By MICHAEL LUO
Tahani Tompkins was struggling to get callbacks for job interviews in the Chicago area this year when a friend made a suggestion: Change your name. Instead of Tahani, a distinctively African-American-sounding name, she began going by T. S. Tompkins in applications.
Yvonne Orr, also searching for work in Chicago, removed her bachelor’s degree from Hampton University, a historically black college, leaving just her master’s degree from Spertus Institute, a Jewish school. She also deleted a position she once held at an African-American nonprofit organization and rearranged her references so the first people listed were not black.
The dueling forces of assimilation and diversity have long battled for primacy in the American experience, most acutely among African-Americans. It’s not clear that assimilation has gained an edge here in the waning days of the decade, but the women’s behavior — “whitening” the résumé — is certainly not isolated. Ms. Tompkins and Ms. Orr were among the more than two dozen college-educated blacks interviewed for an article about racial disparities in hiring published last week on the front page of The New York Times. A half-dozen said they had taken steps to hide their race, or at least dial back the level of “blackness” signaled in their résumés.
That seemed startling somehow, maybe because of the popular perception that affirmative action still confers significant advantages to black job candidates, a perception that is not borne out in studies. Moreover, statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in this jobless environment compared with whites, as that article reported.
But if playing down blackness is a common strategy born of necessity, perceived or real, it still takes a psychic toll, maybe a greater one now, as people calibrate identity more carefully.
“I wrestled with it a great deal,” said Ms. Orr, who has worked for 15 years in fund-raising for nonprofits. “I wrestled with what kind of message I was sending to my children in raising them to be very proud of whom they are.”
There have been ebbs and flows, however, in the degree to which “blackness” has been aggressively celebrated by African-Americans. Ms. Orr’s parents were Black Panthers, part of the black power and black pride movement that came to the fore in the late 1960s. But even Ms. Orr’s mother, counseling her about her résumé, said, “You don’t need to shout out, ‘I’m black.’ ”
Most of those interviewed described their strategy as a way to eliminate one more potential obstacle that might keep them from at least getting the chance to make it to an interview so they could present their case in person. Experts said that course might be wise. Research has shown that applicants with black-sounding names get fewer callbacks than those with white-sounding names, even when they have equivalent credentials. Affirmative action programs in the private sector have largely receded since the early 1980s, replaced by a variety of diversity efforts rarely shown to be effective in raising minority representation.
“The average organization either doesn’t have diversity programs, or has the type that is not effective and can even lead to backlash,” said Alexandra Kalev, a University of Arizona sociologist who has studied such efforts. “So in the average organization, being black doesn’t help.”
Nevertheless, the strategy of hiding race — in particular changing names — can be soul-piercing. It prompted one African-American reader of the article to write that he was reminded of the searing scene in the groundbreaking TV miniseries “Roots” when the runaway slave Kunta Kinte is whipped until he declares that his name is Toby, the name given to him by his master.
Black job seekers said the purpose of hiding racial markers extended beyond simply getting in the door for an interview. It was also part of making sure they appeared palatable to hiring managers once race was seen. Activism in black organizations, even majoring in African-American studies can be signals to employers. Removing such details is all part of what Ms. Orr described as “calming down on the blackness.”
In “Covering: the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights,” Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, wrote about this phenomenon not just among blacks but also other minority groups. “My notion of covering is really about the idea that people can have stigmatized identities that either they can’t or won’t hide but nevertheless experience a huge amount of pressure to downplay those identities,” he said. Mr. Yoshino says that progress in hiring has meant that “the line originally was between whites and nonwhites, favoring whites; now it’s whites and nonwhites who are willing to act white.”
John L. Jackson Jr., a professor of anthropology and communications at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Racial Paranoia,” said he wondered about the “existential cost” of this kind of behavior, even if the adjustments were temporary and seem harmless.
“In some ways, they are denying who and what they are,” he said. “They almost have to pretend themselves away.”
tags: affirmative action, discrimination, identity, john jackson, labor, racial_profiling
tags: affirmative action, discrimination, identity, john jackson, labor, racial_profiling
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