Misery?

Writing in the New York Times, Roxane Gay says many companies have condemned the killing of George Floyd, but "more often than not, they lack any real diversity. They have no black executives. Their black employees are miserable."  Black executives are definitely scarce, but are most black workers unhappy?  The General Social Survey includes a question asking "on the whole, how satisfied are you with the work you do?"  People are offered four choices:  "very satisfied," "moderately satisfied," "a little dissatisfied," and "very dissatisfied."  39% of blacks choose "very satisfied" and 41% choose "moderately satisfied."  That's less satisfied than whites (who are 50% very and 37% moderately) but I don't think you could describe it as "miserable."  Still, people might feel good about the kind of work they do and at least some of their co-workers, but have negative feelings about other aspects of their workplace, so I wanted something more focused. 

Every four years starting in 2002, the GSS has asked "Do you feel in any way discriminated against on your job because of your race or ethnic origin?"  There is a big difference by race:  2.9% of whites and 14.6% of blacks say that they do feel discriminated against (9.9% of people who give their race as "other," but I'll just consider black and white from now on).  I then looked for differences within the races, starting with standard variables like education, age, sex, and occupation, and didn't find much.  That is, there was no clear evidence that men were more or less likely to think that they were discriminated against than women were, or that black men were more or less likely than black women, etc.   After this unpromising start, I set it aside for a while (Gay's piece came out on June 20), but as the summer wore on, I came back to it, and found a couple of things that seem to make a difference.  One is unionization:  workers who are union members are more likely to think that they are discriminated against (5.1%  of whites and 17.6% of blacks, compared to 2.8% and 12.9% for non-unionized workers).  Another is the race of the interviewer (the GSS is done in person, so people see their interviewer):  with a white interviewer, 2.6% of whites and 11.7% of blacks say they've been discriminated against and with a black interviewer it's 1.3% and 17.3%.  The race of interviewer effects seem easy to understand--people are somewhat concerned with what the interviewer might think.  With unionization, it seems unlikely that there really is more racial discrimination (against both blacks and whites) when there's a union--if anything, there might be less, since unionized workplaces have less managerial discretion and put more weight on objective things like seniority.  A more plausible explanation is that unions encourage people to look out for unfair treatment and provide avenues for people to do something about it. 

But probably the most interesting thing about this question is the simple point that only about 15% of black people "feel in any way discriminated against," and it doesn't rise above about 20% in any subgroup that I looked at.  There's no objective standard for what is high or low, but if you'd asked me to guess how many black workers felt discriminated against I think I would have said about 25% or 30%, and that a lot of people would have guessed higher than that.   Of course, the GSS doesn't permit a fine-grained investigation, and I have no doubt that there are some organizations with "toxic" cultures where most black employees feel like they're discriminated against.  But they're not the norm.