It is also a factor of effort.

I am a consultant who is also in charge of hiring for our Chicago-based IT / IA consulting office. I do everything from student job fairs to phone screens and technical interviews — everything up to delivering the ‘passing’ candidates to our partner to interview. I talk to literally hundreds to low thousands of prospects a year. I have met exactly three African-American candidates (who I could identify as such) in two years. Our competitors fish from the same pool of candidates. I completely subjectively and unscientifically (but I think correctly) attribute the reason my firm and our competitors look *nothing like Chicago* to this. We are now trying to work out what to do about the problem — we want to find the best people for the work and culture we have, and clearly we are missing a significant element of the regional population.

The difficulty in reaching people from every community in my hometown illuminates the following, in my mind:

1. There is a breakdown in communication between the African American community here and everyone else, because otherwise I would expect to encounter members of all communities at job fairs, especially in the current economic climate.
2. There is an education gap as well (by which I mean a gap in who studies what, or attends which college), or else African American students at the colleges we recruit at boycott the job fairs (unlikely).
3. Taking affirmative action, which is what actively seeking out every potentially viable employee regardless of background or ethnicity is, is not enough.

I usually argue with statistics, etc. Today I present an entirely subjective perspective on what I take to be the impact of historic, ongoing, pervasive racism — the elimination of access to opportunities, even where those opportunities exist. It both mystifies and frustrates me that despite a lot of extra effort, these invisible barriers are so damn difficult if not impossible to navigate around. There is no rational reason my office can’t look like a close approximation of Chicago, but despite our efforts, it doesn’t.

We are still hopeful that we can crack this nut.