Study: It helps to have a 'white' name

CNN.com ^ | Jan 14, 2003 | unknown

[Frohickey]

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- It helps to have a white-sounding first name when looking for work, a new study has found.

Resumes with white-sounding first names elicited 50 percent more responses than ones with black-sounding names, according to a study by professors at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[Frohickey]

Why am I skeptical of this study?

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[wideawake]

For two reasosn:

(1) The study was conducted in the months following 9/11. I don't know how many people were itching to hire someone named Jamal or Rasheed at that time.

(2) Made-up African names and Muslim names sound low-class to many people. I would probably call Kristen or Susan back before I called Candi or Ginger Ann. That isn't racial - it's class oriented.

I don't thing some named William Dubois MacFarlane would get rejected, and I know I guy by that name who is a black militant.

[hoosierskypilot]

This is nonsense. Well, maybe if your name happens to be Osama, it might be a stumbling block.

These perpetual nitwits continue to do everything they can to take the blame off of an inherently corrupt and inept educational system.

[Frohickey]

The professors sent about 5,000 resumes in response to want ads in The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune. They found that the "white" applicants they created received one response -- a call, letter or e-mail -- for every 10 resumes mailed, while "black" applicants with equal credentials received one response for every 15 resumes sent.

Was there 2500 resumes with 'white' first names and 2500 resumes with 'black' first names?
Did each company receive the same number of 'white' first name resumes as 'black' first name resumes?
Were the resumes both equally proof-read and legible and formatted?

I think a controlled study where two resumes with identical formatting and body of the resume, one with a 'white' first name and the other with a 'black' first name should have been used. Have multiple versions of these, and send equal amounts of 'white' first name and 'black' first name resumes to each company in the want ads.

I want to see their methodology of this study.

[NoamChimpsky]

I like to use my incognito moniker in times like these...something like Rufus Tyrone Thornton-Penobscot III

[Fraulein]

Isn't it racist to acknowledge a name as being a "black name." Isn't that what Johnny Cochran said? /sarcasm

[End The Hypocrisy]

Even if the study's accurate, it just goes to show how racial quotas stigmatize even competent blacks.



It’s hard not to admire how Linda Chavez exposed the following scandal:

http://www.ceousa.org/html/update/update.html

"A detailed, 50-page study released by the Center for Equal Opportunity
concludes that racial discrimination is widespread in Virginia law school
admissions. The report focuses on the three Virginia public law schools --
the University of Virginia, William & Mary, and George Mason University --
and reveals odds favoring black applicants as high as 731 to 1. To put it in
other terms: A student with an LSAT score of 160 and an undergraduate GPA of
3.25 had a 95 percent chance of admission into U.Va. if he or she was black,
but only a 3 percent chance of admission if white, Hispanic or Asian."


Here are some little known facts:

"After graduation recently, 2.5 million American seniors enrolled in either
a two-year or a four-year college. Almost a million did not. They were
overwhelmingly poor, male and white. Much to the surprise of social
scientists who traditionally have looked for educational problems among
minorities, low-income black and Hispanic men are more likely to go to
college right out of high school than white guys. So are young women of any
background, in fact."

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22619-2002Oct26.html

---

Can we refute the following?


Here's Why Affirmative Action Deserves to Survive
BY Professor KIM FORDE-MAZRUI (U.Va. School of Law)
Source: http://www.law.virginia.edu/home2002/pdf/Will_Affirm_Action_Survive.pdf


The last time the Supreme Court addressed whether schools of higher education may consider race in the admissions process, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Court essentially said, “Sometimes, but not with quotas.” Most experts predict the Court will revisit the issue since the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit last month, in Grutter v. Bollinger, upheld Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policy. With seven new justices on the Court since Bakke, and several decisions that reveal a Court increasingly hostile to affirmative action, Grutter may well end affirmative action in higher education. That would be a mistake. Centuries of slavery followed by another century of legalized oppression created an underclass recognizable by race, which America should not now abandon.

LOOKING TO BAKKE Barbara Grutter challenged the practice at the University of Michigan Law School of considering the race of minority applicants, which Michigan defended as necessary to assemble a student body with diverse experiences and perspectives. The District Court held Michigan’s policy unconstitutional. The 6th Circuit reversed, relying on Bakke. Discerning the meaning of Bakke is complicated by its fractured nature. Bakke invalidated a state medical school’s policy of reserving a percentage of seats for racial minorities. Justice Lewis Powell Jr. concluded that the quota was unconstitutional, but that some attention to race was constitutional to achieve a diverse student body. Four justices joined Powell’s conclusion that the quota was invalid, while Justice William Brennan Jr., joined by three other justices, concurred with Powell that some attention to race was permissible. Thus one majority voted to invalidate the quota, while another voted to permit race as one of several admissions criteria. Further, only Powell endorsed the use of race to achieve diversity, while the other four justices approving the use of race cited remedying past societal discrimination as the appropriate justification. The 6th Circuit concluded that Powell’s opinion was controlling, and that if more recent cases call Bakke into question, it is for the Supreme Court to clarify.

DEVELOPING DOCTRINE The Court left unresolved in Bakke the standard of judicial scrutiny applicable to racially preferential affirmative action. But in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989), the Court decided that state-sponsored racial preferences are subject to “strict scrutiny,” which means that such policies will be upheld only if they are “necessary” or “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling” interest. The following year, in Metro Broadcasting Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission (1990), the Court held the federal government to a more lenient standard. But it held in Adarand Constructors v. Peña (1995) that federal affirmative action is also subject to strict scrutiny. As to what purposes are sufficiently “compelling” to justify racial preferences, the case law suggests there are at most two: remedying past discrimination and assembling a diverse group of people in certain contexts, such as educational settings. To remedy past discrimination, a state must identify with “particularity” the discrimination to be remedied, and design the preference to benefit only those persons who were discriminated against and only to the degree necessary to counteract the effect of the discrimination. The Court, since Bakke, has rejected preferences designed to compensate for the effects of unspecified historic or societal discrimination. Thus, in Croson, the Court held unconstitutional a city’s racial quota in awarding construc-

Will Affirmative Action Survive? Grutter v. Bollinger asks the Supreme Court. tion contracts because the policy failed to ensure adequately that the minority firms who benefited had been victims of identified discrimination in the local industry. With respect to whether diversity is sufficiently compelling, the signs are unfavorable. In support of diversity is Powell’s individual opinion in Bakke. What remains of his opinion will probably depend on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the swing vote in affirmative action cases. In Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986), a case that preceded Croson, O’Connor cited with apparent approval Powell’s diversity reasoning in Bakke. Subsequently in Croson, however, O’Connor said that racial preferences should be limited to remedying specific discrimination, suggesting that diversity is insufficient. Also, although Metro Broadcasting upheld a racial diversity program, the four dissenting justices, including O’Connor, are now usually in the majority in affirmative action cases. O’Connor’s dissent in Metro Broadcasting thus suggests how the conservative majority would rule today. O’Connor criticized as stereotypical the assumption that racial diversity would contribute to broadcast diversity, and also criticized broadcast diversity as too vague a rationale to justify racial preferences. Similarly, in two other lines of cases, the Court, with O’Connor’s support, has rejected as stereotypical the assumption that race correlates with juror or voter perspective. Michigan denied that its affirmative action policy was intended to remedy past discrimination—most likely because it would have been effectively impossible for the school to design an affirmative action program with that goal. The Court’s requirement that past discrimination be identified with particularity would seem to require that a school identify the time, place and manner of past discrimination, and identify who, among its applicant pool, were victims of such discrimination, and how such discrimination impaired their ability to qualify for admission under race-neutral standards. Realistically, no school of higher education could meet this standard. The only plausible basis on which to justify Michigan’s policy is the one it relied on—to achieve a diverse student body. The problem the university faces is not whether intellectual diversity in an academic setting is important; the problem is in using racial diversity to achieve it. The Court’s skepticism about using race to predict other traits suggests it would reject as “stereotypical” the assumption that racial diversity correlates with intellectual diversity. Furthermore, even were the Court to accept a correlation between race and student perspective, the Court’s demand in other affirmative action cases for definite standards regarding the manner in which race is to be used suggests it would view diversity as unduly vague. The implications of the Court’s ultimate decision in Grutter are not limited to public colleges and universities. Private schools, which represent almost 60 percent of the four thousand institutions of higher education in the United States, may be just as legally vulnerable. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits the same discrimination by all schools receiving federal funds as the Constitution prohibits by public schools. Accordingly, if the Court in Grutter holds unconstitutional Michigan’s racial preferences, then such preferences would also violate the Civil Rights Act when practiced by schools receiving federal funds. Since virtually all private schools depend on federal funding, Grutter could end racial preferences by all schools of higher education. Seeing the writing on the wall, several public colleges have turned to “alternative action,” policies designed to create racial diversity without racial preferences. Some, for example, are experimenting with “class-based” affirmative action in which weight is given to the socioeconomic background of applicants. Two difficulties face these efforts. First, despite their use of race-neutral criteria, such programs may be constitutionally vulnerable because of the race-conscious purpose motivating them. Equally problematic, economic- based preferences are unlikely to admit meaningful numbers of minority students because whites overwhelmingly dominate the pool of economically disadvantaged applicants who are adequately prepared for higher education, especially for the more competitive schools. Indeed, Michigan considered race-neutral alternatives, and rejected them because of their ineffectiveness in achieving racial diversity.

GETTING BEYOND RACE? Grutter presents the Court with a choice: whether to mandate complete colorblindness or, alternatively, to preserve some discretion in schools to create educational environments as diverse as the society their graduates will serve. Racial preferences are certainly regrettable, and America’s history demonstrates how race may be used to oppress. The tragic consequences of that history persist, however, in the stark disparities between racial groups. The average black child born today is exceedingly more likely than the average white child to be raised in poverty, in a broken family, in a community marked by substance abuse, violent crime, and poor quality schools. Unless we assume that along with darker skin a child of color biologically inherits a propensity to fail, to commit crime, or to die a violent death, we should recognize that these conditions result from generations of injustice whose effects will take effort and time to overcome. To ignore racial differences in the name of colorblindness is to guarantee their perpetuation. The day when race no longer matters will not arrive until we take active measures —affirmative action—to provide opportunities for minorities to educate themselves. If the Court decides to revisit Bakke, it would do well to recall the late Justice Harry Blackmun’s admonition in that case: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Equal Protection Clause perpetuate racial supremacy.”

Author Kim Forde-Mazrui is professor of law and Barron F. Black Research Professor at the University of Virginia. He teaches and writes about race and constitutional law, and is the author of “The Constitutional Implications of Race-Neutral Affirmative Action,” Georgetown Law Journal (2000). He is a former employee of the University of Michigan, where he also received his undergraduate and law degrees.

---

[davisfh]

In my opinion, it pays to have a standard name. Both white and black parents often make their children's futures difficult by saddling them with awkward and unusual names.

My advice to parents about to be blessed with a child is to think of some famous person or some person who was significant in history and, if their name is pretty much mainstream, give that person's name to their child. To do otherwise might result in a childhood of ridicule and teasing and, later in life, a form of silent discrimination.

[Quanah]

I find the results of this study suspect and highly subjective!
I have a "white" name and can't recall it EVER being a plus.

sincerely,
Judas McVeigh Hitler

[truth_seeker]

I think that 100 years ago and 50 years ago, black parents would mostly name their children with "white" names.

The names cited as "black" have mostly come into use fairly recently. What reason(s) explain this? I think it started about the same time as the black power things, of the 60s and 70s.

I would like to see a study of college entrance scores, for people with "white" names and with "black" names. I do have my own, confidential, predictions, about what such a study would reveal.

[meisterbrewer]

This was a topic for discussion on a local Chicago radio station a few days ago and a caller made an excellent point. She said she was a local business owner and that yes, she did call back white applicants instead of equally qualified black applicants. Why? Easy.

If the white applicant doesn't work out, she can easily fire him or her. If the black applicant doesn't work out, she would most likely get a phone call from EEOC or even get sued for racial discrimination. According to her, it was simply an economic decision, not racism.

[thedugal]

This is ridiculous. 4 out of the 9 "black" names (male) are clearly Arab names, and the study was taken after 911. For right or wrong, that clearly skews the study.

The other issue is of course the backlash of affirmative action. If you have a "qualified" black applicant, and you reject him or her for a more qualified white applicant, you could be sued by civil rights groups. If you get a bunch of applicants, it may behoove you to throw some extra out to reduce your chances of libel. Of course, that is not ethical, but the affirmative action crowd have created a hostile environment.

When I was growing up I was taunted relentlessly because of my last name. What most people never knew is that my name had been changed long ago from the original Gaelic (MacDubhghall -> MacDougall). Even though my ancestors had to change their name just to fit in, it still wasn't English enough for some, but guess what, I have never sued anyone for it!

Fact is, many "white" Americans changed their non-English names to English names years ago. They stopped naming their children Semus(Shay-mas) and named them James instead. But blacks have been urged to seek a non-American identity. To stop being Americans and to become "African-Americans". They have begun to change their names to African, Arab or more likely just plain made-up names. They now quite often give their children "African-American" names. I feel no sympathy, and I have no intention of changing my name to the Gaelic spelling either. Liberal actions have negative consequences.

[F16Fighter]

Gee -- Applicants named "Kareem" and "Rasheed" are going to have HUGE advantages in being hired for security at airports.

On the otherhand, the "Buffys" and Skippys" of the world would NOT be pre-judged within rap music circles...

[fightinJAG]

I think you're right about the class-oriented angle. The names of people reflect upon their parents---and their parents' class (or lack thereof), education, sophistication about the world, etc.

I find it especially troubling today that, in addition to so many simply made up names, people have gotten the notion that it is cute (or something) to come up with "creative" spellings for every name under the sun. I'm sorry, it often makes it seem as if Jr. were likely to be raised by an illiterate or was the offspring of an adolescent who had read too many Teen People mags.

[fightinJAG]

Agreed. But this is exactly why names often tell us something about a person---they tell us about that person's parents and whether they even realize the process you have described and the importance of a name for their child.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

Those "white" names are not just "white", they are pretty much entirely British, even just English.

I wonder what the results would be if you did this same type of study comparing British first names with first names from other "white" ethnic groups? For example, how would "Mireille" stack up to "Meredith", or "Jules" with "Geoffrey", or "Gunter" with "Greg", of "Svetlana" with "Sarah", or "Lech" with "Lawrence", or "Zbignew" with "Zachary"?

I suspect that a lot of this is more of an ethnic thing than a racial thing. Indeed, it may be more of just a language thing -- a lot of non-English sounding names are just hard for Anglophones to pronounce. When you have fifty or a hundred job applicants and need to make a cut somewhere, who are you going to call for the interview? The applicant whose name you can pronounce, or the one you can't?