OK, I guess I must comment on the Jayson Blair fiasco, since enough time has passed that the big boys have all issued their major denials & explanations.
Every talk show where they have a black journalist on starts out with said person denying that race played any role. Who are they kidding? Even if a black person is qualified enough for a job, if the field is one where their race is underrepresented, they will get extra consideration because of their race. In the case of incompetents they will get extra breaks because of their race. This applies to women and other minorities as well. If Jayson Blair was Howell Raines’ nephew he would probably have gotten breaks, but if he was a white kid intern he probably wouldn’t have been able to suck-up on the white guilt. That’s probably how it is.
But one thing that isn’t being talked about much, aside from a few isolates like John Derbyshire, is that the Jayson Blair case illustrates what I have seen personally and have heard about many times-that once hired, minorities or women often are harder to fire. This probably has the effect of blacks & women being shunted to less important areas where performance is not as crucial once they are hired (see the corporate ghettoization of minorities & women in public relations & human resources). All this of short-changes individual minorities and women who would be superior performers, as must prove themselves (as they often complain!) to justify the added risk of their “stickiness” (greater cost in firing if they don’t work out).
The moral of it is all is that policies often have unintended consequences-and though they are aimed at groups, it is on the individual level that they are implemented, and the the latter behave differently than the former.
[1] In recent years brown people in the tech industry probably also benefited from group perception of competence.
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