Study Says E-Mails From Black Users Receive Fewer Responses Researchers have discovered yet another area where Blackness is discriminated against. As it turns out, even our emails aren’t seen as worth the time it took to write them, if the recipient suspects that the name in the address sounds like that of a Black person. A new study from the Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn, Germany has found that emails coming from users presumably African American names are less likely to receive any response from public service authorities than those coming from users with more generic, “white-sounding” names. The “Black” e-mails were also less likely to receive a response with a cordial tone, or to be addressed by name or even with a simple respectful salutation such as ‘hello’ or ‘dear’ than those with white names attached. The study was conducted with two “white names” – Jake Mueller and Greg Walsh – and two names that sound more African-Americans – DeShawn Jackson and Tyrone Washington. Over a two week period, the researchers sent 19,079 emails to local government offices — school authorities, libraries, sheriff offices, treasurers, job centers and country clerks — all across the US. The emails signed by the white names received a response 72% of the time, while the ones from with black-sounding names received responses in only 68% of cases. Unsurprisingly, Sheriffs’ offices were the most dismissive of emails from black-sounding names, with those 7% less likely to receive a response than those from white people. Researchers said they found a ‘significant racial gap’ in all four regions of the US they tested – north-east, mid-west, south and west – although some states were worse than others. Dr. Corrado Giulietti, one of the authors of the study, said that this is clearly one of the many reasons that African-Americans face inequalities. Via MailOnline : “Local services constitute the majority of interactions between government institutions and citizens and perform central functions, for instance in education. The discriminatory attitude that our study uncovers could be one of the factors behind the disadvantaged position of black people in American society and could be a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality.” Well, this is something we could have guessed. What do YOU think of the study’s findings??
Originally posted here:
Digital Racism: New Study Finds That Officials Are Less Likely To Respond To E-Mails From Black-Sounding Names
