Prometheus 6

Yesterday Louis at LatinoPundit brought to my attention a BusinessWeek article on the different experiences Black and Latino/Chicano folks have in the job market. The article put him on his guard against divide-and-conquer techniques, and justifiably so. You get line after line of things like this:

One reason for the disparity could be that Hispanics, especially undocumented workers, are often insecure about their education and embrace physical labor, according to Robert D. Lewis, owner of Canyon Fireplace in Anaheim, Calif. African Americans, on the other hand, come to the workplace with a bit more intellectual confidence.

In fact, blacks aspire to higher-level jobs because they tend to have more education. Only 57% of Hispanics age 25 or older have completed four years of high school, compared with 79% of blacks, according to U.S. Census data. And just 11% of Hispanics have at least four years of college, compared to 17% of blacks.

Economists say schools in the Latin American homelands of many of these workers are often inferior to the worst public schools in the U.S. And once people move here, immigrants generally prefer a paycheck -- which they often share with their families back home -- to a report card. Hence, many Hispanics don't develop the skills needed to land white-collar jobs.

and you could start thinking these correlations represent something real.

But if you think about this:

Certain Hispanic nationalities benefit from higher education and income, which usually translates into better workplace status. Though the overall unemployment rate for Hispanics hovered around 7% last year, Puerto Rican men had a 10.1% jobless rate -- nearly identical with that of black men, according to figures crunched by the Heldrich Center's Rodgers. Mexican women had an 11% jobless rate, higher than the 9.1% jobless rate of black women.

But Cuban men, who Rodgers says tend to be better educated, had a 5.9% rate, and Central and South American men claimed a 6.5% rate. The reality, says Jackson: "White Hispanics are handled differently than black Hispanics in this country."

you begin to get suspicious.

Well I do, anyway.

What this information says to me is race still trumps ethnicity in the USofA, but obviously:

Their lesser skills and willingness to work in low-wage jobs -- which tend to be the easiest to come by -- mean Hispanics don't stay unemployed for as long as either blacks or whites. And undereducated Hispanics are more willing than blacks to take what many Americans call "dropout" jobs, says William Spriggs, executive director of the National Urban League's Institute for Opportunity & Equality.

Latinos' thirst for labor and employers' eagerness to hire them "is so powerful that it offsets the education advantage blacks have," adds William M. Rodgers III, chief economist at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

there are those that will counter the "race card" with the "ethnicity card" to the benefit of no one but themselves. I can easily see the kind of divide between the conditions in which the "upper" and "lower" class Latinos live as exists in the Black community now…componded by race the way Black folks' relationships are compounded by colorism (yes, I am talking about your unlinked ass, lightskinnedpeople.com).

The patterns these comparisons form are real but not significant. And they shouldn't be seen as evidence of some sort of competition.