people entering journalism, or finance, or consulting, or any other ‘elite’ profession, are increasingly the children of the children of those who rocketed to prosperity through the post-war education system. A window that opened is closing”.
Mobility is but a memory. “The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data,” writes economist Joseph E Stiglitz in an editorial aptly titled “Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth”.
This is not to say that hard-working elites do not deserve their success, but that the greatest barrier to entry in many professions is financial, not intellectual.
The “lifetime of citizenship, opportunity, growth and change” Drew Gilpin Faust extolled is something most Americans desire. But it is affordable only for a select few: the baby boomers who can buy their children opportunities as the system they created screws the rest.
While the start and end dates of the millennial generation are up for debate – and the idea of inherent generational traits is dubious – people of this age group share an important quality. They have no adult experience in a functional economy.
Millennials are chastised for leaning on elders, but the new rules of the economy demand it. Unpaid internships are often prerequisites to full-time jobs, and the ability to take them is based on money, not merit. Young adults who live off wealthy parents are the lucky few. They can envision a future because they can envision its purchase. Almost everyone else is locked out of the game.
It is one thing to discover, as an adult, that the rules have been rewritten, that the job market will not recover, that you will scramble to survive. It is another to raise a child knowing that no matter how hard they work, how talented they are, how big they dream, they will not have opportunities – because in the new economy, opportunities are bought, not earned. You know this, but you cannot tell this to a child. The millennial parent is always Santa, always a little bit of a liar.
The children of the millennials have been born into a United States of entrenched meritocracy – what Pierre Bourdieu called “the social alchemy that turns class privilege into merit”. Success is allegedly based on competition, not background, but one must be prepared to pay to play.
“This reliance on un- or underpaid labor is part of a broader move to a ‘privilege economy’ instead of a merit economy – where who you know and who pays your bills can be far more important than talent,” writes journalist Farai Chideya, noting that this system often locks out minorities.
By charging more for a year’s college tuition than the average median income, universities ensure that poor people stay poor while debt-ridden graduates join their ranks. By requiring unpaid internships, professions such as journalism ensure positions of influence will be filled only by those who can pay for them. The cycle of privilege and privation continues.
One after another, the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but the most elite to enter.
My father, the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree has value. “Our family came here with nothing,” he says of my great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. “Do you know how incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?” And my heart broke a little when he said that, because his illusion is so touching – so revealing of the values of his generation, and so alien to the experience of mine.
What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.
For lower class parents, admissions is a test failed at birth: An absence of wealth guised as a deficiency of merit. In the middle are the students, stranded players in a rigged game.
Namely, they have raised the price of the credentials needed to participate in the new meritocracy by such dramatic measures that it locks out a large part of the population while sending nearly everyone else into debt.
Today’s youth are the best educated generation in US history. But opportunities are reserved only for those who can buy them.
Young US citizens have inherited an entrenched meritocracy that combines the baby boomers’ emphasis on education with the class rigidity of the WASP aristocracy it allegedly undermined.
People go to college because not going to college carries a penalty. College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer. College shows you are serious enough about your life to risk ruining it early on. College is a promise the economy does not keep – but not going to college promises you will struggle to survive.
In an entrenched meritocracy, those who cannot purchase credentials are not only ineligible for most middle-class jobs, but are informed that their plight is the result of poor “choices”. This ignores that the “choice” of college usually requires walking the road of financial ruin to get the reward – a reward of employment that, in this economy, is illusory.
Credentialism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity.
Journalism is one of many fields of public influence – including politics – in which credentials function as de facto permission to speak, rendering those who lack them less likely to be employed and less able to afford to stay in their field.
College does not offer a better future, but a less worse one. College is not a cure for economic insecurity, but a symptom of the broader plague of credentialism.
The economic crisis is a crisis of managed expectations. Americans are being conditioned to accept their own exploitation as normal.
Entry-level jobs in journalism have been replaced with full-time internships dependent on other internships. Today people work for the possibility of working, waiting to be considered good enough to be hired by the employers under whom they already labor.
Credibility is not something that can be bought, but credentials are.
Source: The View From Flyover Country
Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.
“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”
Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.
“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.
The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.
“We cannot equivocate when it comes to preparing our children to face injustices.”
Source: Study: Poor Kids Who Believe in Meritocracy Suffer – The Atlantic
Despite the enduring power of the rugged individual and meritocracy myths, the burden of evidence shows that privilege (race, class, and gender) continues to trump effort and even achievement in the real world: less educated whites earn more than more educated blacks, men earn more than equally educated women, and so forth.
The perils of “Growth Mindset” education: Why we’re trying to fix our kids when we should be fixing the system – Salon.com
With this in mind, my purpose is to argue that when it comes to issues surrounding poverty and economic justice the preparation of teachers must be first and foremost an ideological endeavour, focused on adjusting fundamental understandings not only about educational outcome disparities but also about poverty itself. I will argue that it is only through the cultivation of what I call a structural ideology of poverty and economic justice that teachers become equity literate (Gorski 2013), capable of imagining the sorts of solutions that pose a genuine threat to the existence of class inequity in their classrooms and schools. After a brief clarification of my case for the importance of ideology, I begin by describing deficit ideology, the dominant ideological position about poverty that is informed in the US and elsewhere by the myth of meritocracy (McNamee and Miller 2009), and its increasingly popular ideological offshoot, grit ideology (Gorski 2016b). After explicating these ideological positions and how they misdirect interpretations of poverty and its implications, I describe structural ideology, an ideological position through which educators understand educational outcome disparities in the context of structural injustice and the unequal distribution of access and opportunity that underlies poverty (Gorski 2016a). I end by sharing three self-reflective questions designed to help me assess the extent to which my teacher education practice reflect the structural view.
These findings led Castilla to wonder if organizational cultures and practices designed to promote meritocracy actually accomplished the opposite. Could it be that the pursuit of meritocracy somehow triggered bias? Along with his colleague, the Indiana University sociology professor Stephen Bernard, they designed a series of lab experiments to find out. Each experiment had the same outcome. When a company’s core values emphasized meritocratic values, those in managerial positions awarded a larger monetary reward to the male employee than to an equally performing female employee. Castilla and Bernard termed their counter intuitive result “the paradox of meritocracy.”
The paradox of meritocracy builds on other research showing that those who think they are the most objective can actually exhibit the most bias in their evaluations. When people think they are objective and unbiased then they don’t monitor and scrutinize their own behavior. They just assume that they are right and that their assessments are accurate. Yet, studies repeatedly show that stereotypes of all kinds (gender, ethnicity, age, disability etc.) are filters through which we evaluate others, often in ways that advantage dominant groups and disadvantage lower-status groups. For example, studies repeatedly find that the resumes of whites and men are evaluated more positively than are the identical resumes of minorities and women.
This dynamic is precisely why meritocracy can exacerbate inequality—because being committed to meritocratic principles makes people think that they actually are making correct evaluations and behaving fairly. Organizations that emphasize meritocratic ideals serve to reinforce an employee’s belief that they are impartial, which creates the exact conditions under which implicit and explicit biases are unleashed.
The False Promise of Meritocracy – The Atlantic
I am cautious about the quality of growth mindset and grit research as valid, and that caution is grounded in the first level-both concepts fit well into American myths about rugged individualism and the Puritan work ethic; thus, even so-called dispassionate researchers are apt to see no reason to challenge the studies (although some have begun to unpack and question Angela Duckworth’s studies on grit).
Scarcity, mentioned about, is a compilation of powerful studies that make a case unlike what most Americans believe about success and failure: those living in scarcity struggle because of the scarcity (think poverty), and those living in slack are often successful because of the slack. This work has not been embraced or received the celebrity of growth mindset and grit because it works against our narratives.
Privileged researchers blinded by their own belief in American myths as well as trust in their own growth mindset and grit, I fear, are not apt to challenge research that appears even to a scholar to be obvious.
The third level is the most damning since growth mindset and grit speak to and reinforce powerful cultural ideologies and myths about meritocracies and individual character-ones that are contradicted by the evidence; and thus, growth mindset and grit contribute to lazy and biased thinking and assumptions about marginalized groups who suffer currently under great inequities.
K-12 applications of growth mindset and grit have disproportionately targeted racial minorities and impoverished students, reinforcing that most of the struggles within these groups academically are attributable to deficits in those students, deficits linked to race and social class.
Rejecting Growth Mindset and Grit at Three Levels | radical eyes for equity
“Strength,” “Courage,” and “Bravery” are virtues often heaped upon individuals undergoing hardship. These compliments come from a deep-rooted cultural value that sacrifice should be praiseworthy and that performing in the face of difficulty is a sign of virtue. In tech, strength is valued to the point of caricature, creating a culture of depersonalization and overwork that disproportionately affects people who by their identities or job descriptions are asked too often to “take one for the team.”
Source: The Cult(Ure) of Strength | USENIX
The large majority of Americans expect black people to “pull themselves up by the boot straps,” and become “better people,” and that will amend poor black people’s economic status, the racial disparities, and the racial discrimination they face. Placing these incriminations on black people and not the systems that enslave, murder, and oppress black people, is criminal. It is also one of the many racist ideas that keep black people chained to an inferior status in this society.
I’m supposed to pretend that our zip codes don’t determine whether or not we live or die? I’m supposed to pretend that zip code genocide doesn’t lead to depression, suicide, and homicide? Nevertheless, I don’t have any more patience in me to be fake-happy. I’m aching, my sanity has been shattered, and I don’t mind accompanying the rest of them in paradise, if there is one.
Poverty is a modern day slave-ship with a little more leg room.
Source: How a young boy has been decaying in Baltimore since age 10: A Death Note
I am tired of the academic affirmative action which has made it not just so that white people are overrepresented at elite colleges (and in professorships), but that their “white racial privilege” at these colleges, where black students are nearly invisible, means that they are more overrepresented now than they were in 1994.
I am tired of the affirmative action for white students at Ivy League universities, where the percentage of students admitted via “legacy admissions” (simply because their parents or ancestors went there) at schools like Harvard is higher than the total percentage of black students.
I am tired of the white affirmative action which means that if a black student can get into college, their job prospects are about as good as those of a white high school dropout. Now that‘s affirmative action! Similarly, a white high school graduate benefits from affirmative action when he has the same job prospects as a black male college graduate, simply by virtue of having been born into a society which raced them as white.
I am tired of the fact that only 13 percent of journalism jobs go to non-white people because of the enduring white affirmative action of the American media.
I am tired of the racist and gendered affirmative action in American society which means that black women nationally earn only 67 cents for every dollar a white man earns. And I am sick of these affirmative action-beneficiary white men deriding black women as “welfare queens,” when black women work more for less than anyone else in the nation and when they showed up in the past two election cycles more than any other race/gender subgroup.
I am tired of the economic affirmative action in American history which has made it so that white families have 10 times the wealth of Hispanic families and 12 times the wealth of black families. The word “merit” has no place in these matters. Merit has very little to do with the racialized structural poverty in American society. Indeed, anthropological economic research has shown in recent years that, “To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents.” Your economic fate can be predicted in a “process [which] can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past.”
What Jeff Sessions Will Never Understand About Affirmative Action
Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.
“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.
Source: Study: Poor Kids Who Believe in Meritocracy Suffer – The Atlantic
https://twitter.com/econ_marshall/status/858389367777263616
https://twitter.com/rboren/status/891703604750553089
https://twitter.com/rboren/status/891704539379892225
https://twitter.com/rboren/status/892781108361916418
https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/892877355584237568
https://twitter.com/rboren/status/893466547636850689
https://twitter.com/sarahlerner/status/894017874603397120
https://twitter.com/Ebonyteach/status/929366328993091586
https://twitter.com/Ebonyteach/status/929367031304028162
https://twitter.com/s_m_i/status/981573451793051648
Reblogged this on Welcome to My Wild Ride and commented:
Much to think about. Also want to add that references are part of the pipeline as well when you do manage to find a job. Suddenly, your employers have more power than you do to show that you’re good for whatever job you’re looking for. If you have a bad relationship with your boss, well, that’s going to make it harder for you to find something else. I have to watch people kissing up hard or doing things I consider unethical just for this sole reason.