[einherjae]

I read the above as a way of saying that names may not necessarily be a good proxy for race specifically. Not as a comment on whether discrimination based on names is right or wrong.

You are of course entirely right that it shouldn’t matter in the decision process, unless the job at hand is “person named John”. But a point to raise is that this holds for positive discrimination as well, if the goal is to increase the number of X minority employees, then you cant optimize for that by selecting for X-sounding names if that’s a bad proxy.