Even qualified Black workers lost promotions to less-experienced white men they had trained.

Evidence

Elmore Jr. spent much of his adult life employed in fairly menial jobs, including stints at a chemical plant and a food distributor, sometimes as a manager. He became a minister, in a bit of a spiritual nod to Elmore Sr., who had been a deacon at their childhood church. But he was unable to find the freedom that his father had told him would come with smarts and hustle. He learned that lesson the hard way. Elmore still feels the sting of being passed over for a higher-paying position; instead, it was given to a less-experienced white man he’d trained. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 919

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the reframing argument’s wage/advancement gap in a concrete case, connecting to the chapter’s thesis about the persistence of labor discrimination.
• SEED: The detail that a Black worker trained the white man who then took his job is a sharp, usable anecdote for any essay on how training pipelines reproduce inequality.