Are lighter-skinned Tanisha and Jamal worth more pay? White people’s gendered colorism toward Black job applicants with racialized names

ABSTRACT

Though race is complex in lived experience, studies of anti-Black prejudice and discrimination in the United States often elide this complexity by operationalizing “Black” using one racial marker. We consider how three intersecting markers – skin colour, names, and gender – predict white people’s anti-Black prejudice. Using two experiments where white participants evaluated fictitious job applicants, we randomly manipulated the applicant’s name (distinctly Black or indistinctly Black) and race/skin colour (white, lighter-skinned Black, medium-skinned Black, or darker-skinned Black). We predicted that when women and men targets had distinctly Black names or darker skin, they would be rated more negatively. Results suggest gendered colorism via salary recommendations, where participants offered a darker-skinned man with a distinctly Black name less salary. However, a darker-skinned woman with a distinctly Black name was offered more salary. We argue that anti-Black prejudice may take on nuanced and gendered forms in the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• Colorism
• experiments
• inequality
• names
• prejudice
• racial discrimination

Acknowledgements

We thank Katherine Fallon, Daanika Gordon, Trent Steidley, and Hava Gordon for their feedback. Heather Martin provided excellent copy editing. Thank you to Camille Desmond and Jazz Desmond altering the photographs used in the experiments. This project was supported by a Faculty Research Fund grant from the University of Denver.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Denver: [Faculty Research Fund].