A Black man has filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against a hotel in Detroit, Michigan, alleging the hotel only offered him a job interview after he changed the name on his resume, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by CNN.
Dwight Jackson filed the lawsuit against the Shinola Hotel on July 3, alleging he was denied a job when he applied as “Dwight Jackson,” but later offered an interview when he changed his name to “John Jebrowski.”
The lawsuit alleges Jackson was denied a job in “violation of Michigan Elliott Larsen Civil Rights Act.”
Is ‘Dwight Jackson’ a black sounding name? I’d have assumed the person was white if I’d read that name.
Dwight not so much, but Jackson, yes.
To the point that “Jackson” became jazz/jive-era slang that was the equivalent of “hey, what’s up?” when black people who used that slang were talking to each other.
It’s also an extremely common surname for those of English/Scottish/Irish descent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_(name)
I’d be more willing to buy that they looked him up on social media and didn’t like what they saw. Whether or not that was his profile picture (race), or something he posted, is something I can’t answer.
But the name alone isn’t something I’d believe.
Over 50% of the people with that surname are Black.
https://discover.23andme.com/last-name/Jackson
That’s nationally too. So in a place like Detroit with a large Black population, I feel like people would assume Dwight Jackson was Black.
Agreed, it may just be a case of they weren’t hiring but then they were or the first resume was lost or a different manager looked at the resume. There are so many reasons what it could be that it shouldn’t be assumed race was a factor unless the hotel specifically said so.
Edit: reading the article I can see the guy applied many times before changing his name. I am slightly more convinced it was based on his name but it could still be they weren’t hiring but then they were. Or maybe they just wanted to meet the guy with such an awesome sounding name “Jabroski” sounds like something you would say in the 90s when Pauly Shore was popular. Memorable names stand out and make an impression.
these, among others, are the reasons why i didn’t take the same action when i resubmitted my resume under a very WASPy sounding name and the desire gets re-ignited every time i get an interview request after re-submitting my resume the same day my original resume was rejected.
Also need to take location into account here. Detroit is 77% black Seems it would be pretty easy to show discrimination is there is a hotel in Detroit that is lacking in black employees.
Middle-aged white guy here. First and last names, total white bread. Middle name? Black. Think “Tyrone” or “Trevon”. (LOL, Trevon shows a spell check error on one of the top 20 black male names.)
Couldn’t get a response on my resume for 6-weeks, nada. Changed the email to take out my middle name. Next week, 3 interviews and a solid job.
Had a black neighbor with a valley girl accent show up to an interview. 8 white girls waiting for their interviews. They showed her the door and said there was a mistake, no openings. She eventually got hired since her preacher was a top dog at the place.
The good thing about racists is that they’re fucking stupid. Just interview the person and say nothing instead of making up an obvious lie.
8 white girls waiting for their interviews. They showed her the door and said there was a mistake, no openings.
This is baffling. She could clearly see the other girls, yeah? All applying for the same position?
How do you dismiss one candidate in front of others, and say there are no openings? I don’t get it.
Well maybe she misread the room? 🤔
Arrives for the interview and there are 8 white girls, in scrubs, in the waiting room. Also, the person who was to take her in the back for the interview was visibly shocked.
My wife is a Filipino and I’m shocked at what she’s encountered in interviews.
“Are you Mexican or Asian?” Visible disgust at Asian.
“Are you a Christian? Oh. A Catholic. You have to attend our church every Sunday or we won’t hire you.”
Bonus points: Her first name is sorta black sounding. Told her to work around that somehow. Because I had to.
I have a Latin surname. I am sure it’s cost me in some circles. But in others it’s an advantage. At least for me I think it kind of evens out.
I’ve witnessed this first hand from the hiring side for an IT position. I was going through resumes with my boss and he straight up said, “I don’t want any hispanics, I want a white guy.” while tossing anything with a hispanic name to the side without even looking beyond that. This was in Orlando in an area with a large hispanic population. The kicker is that my boss was actually hispanic himself!
The kicker is that my boss was actually hispanic himself!
In the UK we call that racist taxi driver syndrome. A lot of immigrants come to the UK and because it’s a good money earner, or at least because they think it’s a good money earner, they tend to buy a taxi.
Anyway you get in and suddenly they start telling you about all their world views, usually it’s along the lines have there been too many immigrants. Even though they are an immigrant themselves.
Very much a case of shutting the door behind themselves.
Haha so true. I remember some my friend’s family going on about how we should all vote leave because of all the immigrants.
Mate, you were born in Napoli. You’re as Italian as spaghetti. I’m not that kind of British person and, as far as I’m concerned, you’re more than welcome here but you’re the “immigrant” you hate so much. Not only that, your that being that person while banging on about how bad immigration is to a group of very obviously white native British people. It was just the most bizarre thing ever.
He still has an accent.
I genuinely wanted to be like “but we like you.” I don’t think that would have gone down very well though.
I’ve spent too much of my life not speaking up at all. Then, I finally achieved speaking up by summoning anger and fear to motivate me. But my presentation is harsh and unfriendly.
My challenge now is to learn to disagree, when it needs to be done, but in a friendly and respectful way.
I’m Chinese and I am also extremely weary of hiring someone from China. Pretty scared of CCP spies TBH.
This is actually really fascinating to me, the idea that citizenship/nationality is a bigger factor in how you feel and that race isn’t a key factor. It tells me maybe society (globally, generally) is getting less plainly racist, but anxieties around nationality (and what that could indicate about individual attitudes and intentions) is obviously rising and taking its place, so racism ends up being obliquely adjacent to the more direct fear of the state. In other words, general society is making progress with being comfortable with people of different races, whereas country of origin becoming more worrying and slowing down progress.
What a strange disconnect there. We don’t fear individuals, we fear what they represent.
(I ate a gummy an hour ago tho sooooo I feel like I’m just stating the obvious so … Maybe?)
I think it’s not that.
Just when you are a member of a minority, communicating to others of the same minority feels weird.
Along patriotic lines - either you are a bit less real than them, or they than you, first.
Second, more importantly, among certain minorities some people trust “their own” more for business, employment, anything, and thus there are scams based purely on that.
Third, with people of a bit different background you are more eager to give some benefit or doubt or something when they show their personal downsides, with people of “your” group those downsides are much more infuriating and there’s a fallacy of presuming you understand them better.
I wasn’t expecting that. I would understand that there a slight positive involontary bias towards candidates with a familiar-sounding name, but such shameless behavior is astonishing
Are Latinos over represented in your company with respect to the population? That would be a defensible position for your boss on this. I mean if you had 85% Latinos that could be taken as evidence of some sort of ethnic bias in favor of Latinos.
His name was already about as white bread as it gets. This is a real and genuine problem when it comes to hiring, but it’s going to be a huge uphill battle for him to prove anything here.
When I think of the name “Dwight” I think of Eisenhower or the character from The Office. Not this guy.
Are there a lot of white Jacksons though? Legitimately asking, I don’t know any Jacksons personally and basically only drum up the obvious as far as famous folk lol
He doesn’t need to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. This is a civil suit. Essentially, his face value evidence is strong enough to win unless the hotel can provide clear explanation of how it did what it did, for example if they had different people processing different stacks of papers. At the same time, the plaintiff will have a chance for discovery, so who knows what will happen on that front.
It could be racism, or it could be because the reviewers eyes fell on different words while they were skimming the CV, or it could be because the reviewer was slightly more tired for one of the CVs. This sort of thing is very hard for a human being to be consistent at.
What you’re missing is his actual job history, identical on both resumes, he was applying for a luxury hotel customer service position, and had many years of exactly that experience, unless three other people with more experience than him applied and one of more dropped out, it makes no sense he was looked over, and then interviewed. That’s what pushes this from a case of maybe racism to a lawyer accepting the case because of the very strong evidence of racism.
And even if it was a case of two three people having more experience on their resume, and then dropping out, why wouldn’t the hiring manager scheduling the interview tell him that, and why did he pick the newer resume over the older one with exactly the same experience, it doesn’t add up. Resumes are usually organized oldest to newest, relevant job history greatest to least.
jackson is an extremely common surname in the black community?? the fuck??
It’s also extremely common in the white community. They’re saying that his real name isn’t one that would cause someone to assume you are nonwhite, like Will Dewitt, Ashley Jones, or Casey Smith.
It’s interesting, assuming he’s right (for the sake of this chain of thought), what would be the statistical relation to being black. In which part. Say, Dwight is not such a common name and how often do black Americans use it as compared to the rest. Or maybe there’s some rhythmic or melodic thing in names which people in different groups follow differently.
EDIT: And while a guy named Jackson can be anything, a guy named Jebrowski is most likely not black. Black people would usually get English\Irish\Welsh\Scottish\German\whatever names, because those were the names of their former, sorry, owners. There weren’t a lot of Poles, especially owning slaves, in the new world at the time this was happening.
EDIT2: So there is a difference along racial lines.
It’s also an extremely common last name among white people. It tells you nothing on a resume. This dude’s name is akin to someone named John Smith.
it’s known as a black surname, it’s not uncommon for white people … but it’s common if you’re black.
And also a common white last name. It’s just a common last name. Alan Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Peter Jackson. It’s a surname with English origin. Lots of Jackson’s out there. It tells you pretty much nothing about what the person looks like. Couple that with your first name being DWIGHT, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a common name.
We had something similar out here where a black family felt their home evaluation was really low when they were getting ready to sell so they had a white couple “show” the home to a different evaluator from the same company and surprise surprise the estimated value was like 30% higher for the white couple.
A guy I know bought a house in my town which still had a “no sales or subletting to negroes” clause in its deed when he took possession. His realtor told him it was totally unenforceable in this century, but would be a hassle to have officially removed. I have no idea of the veracity of the latter statement, but I did see a copy of the covenant and the offending clause was indeed present.
People say, “it wasn’t that long ago that we cast off that kind of racism.” Uh, no. It still hasn’t actually been cast off.
