

Professional racial discrimination testers in St. Louis, circa 1992 - Alex3917
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6921625143558152171&q=%22true+colors%22+discrimination&total=6&start=0&num=100&so=0&type=search&plindex=5

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byrneseyeview
That is an interesting story. What would be _really_ interesting, though, is
to read about the company that saw through this kind of prejudice -- that
hired the equally-qualified minority workers at wages depressed by such
prejudice, and then made a killing. It happened with women -- Greenspan
Townsend hired lots of female economists, because they were underpriced -- but
I've lived in St. Louis, and I do not recall any successful businesses that
emphasized hiring minorities, outside of sports and entertainment.

This reminds me of _Blink_ , in which Malcolm Gladwell dwells on a similar
habit of used car salesman. It is fortunate that Gladwell's career as a
journalist has given him more insight into auto sales than all those guys who
do it for a living -- but what's sad is that he can't convince jurist and
economist Richard Posner that it's because car salesman are immoral, not
because they are making intelligent deductions from available data
(<http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-blink.html>).

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anewaccountname
>What would be really interesting, though, is to read about the company that
saw through this kind of prejudice -- that hired the equally-qualified
minority workers at wages depressed by such prejudice, and then made a
killing.

It isn't that simple. I'm from South Carolina, and racism is all around. A
company could do as you say and hire some killer black salesmen at a huge
discount and it won't matter: they will sell less only because they are black.
A computer repair shop could hire an all black staff of technicians, and leave
white people as the people-facing storefront (not that this would be remotely
legal or moral), and it wouldn't matter: there would literally be
conversations all over the place about how you shouldn't take your computer to
such and such's; they use "nigger" repairmen.

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byrneseyeview
Oh! So it's not a story about businesses being prejudice _at all_. It's a
story about bad consumers! I get it. That makes sense. Why would anyone focus
on the businesses, though, when they're making a perfectly rational decision
-- perhaps because the media are making the perfectly rational decision to
outrage their audience using weak arguments that, as an added bonus, blame the
big bad businessman instead of the average consumer.

I also don't understand how you can say that when I cite the obvious example
of Greenspan hiring women. How did he survive when everyone was complaining
about his bitch of a research assistant? How do companies that hire other
minorities do it? Surely someone out there should start opening white-owned
laundromats, to capture the valuable racist demographic which has somehow been
convinced to patronize the many Korean-owned laundry companies in the US. I
would argue the same about a gentiles-only investment bank, but even if banks
like that _did_ appeal to prejudice, they didn't do it especially well.

If that's your theory, what's your answer: how is it that racism explains how
one ethnic group fails, but fails to explain how other ethnic groups are more
successful than the racist whites who are allegedly holding them down?

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byrneseyeview
Prejudice _d_.

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Alex3917
This was apparently digitized off someone's VCR so there is some weirdness for
the first few seconds. Also, the actual segment is only 16 minutes long even
though the video runs for 23 min.

