Now, the concept of institutional racism compels us to examine disparities in wealth, disparities in employment, politics, education, criminal justice, and so forth. And we want to take a look at some of those things to see exactly the ways in which our dominant social institutions in fact have an adverse and disproportionate impact on individuals because of their membership in ethnic groups. Employment is an area that is constantly being looked at. There is certainly improvement in this area. And for a long time we have hoped that the Civil Rights movement and the passage of particular acts like the Fair Employment Act. As well as the development of certain state and federal agencies, that they would be able to wipe out any discrimination in employment. Or come close to reducing the kind of discrimination that existed historically. But the more recent studies have looked at this question in a systemic way, reminds us that this is still an issue. There was one study done by Bertrand, and I think it's Mullainathan, and it was a question as to whether employers looked at the names of the applicants and made decisions about their ethnicity. And then, in fact, made decisions as to whether they would get an interview or whether they would get a job, as to how the applicants would fare. And the title of the article was, Are Emily and Greg More employable than Lakisha and Jamal?. And the whole idea of the test case was to see if names that are popularly associated with African Americans like Lakisha and Jamal, and other names that people at least assume to be standard, or names associated with the white population, like Emily, whether that would actually make a difference. Now of course, any individual could have any of those names. And those names are not necessarily confined to membership in a particular ethnic group. But they are often assumed to be associated with members of an ethnic group. So that study was simply to develop resumes with these names. To give the applicants the same credentials, other words, to make them equivalent in terms of education and background, and the other kinds of things that would be on a resume for an application for employment. And then they sent those out to employers. And what they found was that the names Lakesha and Jamal got a lot fewer returns than Emily and Brendan. And they concluded that the resumes with white sounding names spurred 50% more call backs that the ones with black sounding names. And they also sent these applications to private business, to federal contractors across the board and learned that they got the same response irrespective of whether it was a private contractor or federal contractor. Their discrimination was systemic around those names in all areas. Now, a related study was done by Devah Pager called The Mark of a Criminal Record. And the first study was done in 2003. And in this study, the social scientists actually created applications for individuals and they indicated ethnicity on the application. Now, one of the things they did with the white applicants, as supposed to the black applicants, was to create a gap in terms of employment on their resumes. And then ask them to write a letter to explain that. And so the white applicants wrote a letter saying that the reason there was seven years with no record of employment is because of five years because they had spent time in prison or incarcerated. Because they were selling drugs or something like that. And that was, of course, applications that were manufactured, not actual individuals. And those were sent out to employers to see exactly how the employers might respond to the mark of a criminal record. Particularly around issues of race and ethnicity. As it turns out, the white applicants with the criminal record, who had confessed to a criminal record, got a higher rate of return than black applicants that were actually clean. That is, applicants who had no criminal record and yet were equal in terms of their education and other qualifications for a job. The second study was done in 2009. When Pager also with Western and Bonikowski did a study called Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Markets. It was a field experiment. In this case, they conducted a field of experiment with black, white and Latino applicants, who were matched on demographic characteristics and interpersonal skills. And these applicants were given equivalent resumes and sent to apply in tandem for hundreds of entry level jobs. And what they discovered was that the results showed that black applicants were half as likely as qualified white applicants to receive a call back or a job offer. Further, they found that black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds, that is, no criminal records, fared no better than white applicants just released from prison. And the point they're making in this is that employees actually do consider race in their decision either to call back or to offer a job. And if they have either information that indicate the race of an individual or if they can associate a name with the race of ethnicity of an individual. That then actually does reflect their openness or their sense of inclusively, willingness to hire people without regard race, color or creeds. Another study that's also received a lot of news coverage, that makes the same point, was the case of Jose Samora. And he was a person who'd been applying for a job using his name, Jose Zamora, and he had a difficult time getting call backs. And then on a hunch, he decided not to use Jose, to drop the s in his name and simply use Joe, Joe Zamora. And once he used Joe, as opposed to Jose, he got a lot more call backs. And a week later he said his inbox was full. So it made all the difference just dropping the s from his name. Because employers that received his application actually associated Jose with an ethnic minority group and were least likely to respond. Once he became Joe, or at least pretended to be Joe, the response was much greater. There also have been writings, Michael Luo is one other person who's written about the whitening of the resume. And what they've found is that some individuals will actually take conscious efforts to conceal or to hide their race in order to get a fairer hearing in an application for a job. And so he writes about a Chicago kid whose name was Tahani and I think she actually changed her name to TS Tompkins as opposed to Tahani Tompkins, in order to increase the chance of getting applications. A different kind of case, instead of a name change, was an applicant who actually took a historical black college off of the application. Because the assumption is that an African American student is more likely to go to a historical black college or university. And whereas that might be true, it's also the case that there are white students as well as Latino students enrolled in those universities as well. But this person concealed the fact that she had graduated from a historically black college. Hoping that that would increase her chances of getting a call back or increases her chances of being considered for employment. But these kinds of tactics indicate the extent to which individuals actually believe that they will be discriminated against if their ethnicity can be identified by future employers.
