To be honest I think this is a very bad example to demonstrate that point. Nothing is proven here except that two different appraisals from two different compan

To be honest I think this is a very bad example to demonstrate that point. Nothing is proven here except that two different appraisals from two different companies/people months apart came up with wildly different numbers. Is it possible racism played a factor? Maybe, but who can tell? Maybe the first guy was just a hack, or was having a bad day, or just made some mistake, or ... I don't know. The article itself mentions (at the end) that appraisals in general are a shitshow with wildly differing figures. People do a bad job all the time, and people are assholes all the time. This is what makes the entire thing so tricky: if we could clearly identify what is or isn't racism then we could simply investigate allegations, fine people, and the problem would be solved in a year. But we can't; all we can do is do some sort of broad study and say that in general there may be some racism at play, and even doing that well is hard because there's loads of factors to control for. If he had done ten of these appraisals and the "black family" ones consistently came out lower than the "white family" ones then yeah, that's pretty clear-cut. But two? It doesn't prove anything.