Robert O. Jones

Among the nuggets of wisdom most Black parents gave their children before the civil rights movement was you must to be twice as smart and twice as good as a White person to be considered for the same job. Since the early 70s many African Americans argue that opportunities to succeed are equal and no such racially biased system exist. Such ideology implies that Blacks no longer have to be smarter and better than Whites because equal qualifications bring equal opportunities. Not so for the Black male who is born with two strikes against him. The Black female is born with one strike because she's not penalized for being female only for being Black. She must earn two more strikes before she's red tagged and equals her persecuted brother. The avoidance of addition strikes is often within the bounds of self-control. When job searching a third strike could be called on the applicant based on any of the following: his or her appearance; educational level; criminal history; illegal drug history; lack of good business manners; poor attitude; and/or Black sounding name, according to White standards.

Regarding jobs and with and without criminal records, White men with prison records receive far more offers for jobs than Black men with identical records, and are offered jobs just as often - if not more so - than Black men who have never been arrested, according to a new study by two Princeton professors. The study, the first to assess the effect of race on job searches by ex-convicts, also found that Black men who had never been in trouble with the law were about half as likely as Whites with similar backgrounds to get a job offer or a callback. Therefore, it is unrealistic for a natural two-striker to pursue a life of crime and add the third social strike. Black men whose job applications stated that they had spent time in prison were only about one-third as likely as White men with similar applications to get a positive response.

In a similar experiment economists Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology responded in writing to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston, using names likely to be identified by employers as White or African-American. Applicants named Greg Kelly or Emily Walsh were 50% more likely to get called for interviews than those named Jamal Jackson or Lakisha Washington, names far more common among African-Americans. Putting a White-sounding name on an application, they found, is worth as much as an extra eight years of work experience. Therefore, Black parents who name their children Black sounding names are inadvertently sending them into a bigoted world with an addition strike and if you happen to be a male... do the math. Tattoos and earrings on Black males are also a third strike while on White males it's one strike.