r/moderatepolitics 20d ago

Government Should Not Legitimate Systemic-Racism Confessions Opinion Article

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/12/15/government_should_not_legitimate_systemic-racism_confessions_152087.html
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u/rightful_vagabond 20d ago

My problem is that I've never seen a good definition of systemic racism that accurately applies to the US and isn't covered under other terms. There's interpersonal racism, present effects of historical racism, legal explicit racism (which is illegal), and disparate racial impact of laws (which is also illegal).

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u/ryes13 20d ago edited 19d ago

A good example would be the 2004 “Names Bias” hiring study [https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/0002828042002561]. Essentially people with identical resumes were much less likely to be called for an interview just because they had a black sounding name. This type of racism is systemic because multiple employers fell prey to the same bias so it’s not individual interpersonal racism. To your other examples it isn’t historical because it’s happening now. It isn’t legal or disparate impact of law because the law isn’t causing it.

Also while this study is illustrative, something to keep in mind that it is just measuring the first step of the hiring process. This is the easiest step to measure and quantify in this manner. This indicates that there may be other systemic problems that we can’t measure via studies like this.

Edit: To respond to comments below, the study has been replicated multiple times including in 2024: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32313/w32313.pdf. It’s a real effect, not made up.

Edit 2: Comment below is making it seem like the “Names Bias” was debunked by another one because it couldn’t find the same effect. There’s a link to a website (Datacolada) that says it’s because they didn’t control for socioeconomic status. If you read the study that website is referencing (which was looking for bias based on college credentials and not race), the original authors don’t say that. They say they probably didn’t find the effect because they were using different methods (online ads instead of paper ads, different jobs, etc). So it isn’t accurate to say that they debunked it.

The Datacolada website (which is actually pretty interesting) was theorizing it might be because they used different names which indicated higher socioeconomic status. But the author of that post even says that these are preliminary results and don’t do the work needed to untangle race from socioeconomic status. From that website: “this conclusion is tentative as best, we are comparing studies that differ on many dimensions (and the new study had some noteworthy glitches, read footnote 4). To test racial discrimination in particular, and name effects in general, we need the same study to orthogonally manipulate”

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u/magus678 20d ago

A good example would be the 2004 “Names Bias” hiring study

The study you have referenced has failed to replicate under greater rigor.

This talks about it at more length but the gist is that what is actually being signaled here is social economic status, rather than race. They were able to get the original data by comparing Lakwonda to Greg, when they should have been comparing Lakwonda to Jethro. Once you control for this, the effect disappears.

But even if we just sort of ignore all of the above, and presume it true:

The effect seen in this study was ~3%, which while obviously not a good thing, is of debatable power. I am not aware of a study that qualitatively measures the difference, but studies have looked at general judgement of resume font choice by hiring managers and it would seem to suggest that this likely has a significantly higher magnitude of effect.

Whether this shows a miniscule effect of race or a ridiculously strong effect of font I suppose is a matter of perspective, but I suspect everyone would probably agree that diverting the amount of social and psychic real estate dedicated to this particular question to discussion on font would probably be strange.

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u/ryes13 20d ago edited 20d ago

Actually reading the study that your link is based on makes it seem not as straight forward as “it fails to replicate under greater rigor.”

From the study: “We find no consistent pattern of differences in callback rates by race, unlike Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004). The possible reasons include differing study settings, time periods, labor markets, application processes, employers, and job quality.”

Further: “We applied to vacancies posted on an online job board instead of to help-wanted ads in a newspaper, and thus it is likely that the employers in our study are larger. Additionally, the jobs in Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) were often in clerical and administrative support occupations (which tend to be lower-paid) and less so in account-ing, finance, and analytical positions (which tend to be higher-paid). Finally, we note that a lack of explicit racial discrimination may actually be due to the online recordable nature of employer-employee contact.“

So that study doesn’t invalidate the results of the original study or say that they should’ve controlled for socioeconomic status. Just that they used different methods because they were measuring for different things.

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u/ryes13 20d ago edited 19d ago

The effect has been replicated. The link you listed even shows that it was replicated three times. It was most recently replicated in 2024: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32313/w32313.pdf

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u/neverunacceptabletoo 19d ago

That study uses the same exact names as the 2004 study.

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u/ryes13 19d ago

No it doesn’t.

From page 6 of the study: “To signal race and gender, we followed previous correspondence experiments and used distinctive names. Our set of names started with that of Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), who used 9 unique names for each race and gender group. This list was supplemented with 10 additional names per group from a database of speeding tickets issued in North Carolina between 2006 and 2018.”

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u/neverunacceptabletoo 19d ago

The Bertrand and Mullainathan study is the 2004 study in question. What precisely do you think

Our set of names started with that of Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004)

Means?

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u/ryes13 19d ago

They started with. The second half of the quote is the important part. They added 10 additional names per group along with the original 9. It’s not the exact same list of names.

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u/neverunacceptabletoo 19d ago

So to be clear… they used the same names as the 2004 study. Which is what I originally said.

What are we arguing about here?

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u/ryes13 19d ago

It’s not the same list. They added names. I am also confused about what we’re arguing about because I don’t understand how using the original list as a base somehow invalidates the entire replication?

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u/neverunacceptabletoo 19d ago

Did I say it was the same list? I said they used the same names, which they did.

This sounds as if we are arguing about a failure of your basic English comprehension.

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u/ryes13 19d ago

Very civil comment.

“They used the exact same names” makes it sound like they used only those names and no others. We can be pedantic about it, but that isn’t a far reach and doesn’t constitute a “failure of.. basic English comprehension.”

And to my original point, it doesn’t invalidate the fact that it replicated the results with an expanded list of names.

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