mothra wrote on Aug 5
th, 2019 at 5:00am:
Are you suggesting that prejudice is a self-fulfilling prophesy? Heaven forfend!
Or perhaps you misunderstand the premise?
Most of the coverage focused on the fact that Bangladeshi and black British workers earn a lot less than white people, more than two quid per hour in the case of Bangladeshis and one quid in the case of black British people. Structural racism, then, you see. Except for the slightly inconvenient point that way out there at the top of the earnings chart were the Chinese, who earned almost four quid more per hour than the whites, and indeed Indians, who earned almost £1.50 more. So if it is racism, it’s a very specific and discriminatory form of racism.
Pakistanis also do very badly by comparison, earning over three pounds less per hour than the Indians, whom they closely resemble and with whom they were once conjoined in a glorious and happy empire. How, then, can racism be to blame for this discrepancy? And if it’s not racism, then what is the cause?
The first answer might be to look at a few other statistics, such as those charting educational attainment by ethnicity. These figures — produced by the Department for Education — mirror almost exactly those earnings figures, with one or two discrepancies. For GCSEs, the Chinese come top, by a mile, the Indians come second. White British come a little further down the list, easily beaten by white Irish. Level with the white British are black people of African descent; only in the headlines are they grouped together with black British people of Caribbean heritage, who perform less well.
Now, the discrepancies. First, bottom of the list for academic attainment by a hefty margin are children from Roma/traveller families — and they were not included in that ONS survey, for reasons I will leave you to work out. And second, Bangladeshis out-perform white British kids at GCSE (although they are still well below the Indians and Chinese).
What might explain the gap between this comparative success and the low earnings of the adult population? Is it possible that the top employers would baulk at taking on someone called Mohammed, but have no aversion to the names Anand or Patel? Possibly, and we should allow for that caveat. But it is also true that of Britain’s ethnic minority communities, Pakistani and — especially — Bangladeshi adults are the least likely to speak English fluently or indeed at all. Sajid Javid highlighted this point in a government green paper — some 770,000 people in the UK have either a frail or nonexistent grasp of English, the overwhelming majority being Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.
Add to that the fact that Bangladeshi families (again from Javid’s green paper) are the least likely to take advantage of free child-care facilities, and you begin to understand why, though Bangladeshi children generally do well at school, their elders are behind in the labour market. Too many of the older generation are unable to speak English. It is also true that both Bangladeshis and Pakistanis often come from working-class backgrounds, whereas Indians and Chinese are more predominantly (although far from exclusively) middle class.
So, to sum up: first, whatever the reason for those discrepancies between ethnic minorities in earnings, racism is almost certainly not the cause. Second, the headline figure — that ethnic minorities earn 3.8 per cent less than the white British — is utterly meaningless, given the vastly different level of earnings within ethnic minority communities. Third, the most obvious explanation for disparity in earnings can be found in the figures for educational attainment: communities which value education the most highly go on to earn the most money, with the exception of Bangladeshis, who may be hampered by having insufficient language skills. Whatever the cause, then, it ain’t race.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/07/the-ethnicity-pay-gap-just-doesnt-add-up/Not fitting in is the self-fulfilling prophesy: you self-select out, you ARE left out.
Fit in or rack off, as the poet Tshirt says.