There’s a popular article in La Presse today about a white man who is furious that 100% of jobs are not available to him like they were to his white man ancestors.
What kind of society are we even living in if a white man isn’t entitled by birth to every single job that exists.
It certainly used to be that 100% of political jobs and church jobs and legal jobs and teaching jobs and medical jobs (etc.) were reserved for white men, and the piece would have you believe it is an injustice that, on occasion in contemporary society, certain jobs are designated for other groups.
The piece suggests that white men’s sense of entitlement to every existing job is in fact so strong that they may find themselves compelled to lie on their job applications – for example, by declaring themselves to be non-binary, or pretending to support diversity and inclusion – rather than accept the principle that a workforce approaching 100% white men is bad, actually.
There are certainly true injustices in hiring to be addressed, like how résumés with white-sounding names get more callbacks than those with names identified with Black or Asian cultures, even for employers who purport to care about diversity and inclusion. Or how male applicants are considered more qualified than female applicants with the same qualifications. Not to even mention the existence of laws that function to bar Muslim women from jobs they are entirely qualified for.
But the piece doesn’t deal with any of these examples of actual discrimination, or accept the necessity of occasionally prioritizing demographic groups other than white men in an attempt to redress that group’s historical and ongoing overrepresentation in positions of societal power and privilege.
Instead, it starts from the premise that white men are entitled to 100% of the things they want, going so far as to quote Martin Luther King in support of the notion that it is injustice that a white man was excluded from two teaching positions in the white-man dominated field of computer science.
It is not. White men and the columnists who coddle them would do well to learn the difference between a sense of entitlement and actual injustice.
Injustice against white men
There’s a popular article in La Presse today about a white man who is furious that 100% of jobs are not available to him like they were to his white man ancestors.
What kind of society are we even living in if a white man isn’t entitled by birth to every single job that exists.
It certainly used to be that 100% of political jobs and church jobs and legal jobs and teaching jobs and medical jobs (etc.) were reserved for white men, and the piece would have you believe it is an injustice that, on occasion in contemporary society, certain jobs are designated for other groups.
The piece suggests that white men’s sense of entitlement to every existing job is in fact so strong that they may find themselves compelled to lie on their job applications – for example, by declaring themselves to be non-binary, or pretending to support diversity and inclusion – rather than accept the principle that a workforce approaching 100% white men is bad, actually.
There are certainly true injustices in hiring to be addressed, like how résumés with white-sounding names get more callbacks than those with names identified with Black or Asian cultures, even for employers who purport to care about diversity and inclusion. Or how male applicants are considered more qualified than female applicants with the same qualifications. Not to even mention the existence of laws that function to bar Muslim women from jobs they are entirely qualified for.
But the piece doesn’t deal with any of these examples of actual discrimination, or accept the necessity of occasionally prioritizing demographic groups other than white men in an attempt to redress that group’s historical and ongoing overrepresentation in positions of societal power and privilege.
Instead, it starts from the premise that white men are entitled to 100% of the things they want, going so far as to quote Martin Luther King in support of the notion that it is injustice that a white man was excluded from two teaching positions in the white-man dominated field of computer science.
It is not. White men and the columnists who coddle them would do well to learn the difference between a sense of entitlement and actual injustice.