Yo! My name is Shaniqua and I want a job!

A study done by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business shows that African-American sounding names are discriminated against more than White sounding names. The abstract explains:

We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We answer help-wanted adsin Boston and Chicago newspapers by sending resumes. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is randomly assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. This manipulation produces a significant gap in the rate of callbacks for interviews. White names elicit about 50% more callbacks than African American names. We also investigate how imprvements in credentials affect discrimination. For each employement ad, we send resumes of higher and lower quality. For Whites, the higher quality resumes elicit 30 percent more callbacks. For African Americans, however, the higher quality resumes do not elicit significantly more callbacks. In other words, African Americans benefit little if at all from improving their credentials. The extent of discrimination is remarkably uniform across occupations and industries. Similarly, Federal contractors (for whom affirmative action is better enforced) and employers who list "Equal Opportunity Employer" in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. In Chicago, we find that employers located in more African American neighborhoods discriminate less.

While this isn't surprising the information is quite interesting. Read for yourself.

/edit/ It appears that this is a hot topic. Apparently there is an article about this on ABCNews. Another interesting read./edit/