Since the current news cycle is going bonkers over the NSA leak scandal, I have to put it in an Other-Side-of-the-Tracks perspective. I’ll justly focus on our chief spy agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), and their hiring of Edward Snowden, the professed leaker of sensitive secrets about America’s denial of phone tapping and internet spying on its own people.

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and just-fired employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the NSA for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen, and Dell.

Though I could now focus on the substance of the leaks or something as mundane as where he attended middle school, I want to zero in on an issue that you won’t hear touched by your trusted media: Mr. Snowden’s qualifications. I have to contextualize it in terms of America’s sordid legacy of white privilege and roadblocks to opportunities.

The NSA arguably has among them the smartest people, not only in the room, but in the country. These smart people decided to contract with companies that also hire the smartest people in the country. These same smart people decided to hire a wiry, young renegade - who dropped out of high school. Now, I have nothing against hiring high school dropouts. Some have proven to change the course of American history and commerce, yet America’s standard for achieving success has been, at the least, a high school diploma. All of a sudden, I see the rules have changed.

Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of Blacks and Hispanics. With those facts in mind, how do high school dropouts get super-sensitive, high-paying spy agency jobs?

We’ve been taught that standardized testing, like SATs and ACTs set the bar - and are the bar - to getting a good job later down the road. Now I see a white male with no high-achieving skill sets - besides being a computer geek - get a $122,000-a-year job. This only got exposed because a government contractor (that is, welfare recipient) hired someone with a conscience.

More to my point, how many Black high school dropouts do you think will land a $122,000-a-year job with Northrup-Grumman, SAIC, Boeing, or Booz Allen Hamilton? Before you answer, remember we are indoctrinated with the “facts” that, absent a high school diploma, one cannot expect to land a job at Home Depot! What’s wrong with this picture?

This is what happens when you privatize government. Thanks to the political takeover by Neo-Conservatives, our country has made “smaller government” by giving the work of responsible government - with all its bars of the GS system - over to private corporations who don’t give a damn who they hire to do someone else’s work…as long as they get paid. Republican Conservatives have not only perpetrated insecurity in our spy agencies, but betrayed the very doctrine of “success after a diploma” that we’ve been taught.

I was floored when I read that Ed Snowden was making that kind of money! A 2004 study on income done by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Picketty, meshed with the latest 2013 median income data, showed:

INCOME GROUPS IN THE U.S.

Median - $26,695

Top 10% - $87,330

Top 5% - $120,210

Top 1% - $277,983

Top 0.5% - $397,949

Top 0.1% - $1,134,849

Top 0.01% - $5,349,795

“College is the surest way to the middle class,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) on this week’s Republican response to the President’s Weekly Address, while he - Alexander - talked also about raising student loan interest rates. Well Ed Snowden bypassed that hurdle to jump straight into the top 5% of American income earners. This path is the main reason (we’re told) that Blacks are doing so poorly in earned income in America. Make it make sense to me, how this guy, Snowden, landed a high-security level job with bare credentials?

This brings me to my point: While municipalities are cutting education funding, robbing urban school districts through privatization, we’re being sold the bogus bill of goods - Blacks earn less because they do worse in school. That IS garbage. Though Ed Snowden serves as anecdotal evidence, he is illustrative of my greater point: White people are still the beneficiaries of an unequal and unjust socio-economic system.

There are plenty of competent computer geeks among Blacks in America; I dare say you’ll find many cases like Ed Snowden’s, but I know you’ll find many white folks who enjoy Snowden-like privileges. So while the NSA is watching us, I guess they’ll be watching who they call qualified.