I am sure each employer thought they were choosing the best person for the job, not weighing the benefits of a black person vs a white person. The point is that when all these decisions are summed up a bias emerges. The author of this argument is arguing that our tendency to incorrectly clump people into groups is the reason for this bias.
I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about blacks vs whites. I asking why this experiment doesn't show any difference between high-quality and low-quality black candidates.
Using the names suggested by the article, suppose Tyrone is a high-quality black candidate and Latoya is a low-quality black candidate. The experiment shows that employers--when they do choose a "black" candidate--will choose Tyrone and Latoya equally often.
The employer supposedly has no preference for the better CV among the black applicants.
It does seem very odd that there was no difference between high-quality and low-quality black candidates, but I'll guess at an explanation: employers are suspicious of black achievement because of affirmative action and similar programs. It's harder to know if a black applicant "earned" his accomplishments or not, because they're more likely to be given undeserved grades, accomplishments, opportunities, etc.
And I think all you need for evidence that this is true is ... this study! The failure of an employer to interview enough black candidates is considered by many to be prima facie evidence of racism. (Just look at the comments here. Likewise, giving more failing grades to black students is racist.) So-many people are desperate to avoid looking racist, and black students/employees/etc. get a lot of little advantages as a result. Some of these are harmless (well performing black guy gets first crack at a new position, rather than well performing white guy), but some of them aren't (now-poorly-performing black guy doesn't get fired/demoted from new position).
The employers were not merely classifying people into groups, they wanted to actually hire someone.
If in the employer's mind, all black applicants were bad, the employer would hire a white applicant, or wouldn't hire anyone, or would keep looking.
But that's not what happened. Sometimes the employer called one of the black applicants for an interview. Even if the employer thought that all the black applicants were bad, the logical thing to do would be to go through the CVs again to try to discern some differences in the pool of black applicants before you waste time on an interview.
But the experiment says that the employers found all black applicants to be equally bad.
Then my question is: On what basis did the employer pick the black applicant to call for an interview?
It's as if the employer is saying, "We prefer to interview the best white applicants. Sometimes we interview a black applicant, but in those cases good or bad doesn't matter -- we'll interview a random black applicant."
It doesn't add up. Either the experiment is flawed or there is a subtle explanation for this anomaly.
