Is Racial Preference Merely “Differently Negotiating” The Job Market?

Once again Penn Prof. John L. Jackson Jr. brings his keen anthropological insight to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog (earlier examples are here, here, and here), this time discussing, in “Graduating While Black,” hiring preferences for black PhDs.

Prof. Jackson mentions a couple of examples of recent black PhDs having their impressive job offers attributed, either matter of factly or with some hostility, to their race.

The argument is pretty straightforward. There are so few African-Americans getting doctoral degrees that the ones who do make it through the process have a relatively easy slide into the ranks of the professoriate.

But, Prof. Jackson asks, drawing no doubt on his social science training,

[i]s that the end of the story? Really? Is that all the analytical work that need be done to explain how race operates in the academy today? I hardly think so.

Since Prof. Jackson believes that this easy imputation of racial preference is “peculiar, and decidedly self-serving,” even as it is also “undeniable,” it’s easy to see why he believes more “analytical work” needs to be done. The article then concludes with what I take to be the “analytical work,” or a framework for it, that Prof. Jackson would offer:

But most of the people who demonstrate recognition or melancholic resignation about the fact that students of color differently negotiate the academic job market always seem to stop just short of spending much time voicing the same amount of concern and righteous indignation about how few students of color are even admitted to prestigious doctoral programs in the first place — or ever end up teaching in tenure-track posts at American universities.

Can one really have it both ways? Flagging what seems to be but one of the many examples of how race informs people’s academic-job prospects while failing to link the job market’s racial dynamics to a larger story (bigger than just “supply and demand”) about the entrenched mechanisms by which past racial imbalances are effortlessly (and even unintentionally) re-animated?

Perhaps in a future discussion he will describe the “entrenched mechanisms” that either a) cause prestigious doctoral programs to discriminate against deserving black applicants or b) artificially reduce the pool of qualified black college graduate who apply to those programs.

Until those mechanisms are clarified I suspect that many of us without the advantage of advanced training in social science will continue to regard the preferential treatment of minority applicants to college and college teaching positions as something substantially more than “the fact that students of color differently negotiate the academic job market.”

Say What?