from Andy Kroll's article:

"(Devah) Pager sent those two young black men and two young white men out into the world to apply for perfectly real jobs. Then she recorded who got callbacks and who didn't."

"Pager's white applicant without a criminal record had a 34 percent callback rate. That promptly sunk to 17 percent for her white applicant with a criminal record. The figures for black applicants were 14 percent and 5 percent. And yes, you read that right: In Pager's experiment, white job applicants with a criminal history got more callbacks than black applicants without one."

article furthers...

"Other research has supported her findings. A 2001-02 field experiment by academics from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, uncovered a sizeable gap in employer callbacks for job applicants with white-sounding names..."

that is a reference to the work of Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan:

"We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews."

i had first heard of this through Freakonomics as Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt approached the name game with a variety of conclusions, that attempts to correlate other factors. for a breakdown of both studies check out http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional/06/01/ethnic_names.pdf

it was however my first intuition and now in agreement with Pager as she states:

"many employers who discriminate don't even realize they're doing so; they're just going with 'gut feelings.' 'It's not that these employers have decided that they are not going to hire workers from a particular group,'"

sure, there are some who are, in all likelihood directly employing their racism. but it's my tendency to believe that the majority of those rejecting "black" applicants are reacting within deep-seated perceptions, fears or cultural discomforts without full cognizance. and this is a hard thing to pinpoint. if asked directly, some would not be honest for practical matters. but many would not really be honest by default because they are first not honest with themselves, have not really questioned their own process or been confronted, and if confronted would naturally find a mental defense mechanism for internal avoidance.

the difference in applicant responses shows both a lack of public discourse and the success of concentrated power to perpetuate itself through division (intrinsically tied). on a cultural whole we have barely touched on defining or more appropriately undefining race... maintaining superficial definitions, based on physical traits and geographic origins of human beings, within the confines of institutional racism. racism is power and we continue to divide ourselves with terms like black and white, as if skin tone defines a human being minus the cultural perceptions.

Obama is widely referred to as the first "black" president (or Afrrican-American according to Wikipedia). his mother is European and father African. by our cultural definitions that means a white mom and black dad. he is thus black. the institutional racism and cultural effects of this are never discussed. simply put, when white and black mix, the white has been impurified and thus creates black. this is illustrated well in the period of Jim Crow laws when states indvidually defined the amount of African ancestry it takes to make one a negro... varying from an 1/8 to 1/16 or just any amount in Alabama, that means one could literally, by legal definition, change race by crossing an invisible boundary. it seems to me, if we aren't dissecting these basic terminologies by understanding their historical contexts, we have a pretty difficult task at eliminating the disparity based on them, and even further difficulty at creating substantial movements to evolve beyond institutions of concentrated power.

on a related level, i came across a book today (haven't read) via an AK Press Facebook update. kind of random, but just happened to be by my good friend's sister. so i caught this interview:

http://wn.com/Interview_with_Makani_Themba_Nixon