Yesterday, in class, we discussed racism in Huckleberry Finn. In the process we touched upon racism against African-Americans in today's America. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) for racism, made by Harvard researchers, was brought up. An African-American friend of another student in our class (Lizzy) apparently, according to the IAT, is racist against African-Americans. One of our teachers, Mr. Bolos, explained this by saying that this friend of her's had probably absorbed our racist culture, while if a white -America got the same result, it means that he/she is racist. I hope I misheard or misinterpreted what he said.
I just took the IAT for racism. It asks you to fill out a questionaire, mostly questions about age, education, and location, and match words and pictures to the correct category. First, you match good and bad words with the categories Good and Bad, then pictures or blacks and whites with the categories European-Americans and African-Americans. Afterwards, they combine Good with European-American and Bad with African-American and have you match words and pictures, then they switch the combination and you match the pictures and words again. Their calculation for your preference for one race over the other is based off how quickly you match the words and pictures in the different combinations. My result: moderate preference for White-Americans.
I am not surprised, but not because I think I am racist. I believe I have a class prejudice against those who live in this country's slums and projects and ganglands; I get uncomfortable, and sometimes scared, around people who dress "gangsta", especially when passing through said areas. This combined with the fact that a large percentage of the people who live in these places have dark skin is the most likely explanation for my results on this test; and, I would argue, a very good explanation for why many people, especially of the population that would take such an online test, have a preference for whites over blacks (54% of participants had a moderate to strong preference for whites).
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I am pretty sure that what Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor meant was that the test didn't really test the racism of people of any ethnic background. Rather, it shows what preference people have. I think they were making the argument that racism implies purposefully hating or ostracizing people of another race, while the test is more about the subconscious. I am not sure that I agree with them, though. The article that I read about the test said that subconscious biases lead to conscious ones. It gave the example of a white man interviewing an African-American man for a job. If the white man subconsciously doesn't make as much eye contact with the black man as he would with someone of a different race, it puts the other man on edge, who then also makes less ete contact. This creates a disconnect between the two, and gives the interviewee a much worse chance of getting the job.
ReplyDeleteI think that the test done by Harvard is very intersting. I did the test but i didn't see my results because I closed the window too soon. But I don't think of myself as racist at all. In your post you mentioned that you get uncomfertable around bad neighborhoods, which I think is normal. I think that the reason you may associate people with dark skin with bad neighborhoods is that the media tends to project strong stereotypes of such neighborhoods (among others) in movies and TV shows.
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