[wpietri]

I see you're taking some heat for this comment, but I agree entirely. Trolling seems the more polite interpretation, because otherwise you'd be accusing somebody of levels of ignorance and arrogance that are mind-boggling to me.

Racism does of course exist and is a problem. There's a ton of research on this. Here's a good place to start:

http://www.projectimplicit.net/media.php http://www.projectimplicit.net/articles.php

But one great example is a study where they sent out the same resumes with different names at the top; some sounded black and some sounded white. The "black" resumes got significantly fewer callbacks, and on "black" resumes increases in skill and experience mattered significantly less:

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...

[stonemetal]

some sounded black and some sounded white.

The research on what people name their children shows very little racial correlation after controlling for wealth. Though it does show high correlation with wealth and status. So showing a bias against names poor people choose regardless of race then claiming it is about blacks is poor form.

[wpietri]

If you're curious about their particular experimental design, you can read the paper here: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/pdf/bertrand.pdf