Racism is still a critical topic because it is presented in various forms that are challenging to control legislatively. The podcast “How much does your name matter?” discusses unique African American and white names that cause racial discrimination. For instance, the podcast’s guest, Steve Levitt, talked about their research that revealed that employers are less likely to select candidates for a job interview if they have black names.
Indeed, this study is an example of racial discrimination, defined by Latanya Sweeney, the invited Harvard scholar, as giving or withholding services and benefits based on a person’s race. She also described the structural racism that happens when a system or service organization always leads to a discriminatory outcome. To exemplify, Sweeney discussed their experiment, which demonstrated that searching African American names on Google showed ads with arrest records, whereas white designations did not produce such results. Overall, these two cases reveal that racism is still an issue in the United States.
As I learned from the podcast, the name had no impact on children’s future, but changing the composition of our population will not likely change ethnicity and race definitions if older generations’ attitude is taught. My personal experience showed that numerical predominance or equality of either race does not change people’s perception of skin color differences. Still, I noticed that older people make more emphasis on racial identity than youth. For example, my high-school class, which had students of three different races, never had conflicts about ethnic and cultural differences. Therefore, eradicating prejudices about black and white names can minimize structural racism and employment discrimination. However, these changes may require mindset shifts in several generations to eliminate this bias.