My girlfriend is a 30-year old black woman from Brooklyn. She manages a cocktail lounge in Manhattan with a fairly well-to-do clientele, where she occasionally has to wear various hats. On busy nights, she could be found tending bar, serving tables, or even taking guests' coats.

Guests are often shocked to learn that she's a manager. We always assumed this was because she looks young for her age -- many people put her at not a day past 23 -- but new research suggests it might be something more permanent than youth: the color of her skin.

Racism is nothing new, but according to a study that was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, black women face a unique disadvantage: virtual invisibility.

The researchers found that in facial and vocal recognition experiments, observers were far less capable of distinguishing one black woman from another than any other group, suggesting that black women are "treated as interchangeable and indistinguishable from one another," say Amanda Sesko and Monica Biernat, both professors at the University of Kansas who conducted the study.

My girlfriend has shared other stories that corroborate the study's findings: of being frequently mistaken for "the other" black girl or girls she's worked with, of a friend who works as corporate lawyer getting overlooked time and again by the firm's partners, and countless tales of the exact form of racism that Ralph Ellison wrote about in his acclaimed novel, Invisible Man. That book was published 56 years ago, before the Civil Rights movement, before desegregation in the schools, before Barack Obama was even born. When will its lessons finally be heard?

[Image: Miller-McCune.com]