| I didn't explain what I meant very well. What I had in mind was that for a white English speaker, the 'black' names would probably sound foreign and unfamiliar, but non-English names from white countries (e.g. Norway, Iceland, Sweden) would also sound foreign and unfamiliar. The question I was curious to answer was, are the people who are assessing resumes responding to an impulse (conscious or unconscious) of: - "hmm, that name sounds black" or - "hmm, that name sounds unfamiliar and foreign"? With the former, it sounds like racism, with the latter, it sounds like generic suspicion of foreigners, concern about English communication ability, etc. Maybe it's an academic point because in a US context, there are probably more people with "American Black" names that sound unfamiliar to white, English-speaking Americans, than there are Norwegians or Icelanders with similarly unfamiliar names. |
In some sense, I suspect the two aren't totally distinguishable, because I expect the underlying mechanism is at least partly an in-group vs out-group mechanism. Indeed, the social justice technical term "othering" is about how people take actual present people and dehumanize them by activating negative intergroup biases.
In this case, the researchers used in-person surveys to judge that the names specifically were perceived as black, rather than merely unknown.