Soft Skills Essay

Total Length: 852 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

Total Sources: 2

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Race and Employment

The United States is supposed to be based on the principle that all men are created equal. Men have fought and died in order to defend this idea, but even more than two hundred years after the founding of this nation, there is still a great disparage between the positions of men in this country based upon the differences in their skin color. In the television program The Wire, a large group of black men and women find themselves in the position where they have to commit crimes and other unlawful actions in order to support themselves and their families. In their low income areas, often the only way in which to earn the money to hopefully get their siblings and their children out of these poor communities is to sell drugs or their bodies to other low-income people in similar dire circumstances. According to authors Philip Moss and Chris Tilly in their article "Soft' Skills and Race: an Investigation of Black Men's Employment Problems," the reason that many people like the characters depicted on The Wire become involved in criminal activity is because they are not given financial opportunity by traditional employers. If a person is from a lower class part of the community, then they are wrongly associated with the seedier aspects of that part of town, which then prevents them from social mobility and requires them to then engage in the base behaviors.


Soft skills are defined as the specific things that a potential employer examines when interviewing would-be employees. Moss and Tilly define them as skills, abilities, and traits that indicate personality, attitude, and behavior instead of formal education and experience (1). These are not education or work experience or references; these are the inescapable facets of a person's character that an employer may perceive of an applicant based upon things beyond their control; specifically race, social standing, neighborhood of residence (Lim 2). No matter how much a person has worked to pull him or herself out of the social and class position of their birth, there is still a stigma that is applied to certain members of the population because of their upbringing.

In The Wire, employers perceive black men from the low, or ghetto, parts of their city as being less desirable as potential employees simply because of where they come from. This classification of soft skills is a form of socially ingrained racism and it is difficult to know when these kinds of biases are coming into place in some instances. Employers in industries which are….....

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often have stereotypical views about blacks and rate them as possessing weaker hard and soft skills than their white colleagues. Some of these managers openly admit to employing discriminatory recruiting procedures when hiring. This results to blacks being hired at a far lower rate than their white counterparts even where controls exist to avoid such a reality. Gender discrimination makes the issue even worse for women of color. Social class seems to not have a big impact on racial discrimination, but the actions are reported more frequently as education levels rise (Lawrence D. Bobo & Cybelle Fox, 2003). Course of Action in such a… Continue Reading...

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