Damien O'Connel
Banned
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2007
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- 5,139
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Jiggo, I get that you're trying to be an equal-opportunity offender but you are conflating very different things.
You are absolutely correct that there is employment discrimination against people with unusual names. But you haven't dug deeper and understood why.
1. Studies (such as this one) show that the reason those with unusual African-American names have trouble getting employed is because of white racism, not the names themselves.
That same black person, had they been named, "John" wouldn't necessarily get hired, either. They would just get knocked out of consideration later in the process, perhaps at the in-person interview stage.
2. Further other studies also show that when you take people with "strange" names and then control for race, income, opportunity, networking connections, etc. that there is no evidence that a name in itself does any damage to employability.
It's not the name, it's the other factors, primarily racism and opportunity.
Your main thesis is simply wrong. What you are attributing to the name is actually attributable to racism, among other factors.
That last thing you'd want to argue is that society ought to bend toward the will of the racists. Rather, it should be the opposite: we should oppose and resist racism in all forms (including names) and not give in to it as "just the way things are."
There's a cutoff point with this though...and we're closing in on it rapidly. Now folks are just adding actual words onto the front of names...just to be different. Like what was wrong with naming him Dominic?! Where in the process did his mother say to herself "Dominic is a great name...I better make it fucking stupid real quick."
Soon there's gonna be a kid named Iieuejfjbd pronounced: Thomas