There’s no denying that the civil rights battles of the 1960’s paid off, especially for today’s minority students and workers. Despite the never-ending attacks on affirmative action on campus, and the lack of affirmative action at worksites, today there are more minority students at better schools and minority workers have at least a foothold in many occupations, once off-limits.

Still, racial discrimination and prejudice are alive and kicking, despite legal strictures and prohibitions. Moreover, where there is racial bigotry, some researchers have found, there is also a way to get around the law, not to mention human decency.

The researchers’ findings were summarized in the New York Times (December 12, 2002), and there can be no doubt as to the rigor of the researchers’ study, or the accuracy of their conclusions. Simply put, some employers are rejecting job applicants sight-unseen, based on their names. In other words, a resume submitted by someone with a name thought to be common to blacks, more than likely means that the chances of the applicant making it to an interview session go down, way down.

Previous researchers had sent matched job applicants to seek jobs in person. “Typically, though not always, the black job seekers were less likely to be invited for an interview or offered a job.” However, the earlier study was criticized by some other academics as methodically flawed, and its findings of racial discrimination, they said, were not substantiated. So two professors, one at the University of Chicago and the other at MIT, designed and conducted a fresh study that confirmed the earlier study. This time the job applicants were not sent out to companies; in fact, there were no real job seekers, only “phantoms” submitting resumes.

The researchers selected some 1300 help-wanted ads from Chicago and Boston newspapers, and answered them with resumes submitted with randomly assigned first names, “choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among whites….Last names common to the racial group were also assigned. Four resumes were typically submitted for each job opening, drawn from a reservoir of 160. Nearly 5,000 applications were submitted from mid-2001 to mid-2002. [Records] kept track of which candidates were invited for job interviews.” Names, including Kristen and Meredith, Latoya and Tamika, were selected to distinguish black women and men from white women and men.

“Apart from their names, applicants had the same experience, education and skills, so employers had no reason to distinguished among them.” But “distinguish,” some bosses did. “The results,” reported the Times, “are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than those with black-sounding names…. The 50 percent advantage for white-sounding names held in both Boston and Chicago, and for both men and women.”

The professors believe that two factors, equally sordid, explain their findings. One is simple bigotry. The other is equally simple. Some bosses believe that hiring whites means higher productivity and more profits for them than if they hire blacks.

No doubt such studies are useful, even if they only substantiate historical experience too weighty to be called anecdotal. Still, such studies mean almost nothing without the pressure of blacks and their allies, who take the fight against racial injustice into the streets.