Discrimination in US Local Public Services

Study Shows African Americans Discriminated Against in Access to US Local Public Services

PhysOrg | August 19, 2015

Requests for information from local public services, like sheriffs' offices, school districts and libraries, across the United States are less likely to receive a reply if signed by 'black-sounding' names, according to new research conducted by economists at IZA and the University of Southampton.
The study finds that email queries coming from senders with distinctively African American names are four per cent less likely to receive an answer than identical emails signed by 'white-sounding' names.

Source: http://quotes.lifehack.org/quote/anthony-j-dangelo/if-you-believe-that-discrimination-exists-it/

<more at http://phys.org/news/2015-08-african-americans-discriminated-access-local.html; related links: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2655330 (Racial Discrimination in Local Public Services: A Field Experiment in the US. Corrado Giulietti, Mirco Tonin, Michael Vlassopoulos.IZA Discussion Paper No. 9290. [Abstract: Discrimination in access to public services can act as a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality. We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to a wide spectrum of public services in the US. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We find that emails are less likely to receive a response if signed by a black-sounding name compared to a white-sounding name. Given a response rate of 72% for white senders, emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer. We also find that responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests demonstrate that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus towards blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race.]) http://phys.org/news/2013-05-fairness-ads-outlines-bias-score.html (Seeking fairness in ads: Researcher outlines how 'bias score' could be calculated in online delivery. May 1, 2013)>