RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IS STILL AT WORK IN U.S.

Two young high-school graduates with similar job histories and
demeanors apply in person for jobs as waiters, warehousemen or other
low-skilled positions advertised in a Milwaukee newspaper. One man is
white and admits to having served 18 months in prison for possession
of cocaine with intent to sell. The other is black and hasn't any
criminal record.

Which man is more likely to get called back?

It is surprisingly close. In a carefully crafted experiment in which
college students posing as job applicants visited 350 employers, the
white ex-con was called back 17% of the time and the crime-free black
applicant 14%. The disadvantage carried by a young black man applying
for a job as a dishwasher or a driver is equivalent to forcing a white
man to carry an 18-month prison record on his back.

Many white Americans think racial discrimination is no longer much of
a problem. Many blacks think otherwise. In offices populated with
college graduates, white men quietly confide to other white men that
affirmative action makes it tough for a white guy to get ahead these
days. (If that's so, a black colleague once asked me, how come there
aren't more blacks in the corporate hierarchy?)

A recent Gallup poll asked: "Do you feel that racial minorities in
this country have equal job opportunities as whites, or not?" Among
whites, the answer was 55% yes and 43% no; the rest were undecided.
Among blacks, the answer was 17% yes and 81% no.

The Milwaukee and other experiments, though plagued by the
shortcomings of research that relies on pretense to explain how people
behave, offer evidence that discrimination remains a potent factor in
the economic lives of black Americans.

"In these low-wage, entry-level markets, race remains a huge barrier.
Affirmative-action pressures aren't operating here," says Devah Pager,
the sociologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who
conducted the Milwaukee experiment and recently won the American
Sociological Association's prize for the year's best doctoral
dissertation. "Employers don't spend a lot of time screening
applicants. They want a quick signal whether the applicant seems
suitable. Stereotypes among young black men remain so prevalent and so
strong that race continues to serve as a major signal of
characteristics of which employers are wary."

In a similar experiment that got some attention last year, economists
Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil
Mullainathan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology responded in
writing to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston, using names likely
to be identified by employers as white or African-American. Applicants
named Greg Kelly or Emily Walsh were 50% more likely to get called for
interviews than those named Jamal Jackson or Lakisha Washington, names
far more common among African-Americans. Putting a white-sounding name
on an application, they found, is worth as much as an extra eight
years of work experience.

These academic experiments gauge the degree of discrimination, not
just its existence. Both suggest that a blemish on a black person's
resume does far more harm than it does to a white job seeker and that
an embellishment does far less good.

In the Milwaukee experiment, Ms. Pager dispatched white and black men
with and without prison records to job interviews. Whites without drug
busts on their applications did best; blacks with drug busts did
worst. No surprise there. But this was a surprise: Acknowledging a
prison record cut a white man's chances of getting called back by
half, while cutting a black man's already-slimmer chances by a much
larger two-thirds.

"Employers, already reluctant to hire blacks, are even more wary of
blacks with proven criminal involvement," Ms. Pager says. "These
testers were bright, articulate college students with effective styles
of self-presentation. The cursory review of entry-level applicants,
however, leaves little room for these qualities to be noticed." This
is a big deal given that nearly 17% of all black American men have
served some time, and the government's Bureau of Justice Statistics
projects that, at current rates, 30% of black boys who turn 12 this
year will spend time in jail in their lifetimes.

In the Boston and Chicago experiment, researchers tweaked some resumes
to make them more appealing to employers. They added a year of work
experience, some military experience, fewer periods for which no job
was listed, computer skills and the like. This paid off for whites:
Those with better resumes were called back for interviews 30% more
than other whites. It didn't pay off for blacks: Precisely the same
changes yielded only a 9% increase in callbacks.

Someday Americans will be able to speak of racial discrimination in
hiring in the past tense. Not yet.