Alongside the obvious problems of life and the world, every so often you find out about a new one. For example, suppose you're a married African-American dual income professional couple and you want to hire a nanny for your kids. Big trouble: "'Very rarely will an African-American woman work for an African-American boss,' said Pat Cascio, the owner of Morningside Nannies in Houston and the president of the International Nanny Association." Perhaps not the worst problem in the world, but still:
Many of the African-American nannies who make up 40 percent of her work force fear that people of their own color will be "uppity and demanding,” said Ms. Cascio, who is white. After interviews, she said, those nannies "will call us and say, 'Why didn’t you tell me'" the family is black?
All strange. Further complicating matters, "African-American professionals, who constantly battle the stereotype that blacks do not speak proper English, sometimes hesitate to hire Caribbean nannies who speak with lilting accents or island patois, said Cameron L. Macdonald, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison." According to Mary Waters' book, black people actually suffer from substantially less discrimination if they speak with island accents. Sudhir Venkatash in Off The Books has a different story to tell about nannying. He describes it as difficult for the women he observed to break into nannying for white families but said the pastors at inner-city churches would regularly place people with middle class congregants commuting from the suburbs -- but only on a short-term basis and only in exchange for a broker's fee.
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Heads in the Sand
Contemporary master-servant relationships tend to be particularly fraught with complicated psychological resentments on both sidea. And, yes, as you noted, the NYT article did a very bad job of explaining exactly what was going on here. Presumably, the real story, whatever it is, violates a lot of dominant taboos about writing frankly about race.
My guess (and it's only a guess) would be that the true explanation is tied into modern African-American disapproval of blacks taking servile jobs. As recently as the 1950s, a huge fraction of black women and a large fraction of black men had personal service jobs -- nanny, maid, gardener, cook, Pullman car porter, etc. The black pride movement of the 1960s derogated these kind of jobs as racially demeaning, so African-Americans exited them. They were largely replaced by immigrants -- Mexican and Central American in much of the country, Caribbean in NYC (although Mexicans have been pouring in to New York recently).
In contrast, black immigrants tend to feel less strongly that servant jobs are demeaning, so there are lots of West Indian nannies in NYC. You can imagine the unspoken tensions and mixed feelings of a middle class African American household that employs an immigrant black servant. It would be a worthy subject for a Tom Wolfe novel.
Posted by Steve Sailer | December 27, 2006 2:55 PM