clowncar: "A lucrative racial extortion racket longs to expose lingering prejudice behind every errant look or parsed word."

Is his main goal to try to prove that white people know more words than minorities?

You must have a nubianrdly vocabulary.

drjekel_mrhyde: Talk to me when you get stopped by white police(with a gallon of milk in your hand), searched, ID'd, and told to take your farking shoes off to check for imaginary drugs at 11 am.

Been there. Done that. Except the one of the cops was of Puerto Rican decent. The down side of having long hair. Despite being fish-belly white. And, well, it was 4 pm or so.

No employer of mine has ever discriminated against any minority. Has yours? Most firms actively recruit and promote people of color while extolling diversity.

Right. Discrimination in employment is over, that's why people with "black" names require an extra eight years of experience to get an interview.

The author says his employer hasn't shown bigotry in employment, has any of yours? Uh yeah, many of them. It was especially so at businesses that had off-the-books staff. No one would complain because they didn't want any trouble with the taxman.

I remember one supervisor who would dog ear the application if the person was black. At one place, which was a restaurant, they hired a bi-racial lady for the job as hostess--she was a wonderful person, very pretty with such a great smile too--she was perfect for the job. But the district supervisor didn't want her as a 'representative' of the company, didn't fire her, but simply erased her name from the work schedule. That was there way of getting rid of anyone they didn't like that was doing a good job and couldn't be fired for cause. I remember an Inn that would close down for a few weeks because they couldn't get any help in a region loaded with hispanic workers--not their type of people.

I can't believe Forbes would actually print such hogwash--if people need to make their point by scraping the bottom of the barrel that's because they themselves are only just above it.

Chameleon: people with "black" names require an extra eight years of experience to get an interview.

That's a real problem, but it's naive to attribute it to race, or at least solely to race -- names represent culture much more than a race or skin color, and intra-cultural hiring is a valid (if potentially discriminatory) risk-reduction technique. So the solution probably has less to do with telling people how bad they are for being racist and more to do with either A) finding more useful techniques for evaluating job candidates and/or B) improving cultural integration such that "black names" isn't a distinct group from "american names" (or eventually just "names").