Debunking the famous Black Names Study

In an Salon.com article entitled Yes, black people still face discrimination, David Sirota argues that black people face discrimination. Not exactly a novel topic, right. Mr. Sirota concocts his piece around familiar buzzwords like "white privilege" "denialism", "demagogues", and "institutional racism". Anyone else starting to think some computer program writes the entire anti-racist catalog?

In sum, Mr. Sirota asserts discrimination as the only plausible hypothesis given extant racial disparities. This purposefully obtuse conclusion comes from the leftist axiom that all races, even all people, have the same inherent potential, with outcome differences caused only by the evil white man. See his example below concerning black scientists. Mr. Sirota does not even consider any alternative hypothesis; or, perhaps he can't due to the fervency of his liberal beliefs:

In the same week the Oklahoman insinuated that government gives African-Americans a "tremendous advantage," the New York Times reported on data showing black scientists are "markedly less likely" to win government grants than white scientists. A few weeks earlier, the Pew Research Center had reported that "the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households."

Conveniently, Mr. Sirota ignores Asian success, a fact that would partly undermine the notion of "white privilege." At the very least, he would have to admit that some factor besides a surreptitiously evil cabal of "institutionally racist" white men underpins success. Amongst his sanctimonious liberal sermonizing, Mr. Sirota does cite a very interesting and seemingly potent study on jobs and race.

A study entitled Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination, is a favorite amongst race liberals:

You can see it in a 2004 MIT study showing that job-seekers with "white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews" than job seekers with comparable résumés and "African American-sounding names."

I read the study and in the context of leftist race studies, this one is admittedly quite impressive. While the authors still push the discrimination angle quite hard, they do proffer alternative explanations and possible sources of error. Further, the study is well designed with the authors taking the novel approach of actually controlling for variables, something leftist academia often just sort of skips over. Nonetheless, this liberal favorite does have a few problems which I'll discuss in bullets below:

In the real world, the results likely have an almost negligible impact: The study doesn't merely posit discrimination based off a sample of artificial resumes. It contends, and preening media types like Mr. Sirota use it as such, that these results reflect widespread discrimination against blacks in the job market. But how realistic is the study? How many black children born to mothers who would name their children Laquisha, DeShawn, and Marquis are actually as competent as the resumes portray them to be? In other words, black mothers who name their children "ghetto" names don't normally have very astute children. I confidently presume that the job market is bereft of blacks with ghetto names who are also qualified for white collar positions (the posted jobs were in sales, administration, and customer service - not exactly a comprehensive variety of jobs by the way). To test this very quickly, I randomly chose a white collar position, journalism, and looked up a representative group's executive board. The board members of the National Association of Black Journalists have the following names:

Gregory, Errin, Bob, Lisa, Keith, Cindy, Dedrick, A.J., Michelle, Dawn

Here are the names from the board of the National Association of Black Accountants:

Gregory, Shariah, Wayne, Veda, Walter, Ronald, Celia, Tina, W. Delores, Sheila, James, Arica, Monica, Charles, Carriea, Robert, Steven, Kenneth, Nora, Uso, Manuel, Theresa

Extremely few "black" names here. And note that these are black groups, so one wouldn't presume discrimination against ghetto-named people for these Executive Board positions. In essence, the purported effect has no real practical importance because astute white collar blacks with ghetto names are so rare.

From a liberal perspective, it's justified: Liberals constantly tell us that background matters, as in all groups must exhibit a significant level of diversity to function successfully. Of course, leftists use this as an excuse to hire less qualified minorities, never applying the same principle to discriminate in favor of whites. But if blacks and Hispanics are endowed with some unique knowledge given their racial background, then the same can be true of whites. So then, perhaps 50% more of the jobs offered required a white sensibility. For example, maybe the job was in an exclusively white area, relied on cultural knowledge of regional white customs, or involved dealing only with white children. If blacks are often afforded the luxury of dealing with other blacks (e.g. education reformers support blacks teaching black children), then the same freedom should be offered to whites. The job "discrimination" may reflect this liberal idea.

The study does not actually show general anti-black discrimination: The authors of the study actually do spend a considerable amount of effort offering alternative hypotheses. Unfortunately, no media types actually read that far into the study:

These facts suggest that perhaps other models may do a better job at explaining our findings. One simple alternative model is lexicographic search by employers. Employers receive so many resumes that they may use quick heuristics in reading these resumes. One such heuristic could be to simply read no further when they see an African American name. Thus they may never see the skills of African American candidates and this could explain why these skills are not rewarded. This might also to some extent explain the uniformity of discrimination since the screening process (i.e. looking through a large set of resumes) may be quite similar across the variety of jobs we examine.

The employers have limited resources (time) with which to screen the large number of applicants. They likely make a quick run through the resumes and look for the smallest reason to eliminate many of the applicants. A ghetto name, owing to the phenomenon discussed above in regards to white collar blacks, likely eliminates many applicants even before the employers look at the actual qualifications. In other words, the employers immediately see the ghetto name then stereotype the individual not as a black person in general, but as a certain type of black person - one with a ghetto name. So the "discrimination" is not applied to an entire race, but rather to a certain subset of a race, with the stereotype shown above to be quite rational.

Monolithic racial groups and no control group of lower-class whites: Related to the last point, the authors do not have a corresponding control group of whites with distinctively lower-class names. While the authors do broach the notion of social class, they reject it as a possible explanation with unconvincing hand-waving. In total, they conveniently present the ubiquity of names like Jamal and Tyrone as applying all blacks. In doing so within their general discussion social class, they look at race as monoliths instead of understanding the existence of a black "talented tenth" who almost always give their children whiter names. To more accurately test the social class supposition, the authors should have sent out resumes with stereotypically lower-class white names, such as Billy-Bob, Earl, Sharlene, and Crystal. Though not as immediately recognizable as ghetto black names, this would have better measured the effect of social class.

I applaud the study's authors for at least trying, but I believe the points raised above largely undermine the practicality and accuracy of their work. Unfortunately though, we can't expect anything but empty catchphrases like "white privilege" coupled with anti-white antagonism from the likes of Mr. Sirota.