Let me begin with thanks and a Hat Tip to Joanne Dixon, who emailed me a link to this article on the science of prejudice. I took the Implicit Association Test for race, and quite frankly, I was shocked the results. After thinking about the results in light of my own background, they made more sense and I’ll explain why.
I’m sitting in the soft-spoken cognitive neuroscientist‘s spotless office nestled within New York University’s psychology department, but it feels like I’m at the doctor’s, getting a dreaded diagnosis. On his giant monitor, Amodio shows me a big blob of data, a cluster of points depicting where people score on the Implicit Association Test. The test measures racial prejudices that we cannot consciously control. I’ve taken it three times now. This time around my uncontrolled prejudice, while clearly present, has come in significantly below the average for white people like me.
You think of yourself as a person who strives to be unprejudiced, but you can’t control these split-second reactions.
That certainly beats the first time I took the IAT online, on the website UnderstandingPrejudice.org. That time, my results showed a "strong automatic preference" for European Americans over African Americans. That was not a good thing to hear, but it’s extremely common—51 percent of online test takers show moderate to strong bias.
Taking the IAT, one of the most popular tools among researchers trying to understand racism and prejudice, is both extremely simple and pretty traumatic. The test asks you to rapidly categorize images of faces as either "African American" or "European American" while you also categorize words (like "evil," "happy," "awful," and "peace") as either "good" or "bad." Faces and words flash on the screen, and you tap a key, as fast as you can, to indicate which category is appropriate…
Inserted from <Mother Jones>
To take the test yourself, click the IAT link above or click here. Click through to the list of tests, and choose the test for race near the bottom of the list. How did you do?
My test showed that I have a preference for African Americans. I was shocked because I am white guy, who grew up in an environment of extreme racism. To this day, I catch myself thinking stereotypically against minorities on very rare occasions. I correct myself whenever that happens. So I was expecting a bias toward Caucasians. But I think I understand it.
I grew up one block from the bay and two from the ocean, so I don’t remember a time I wasn’t in the water. One Saturday, when I was eight or nine years old, I was diving for muscles in the bay. I stayed down a bit to long and came up fast right under the boat and hit my head. I knocked myself cold. Another young boy, fishing for flounder nearby, heard the collision, dove in and pulled me out. I quickly regained consciousness, and realized that he had saved my life. His name was Bobby. I took him home to meet my family. I was not allowed to have friends in without permission, so he waited outside, and I went to talk to my father. He wanted to meet the boy that had saved my life. It did not occur to me to tell him Bobby was black. My father took one look at him, got red in the face, and bellowed, “Get that dirty little n*gg*r out of my house!” I was mortified. Bobby just shook it off. We remained secret friends for years, and then, open friends, until he was killed in Vietnam. My father created a civil rights activist that day.
How this relates to the test is that my rejection of the kind of racism my father displayed is so strong, that I unconsciously show preference to black people, as an overcompensation for the tiny remnant of prejudice that surfaces, ever so briefly, every two or three years. It may also be compensating for the racism in our society.
Was your test what you expected, or did you gain insight into yourself from it?
