[noste]

> All else held equal, that is simply not true in modern America. There are very powerful incentives to hire the equivalently qualified black guy in order to avoid lawsuits.

What about the audit studies that would appear to indicate otherwise? For example, an audit study from 2004 states in its abstract that "White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for White names than for African American ones. The racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry, and employer size."[1], and earlier experiment would appear to show that white applicants with criminal records are called back slightly more often than black applicants without one[2].

1. Bertrand and Mullainathan: "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mullainathan/files/...

2. Devah Pager: "The mark of a criminal record" http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc232i.pdf