Showing posts with label blacks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blacks. Show all posts

April 30, 2007

Are African-American cultural interests narrowing or expanding?

Something that everybody in about 1975 knew was inevitable was that African-Americans would expand into a much wider variety of pursuits as greater opportunity became open to them.

But, has that happened? Or are blacks increasingly focused on a handful of black-dominated areas? We've had enormous amounts of various kinds of affirmative action -- both quotas and additional recruitment and training -- aimed at getting blacks into more careers. And yet, they seem to want to move into narrower ruts.

I'm not talking just about, say, theoretical physics, but also about fields like tennis. After Althea Gibson won five Grand Slam singles titles in 1956-1958, and Arthur Ashe won three from 1968-1975, it seemed inevitable that such famous role models would lead to an infusion of numerous blacks into professional tennis. And, yet, ... with the exception of the Williams sisters, who are closer to the exception that proves the rule (their strong-willed father pretty much bred them with the goal of physically outdoing white women in tennis), blacks haven't made much of a mark in tennis since. Half-black Frenchman Yannick Noah won the French Open in 1983, but his son is now a college basketball player at Florida (granted Joakim Noah is around 9 feet tall so it only makes sense for him to play basketball, but still ...)

Now, part of what is going on is that tennis today requires more childhood training than in the old days. Most tennis pros of this decade were sent away by their parents to live at tennis academies as adolescents. So, it costs more to raise a tennis star than in Gibson and Ashe's day, so that works against blacks.

One possibility is that while middle class black adults are reasonably culturally open-minded, black youths are more ethnocentric than before, are more into keepin' it real and not acting white. For example, I've played golf over the years in foursomes with dozens of black guys (and over the last decade I've finally started to see black women playing golf), but none that I can recall under age 25. Golf isn't as youth-dominated as tennis, and you can have a fairly normal upbringing and become a professional golfer, but you still almost always have to start playing as a teenager. That of course is expensive, but you also have to want to be a golfer when you are a teen. I suspect that is much rarer among black teens.

So, are blacks avoiding non-traditional careers? It's hard to say for sure.

In contrast to tennis, there has been a slow but pretty steady movement of blacks into, say, film directing, including directing films with non-black casts. F. Gary Gray did a good job with "The Italian Job" in 2002, and Antoine Fuqua has directed a number of conventional Hollywood films, like "Shooter" and "King Arthur," although his best remains "Training Day," which won Denzel Washington an Oscar.

So, please help me out. Can you think of more non-traditional careers, such as movie directing, in which blacks have been doing better and better? Alternatively, can you think of careers where there aren't significant IQ barriers to success, such as tennis, but blacks just don't seem to be choosing to enter?


Urban v. Suburban Travel: Diversity in ownership v. diversity in employment

It's often remarked that the commercial environment that the business traveler in America confronts is remarkably uniform: all across this vast land of ours, he'll find the same rental-car companies at every airport, the same hotel and restaurant chains off every interstate. Moreover, these firms strive to deliver a uniformity of service - every contingency is anticipated in a binder and the response pre-programmed.

In contrast, in certain big cities, typically ones with huge immigrant populations, there are far more unique restaurants, hotels, and shops. This is frequently extolled as a shining benefit of diversity and perhaps it is.

But let me ask a question of all the nice liberals that I haven't heard mentioned before: As you travel, look at the workers you come into contact with and ask: On the whole, where do African-Americans find employment? In boring old corporate chains or in funky diverse one-of-a-kind establishments?

The answer appears to be titled heavily toward the Amerisuites and Alamo rental cars and Ruby Tuesdays. Just as African-Americans have long done relatively well in the peaceful, clerical side of the U.S. Army, where everything is spelled out in endless detail ahead of time, they tend to thrive better on the job in big chains with cookie-cutter manuals, and bureaucratic hiring procedures.

In contrast, unique urban establishments tend to have fewer blacks working for them relative to the size of the nearby black population. Immigrant owned businesses tend to hire other people, especially relatives, from their immigrant groups and white business owners tend to find they're more comfortable bossing around immigrants, even black African immigrants, than African-Americans.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer