To: Lauri Hogan and Hope Hartman, Sr. Vice President, Communications
#FireRavenSymone
No one should have to change their name in order to have a fair shot at finding a job or a home! The Walt Disney Compay, ABC Television and the producers of The View must immediately fire Raven Symone for promoting and justifying racist hiring discrimination on one of TV's most viewed shows.
Why is this important?
Former child star Raven Symone used her platform on The View to justify discrimination against people with names she deems too "ghetto" -- a common epithet used to mask discrimination against poor and black people.
This kind of discrimination is all too common in the real world. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."
This has real consequences. According to NBER, "a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience." This type of bias, whether implicit or explicit, unfairly disadvantages black applicants, even when their experience is exactly the same as white applicants.
Name discrimination isn't limited to jobs -- name discrimination is also a significant factor in housing. No one should have to change their name in order to have a fair shot at finding a job or a home!
It doesn't matter that Raven-Symone is black -- no one should have a national platform to advocate anti-black racist practices. If anything, that Raven-Symone is black actually makes matters worse -- it makes it easier for people in positions of power to self-justify imposing anti-black bias in their decisions because a famous black person said that this kind of bias is ok.
ABC must fire Raven Symone today.