I preferred hiring people that I knew were good workers or were referred to me by people I trusted to have good judgement over someone who was maybe better on paper.
An unfortunate side effect of that is my social circle early in my career was mostly other white people.
Right, and your statement proves that individual racism isn’t required for oppresion to exist, cuz you’re pretty much defining systemic racism. Many white people don’t know many POC because of deliberate, decades-long systemic segregation practices (e.g red-lining) that push us towards race-defined classes.
Yeah, agreed. That’s what I was trying to get at with the last part of my comment. As time went on my circle widened and I got to know more diverse people the candidates getting recommended to me became more diverse. DEI, even the boogeyman version people like to complain about makes that happen much faster rather than organically.
Right, and your statement proves that individual racism isn’t required for oppresion to exist, cuz you’re pretty much defining systemic racism. Many white people don’t know many POC because of deliberate, decades-long systemic segregation practices (e.g red-lining) that push us towards race-defined classes.
Yeah, agreed. That’s what I was trying to get at with the last part of my comment. As time went on my circle widened and I got to know more diverse people the candidates getting recommended to me became more diverse. DEI, even the boogeyman version people like to complain about makes that happen much faster rather than organically.