Today’s corporate press regularly churns out articles with a predictable theme: too few black people have this or that important position or advantage. As I began this review, a local newspaper was complaining that hourly workers at Amazon are mostly blacks or Hispanics, while the “highest ranks” are occupied largely by whites and Asians. That same day, a CNN feature lamented that blacks and whites still tend to occupy different neighborhoods in Atlanta and nationwide. Absent from the Amazon piece was any reference to what has been euphemistically termed the “pipeline” problem—the fact that there are many times more whites and Asians than blacks and Hispanics qualified to occupy upper-echelon jobs at Amazon. The CNN feature briefly cited the role of crime in driving people to flee black neighborhoods but summarily dismissed that explanation as a pretextual “myth” to hide discriminatory “opportunity hoarding” practiced by selfish, racist whites.
