Education’s Broken Promise to Minorities : Success: Why do my white counterparts, with the same academic credentials, make more money than I? Maybe my grandfather knows.
During my 20 years of formal education, I was sustained by two assumptions, each born of the reassuring idea that education is the “great equalizer.” The first was that education not only paved the road to success, it leveled the playing field. For the relatively few Latinos fortunate enough to have one, a college degree would assure a life not only comfortable but also comparable to that of whites with the same credentials.
The second assumption was that the amount of material success afforded an educated individual was directly proportional to the amount of education received. The higher I climbed up the ladder of professional training, the narrower would be the gap between my income and that of my white colleagues until, eventually, it would disappear in a bottleneck of opportunity.
Now, my assumptions have crumbled under the weight of an analysis by The Times of new census data on the California work force. As we approach the year 2000, the analysis suggested, university degrees still do not produce even a semblance of parity between white and nonwhite workers. A white worker with a bachelor’s degree earns an average annual salary of $44,426, compared with $34,290 for African-Americans and $33,817 for Latinos. A white worker with a master’s degree earns an average annual salary of $52,787, while an African-American with the same credential earns $42,254 and a Latino earns $41,431.
Even more curious is the finding that among the more educated the gap in earnings does not narrow but actually widens. Whites with doctorates earn an average annual salary of $59,348, while African-Americans earn $54,205 and Latinos only $46,873. And, strangely, it is among professionals like doctors and lawyers that the income gap is at its absolute widest. On average, a white lawyer makes $77,877 compared with an average of $61,015 for their African-American counterparts and only $41,029 for those who are Latino.
These statistics brought to mind a Latino classmate at Harvard who announced, in his senior year, an ambitious plan to stockpile graduate degrees. “Let’s see, I’ll take an MBA, JD and Ph.D.” But if one’s personal goal is not only financial security but also financial parity, there seems to be a certain pointlessness to his quest. After all, among high-school dropouts, Latinos averaged 63 cents for every dollar earned by their white counterparts, while among professionals, the disparity was greater, with Latinos earning just 53 cents per white dollar.
This reality of disparate earnings comes as graciously as a slap in the face. I have not even been given the satisfaction of knowing why education betrayed me. What unseen forces are at work in the California labor market that have the practical effect of breaking the promises of education for racial minorities? Maybe there is a glass ceiling in corporate America that limits the opportunities of women and minorities. Maybe job discrimination remains, despite pages of laws, an unseemly reality of the American workplace. Maybe there is wisdom in my grandfather’s shrug, as the old man with calloused hand tells me in Spanish that los gabachos will never, ever, admit that we are as good, as intelligent and as capable as they are.
The reasons why higher education does not keep its promises to racial minorities are unclear and, really, unimportant. What is important is the effect, psychological and social, of continued economic disparity on those few well-educated minorities.
For nonwhite alumni of schools like Harvard--what W.E.B. DuBois might have called, the “talented 10th”--this news is especially unwelcome. Somewhere amid Ivy-covered halls and New England autumns, a handful of Latinos gradually began to believe their own press clippings. They began to believe they were special, different, better than those left behind. They developed the confidence that they were, if nothing else, an elite and privileged few and that elitism would bring equity.
My generation of overachievers has a bizarre wish for racial anonymity. In my parents’ era, the overriding issue was access. Admission to college or the security of a civil-service job was an end in and of itself. The affirmative-action programs of the 1960s and ‘70s made that access possible. But, in the ‘80s, even the phrase “affirmative action” became dirty and tainted. With racial epithets suddenly politically incorrect, white students in high school classrooms found an even more effective insult to hurl at minority classmates applying to elite colleges--”token minority.” Because my generation passed through the difficult time of adolescence in the middle of all this, we have, for 10 years, craved one thing above all else. Not accolades or prestige or even wealth. Simply, respect.
The finding of disparate income in the largest state in the country is a wake-up call for my generation of affirmative- action babies. It tells us that we are not immune to the indignities of job discrimination and that our elite education will not open every door. It tells us that we cannot simply define ourselves, but that others will define us and limit out opportunity in their definitions. It tells us that we have not moved nearly as far as we thought from our parents’ lives or from the ghosts of those Chicano classmates who dropped out of high school, those whom we secretly considered ourselves so much better than.
In fact, it tells us that perhaps, poetically, it is the negative stereotypes that surround an uneducated and impoverished underclass of non-white Americans that discourage the pristine Beverly Hills law firm from appointing a Latino partner or the largest newspaper in the San Joaquin Valley from hiring a Latino columnist. Above all, it reminds us of the wisdom in the cynicism of our grandfather’s shrug.
