The dark side of snap judgments: prejudice
The Implicit Association Test measures how easy it is for us to associate concepts to one another and provides measurements for our automatic preferences. The results may be shocking as they may reveal the effect of strong cultural biases that the subject is either unaware of or consciously opposed to.
I think of myself as a pretty liberal guy. I believe in egalitarianism and I am a firm proponent of human and civil rights without regard to skin color. I realize that I probably have some prejudices, but I hope that they are not so pronounced as to be noticable.
The Race IAT bowled me over. I agree with the logic of the test and I don’t believe that it measures my beliefs, but I think it probably does a good job of measuring unconsidered assumptions. And it basically called me a bigot. I could tell as I took the test how difficult it was to associate «happy», «safe» or «laughter» with the face of an African American.
This is very disturbing. Go try it yourself and let me know what you think.
Nah…
Everybody’s
Nah…
Everybody’s racist.
How we actually treat one another is what’s important.
Exactly. The question, IMO,
Exactly. The question, IMO, is, are you aware of your racism, and how do you react to it? Do you embrace it, try to negate it, or over-correct for it?
On another note: is racism just endemic to our culture, or are we biologically hard-wired for it? There are, I think, obvious evolutionary advantages to promoting your own race over others.
.…are you aware of your
.…are you aware of your racism, and how do you react to it?
The most popular answer in our society seems to be “deny it, to yourself and others.”
And denial works about as well on racism as it does on alcoholism, addiction, family dysfunction.…
.…is racism just endemic to our culture, or are we biologically hard-wired for it?
Despite what many folks seem to believe, racism was not invented by the United States, and other cultures are not havens of egalitarian enlightenment.
In the 20th century, the most atrocious acts of racism were perpetrated by groups of people of one color upon groups of people of the same color. Nazi-Jew, Japanese-Chinese, Hutu-Tutsi.…
Humans seem to be programmed to pick an “other” (and all you Liberals out there who think you’ve transcended that, tell me what you think about the Red States) and blame them for whatever’s “wrong” with their world.
As for simple prejudice, which seems to be what was exposed in Splicer’s taking of the test, I firmly believe that it exists in most creatures as a survival mechanism. There’s no way our brain can take in all the information that our senses deliver, so the brain takes shorthand. Much of that shorthand is based on what it has learned previously. White boys at the mall took your skateboard? Brain equates white boys with “danger.”
Unfortunately, a lot of it
Unfortunately, a lot of it is cultural conditioning that goes beyond direct experience. One of the studies referenced in the book took some number of African-American students and gave them all the same test, but with a random sampling given a cover page that asked them to state their race instead of just their name and age. The group that was reminded of their race at the beginning scored substantially lower on the test. Substantially like an average of fifteen points lower out of 100. So it’s not just blacks fear whites and whites fear blacks in the “otherness” you describe. It’s accepting a cultural judgment and a set of implicit associations with race. I really wish I could transcend it.
It’s poignant that you bring up the fact that other cultures are not havens of egalitarian enlightenment. I hear (frequently liberals) talk about how Native American tribes accepted every member with equal voice in decisionmaking. When it’s brought up that some of those very same tribes would kill a member of a neighboring tribe on sight without hesitation, those folks make excuses that well, yeah, its natural that the tribes would see competing tribes as outsiders and not offer them the same protection that they gave themselves. Yet those same people will decry as hypocritical the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States because neither document put an end to slavery, even though they set forth ideals that, once enshrined into our national conscience, eventually put an end to slavery, and ideals that we still have yet to live up to 230 years later. I guess if you want to believe in progress you can find hope, but if you just want to point fingers there are always targets for that too.