Racism Again

Racism Again

You can count on some people to turn everything into a racial issue. Do you remember when Obama made the claim that some Americans cling to their guns and Bibles and turn their hostility towards others that don't look like them when jobs get scarce? Well, there really are people like that--but in this case, it's one of Obama's economic advisors, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor:

The stimulus plan will create jobs repairing and upgrading the nation's roads, bridges, ports, levees, water and sewage system, public-transit systems, electricity grid, and schools. And it will kick-start alternative, non-fossil based sources of energy (wind, solar, geothermal, and so on); new health-care information systems; and universal broadband Internet access.

It's a two-fer: lots of new jobs, and investments in the nation's future productivity.

But if there aren't enough skilled professionals to do the jobs involving new technologies, the stimulus will just increase the wages of the professionals who already have the right skills rather than generate many new jobs in these fields. And if construction jobs go mainly to white males who already dominate the construction trades, many people who need jobs the most -- women, minorities, and the poor and long-term unemployed -- will be shut out.

But as a number of commenters (many of them sharing Reich's leftist sentiments) pointed out, in many parts of America, construction jobs mainly go to Hispanics, many of them illegal aliens--not "white males." If Reich had written this in say, 1970, there might be some merit to his concerns. Construction trades labor unions were notoriously racist, and many had explicit racial exclusion policies into the 1950s.

Of course, the government helped them to do this. The Davis-Bacon Act, by mandating that government construction be done at "prevailing wages" (generally interpreted by the courts to mean union scale) had played a major part in keeping blacks out of the construction trades. If a contractor bid on a project, he could either pay union scale (and get skilled and trained union white workers) or he could hire non-union (and often non-white) laborers at the same wages. What incentive did the contractor have to give a bunch of black guys a chance at acquiring job skills?

But it has been a couple of generations since this was the case. There are plenty of non-white construction workers out there, and the notion that the government should explicitly discriminate against people because of their sex or race--that's so Democrat.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for bringing this to my attention.

UPDATE: I notice the comments are filled with the kind of racist thinking that I thought we were supposed to be past, now that Obama is President:

You're just diverting attention away from the true source of the problem--white Republicans (mostly) and white Democrats (to a lesser extent).

White-owned businesses lured illegals here to fill jobs that Americans did not want (agricultural) or where there were shortages (housing construction).

White housing contractors have no problem finding jobs, though I admit there are many illegals working to build our glut of homes. The problem here is that white-owned home developers have funnelled big bucks to white Republican politician campaign chests so that they are permitted to build a large glut of cheap homes.

There is a lot of racism in America still--but directed at white people.