It’s Written in Your Name

From Billie Holiday to Elton John, stage names have become a norm in the entertainment industry. But why are these names so iconic? Are some names really better than others? Perhaps certain names carry favorable connotations or maybe some names just sound more pleasing to the ear. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example, mentions that Jay Gatsby, with his regal name, was born as simply James Gatz. But was his pseudonym contributory to his considerable financial success? Or rather, more specifically, does the name of an individual currently affect his or her economic and academic opportunity? It turns out that some names imply ethnic background and this in turn leads to racial discrimination and thereby impedes financial success. For academic success, whether or not colleges discriminate using names is unclear. There have been government efforts to promote racial diversity in academia; however minority quotas in colleges have begun taking fire because of reverse discrimination, which has been partly caused by lowered standards for certain ethnic groups and elevated competition in groups that tend to be higher-achieving.

The Racial Judgment of NamesRacism, a possible resultant of name bias, is not something easily removed from society; African Americans, for example are still given negative and degrading labels that originate from the time of slavery, more than a century ago. Spikes in U.S. number of immigrants have continuously been met by American nativism and jingoism, whether it be immigrants from Europe, Asia, or Latin America. The unfortunate adamancy of racism is what makes certain names subject to unequal judgement.

Despite claims of equal economic opportunity in the US and the explicit claims of businesses’ hiring advertisements that they are “Equal Opportunity Employers” racism still exists in the form of stereotypes. This unequal treatment becomes distinguishable particularly in the economic world where hiring employees requires criticism of the applicants. Since most job applications do not routinely require photo identification, employers can only hire based on elements like experience and character, but they are also free to make assumptions through the name. Certain names are unique to certain cultures and therefore there are ethnicity-implying names, which, alongside negative racial stereotypes, do not enhance equality. As economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan boldly question in the title of their research report: "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?"

This report detailed the findings of a 2003 social experiment designed to determine whether or not discrimination based on name is present in hiring employers. Bertrand and Mullainathan sent around 5000 fictitious resumes to businesses with job open job positions that they categorized into six groups: “executives and managerial occupations; administrative supervisors; sales representatives; sales workers; secretaries and legal assistants; clerical occupations.” These resumes were each given a black or white-implying name and sent to businesses that advertised openings on specific websites and newspapers. Each opening was sent two sets of resumes, one set would include a high and low quality resume with the former under a black name and the later under a white. The second set would be the inverse of the first set.
After receiving call-backs from 1300 of the resumes, the “results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase.”

Name Bias in Colleges? Hard to Say...There's Affirmative Action ThoughThe root of financial success is most often attributed to education; even here, at the initiation stages of developing a career, race is used to determine the path of schooling. To ensure that colleges are ethnically diverse, all states originally operated according to policies of affirmative action, “in which an institution or organization actively engages in efforts to improve opportunities for historically excluded groups in American society.” Many Ivy League colleges, including Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, continue affirmative action to maintain diverse campuses. This system was originally intended to benefit minorities when it was established in the 1960s, "But there has been a backlash against Affirmative Action mainly from whites who feel they have lost out on jobs or university places to non-whites with poorer qualifications."

Not only that, but current trends have revealed high academic achievement in the Asian minority partly due to traditional emphasis on education. Colleges that do not adhere to affirmative action have substantially higher percentage of Asian students: at Harvard, where affirmative action is effective, Asians make up 19% of the population and whites make up 45%, at Yale, Asians make up 18% and whites 53%, while at UCLA, where acceptance based on ethnicity is unconstitutional, Asians make up 34% and whites 27%, at UC Berkeley, Asians make up 39% and whites make up 29%. No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, a book by sociology professors Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford estimated that, on a 1600 SAT scoring scale, “Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.” The Supreme Court has presided over several lawsuits relating to alleged injustice in college admissions where the culprit is always affirmative action. In the cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court wavered back and forth between condemning admittance based on race or rendering it constitutional. Affirmative action now remains in most states as lawful except in California and Florida.

So how do colleges determine ethnicity? College application forms normally include a section asking for the applicant’s race. For Asians, many fear that checking the “Asian” box will mean that they will be compared with thousands of other high-performance Asians and thus have a lower chance of acceptance. In his USA Today article "Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'", Jesse Washington interviews several half Asian, half white students of top-tier colleges with white and European surnames for their opinions about affirmative action and found that there are mixed feelings. Some took advantage of their allegedly favorable surnames and checked only the “white” box, some checked both “white” and “Asian”, and some simply chose to leave the section blank. Washington also interviewed Taiwanese-born-American Jasmine Zhuang from Yale, “She didn't check the box, even though her last name is a giveaway…” Though it is not clear whether or not colleges are allowed to assume race based off of name, it is is difficult to say if there is any subtle or unintended assumptions made. Washington writes, “Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania declined to make admissions officers available for interviews for this story.”

The uniqueness of certain names to a culture makes racial discrimination all to imminent. An individual’s name can greatly influence the odds in applying for jobs. On the topic of academics, the role of the applicant’s name in a college application is still unclear, though the presence of affirmative action has been reason enough for prospective students to take advantage of their more white or European-sounding names and especially for Asians with Asian names to ignore the demographics section of college applications.