Racial bias makes you stupid

It does, although I meant it in a scientific way. Apparently we all have implicit racial prejudice, and not only that, we also harbour negative or positive feelings based on sexual preference, gender, age and other, usually non-determining factors. An Implicit Association Test, or IAT, gauges the relative ease with which participants are able to link certain groups of people, for example, gay people, and the concepts of "clean" and "soiled." Ease of association, determined by judgment speed, is considered evidence for an implicitly-held attitude toward that particular social group. If participants are quicker to link "clean" with "heterosexual," for example, as compared to "homosexual", then they're considered to be biased in favour of heterosexuals. In other words, they're prejudiced against homosexuals.

A 2003 experiment revealed that people who have implicit racial bias are "left mentally exhausted after interacting with someone from a different race. [Source]" The tests were conducted on white people, but the result is surely the same on prejudiced, black people. 30 white students took a computer test asking them to classify given names as of black or white people, and given words as being positively or negatively oriented. Testees who took longer to hit the button for positively oriented words following a black name (like for Sipho below) were considered implicitly biased. Ponder this:

 

1. Flash: SIPHO MAHLANGU 1-2-3   Flash: GREAT

2. Flash: TOM HENDRICKS 1-2-3   Flash: GREAT

Then the testees were first made to interact with either a black or a white interviewer on some controversial topic, then immediately given a cognitive test on something unrelated to that topic. I can imagine the topic being Affirmative Action, a subject that has animated the South African blogosphere (see this first post, this second one, and this third one) since it came into play. A short time, considering that after more than 40 years it is still a hot subject in the United States. Much of the information concerning its life-span can be gleaned from Fact Monster's US Affirmative Action time-line.

Lastly, the testees were shown photos of unfamiliar black and white men, with a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner studying their brain. There was a clear link between IAT-measured racial prejudice, poor performance on the post-interview cognitive test, and brain activity picked up by the scanner. In effect, when shown snaps of black men, the frontal lobe areas ("associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving" [Source], or the executive function of controlling emotion and thought) of the brains of all the white participants lit up. But no frontal lobes lit up when the participants were shown the snap of a white man.

Folks who have implicit racial prejudices are left mentally tired after interacting with a person or people of a different race. Hidden racial bias makes them stupid. The study suggests that it may be because they're trying to quell their prejudice. Use the Harvard IAT to measure your own non-bias, or bias. Ponder this post, your score on the IAT and decide whether it all teaches us anything worthwhile about ourselves. Even with the static flash test above, one sees how far implicit bigotry can go.

Say you're a white European American who truly believes that a person should not be judged by the color of his or her skin.

Despite that egalitarian attitude, according to new Northwestern University research, subconscious -- or implicit -- bias can emerge subtly but quickly from its hiding places in the psyche and cause even well-meaning whites to look at identical facial expressions of African Americans and European Americans and see greater hostility in the African American faces.

Or take whites' perceptions of racially ambiguous faces that combine both African American and European American features. If the expression on the racially ambiguous face is hostile, European Americans are more likely to identify it as African American [Source].

Comments

[James Clark]

LOL. I'm white, but I got:

"Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American compared to European American.

Go figure. :P

[Rethabile]

I did this some time ago while reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Blink," which I highly recommend.

I'd like to do it again without the constraints that I had at that time. I'll post my results then.

[Bryan Wilhite]

Blacks get stupid when they mistake huge chunks of "high" culture for white values.

Whites get stupid just by being white. The next major revolution occurs when white people are truly and sincerely insulted when they are called "white".

[Rethabile Masilo]

BW: "Blacks get stupid when they mistake huge chunks of "high" culture for white values."
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RM: I'm stupid right there, because I don't understand. Please elaborate.

BW: "Whites get stupid just by being white. The next major revolution occurs when white people are truly and sincerely insulted when they are called 'white'."
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RM: I hope my post did not lead you to think I was saying whites are particularly stupid. They are as stupid as reds, or blacks.

If one day white people feel insulted when labeled white, then the revolution will have gone too far, don't you think? It will have come full circle, and by that time blacks will be in the process of quelling a revolution, perhaps by killing rebels and declaring that they slipped on a bar of soap.

A lot of work resides effectively with white people, but black people have a hyper-major part to play, too, and so far, they have played it out marvelously.

Due to that very fact, I think the revolution will be when blacks aren't offended when labelled Africans, nor whites when labelled Europeans.

White? Black? They're mere labels aren't they? Rather inaccurate ones, at that. Otherwise, what colour do we slap on a Cape coloured?

[James Clark]

I have a problem with being called "European".

Now I don't mind, "Of European decent...", but I don't like "European". I'm not European - I've never been to Europe. In fact, I've never set foot outside Africa!

I suspect some black people who have lived in Europe all their lives (and their family has lived there for four generations, as in my case...) probably feel similarly.

[leonard]

Interesting stuff - as always.
A while back I had a long harangue from a fellow ex-pat here: I used the expression 'african american' - and got soundly lectured as to her having greater 'rights' to the word 'african' than any of the 'blacks' in north america...her claimed background goes back to 1820...sigh.

[Rethabile Masilo]

James: I dig that, for you're not European. Labels have always foxed me. Does one say negroid, negro, coloured, afro-American, black, African-American, of African origin, or of African decent? Some black Americans aren't comfortable with some of these.

Leornard: Yes, one never knows. All this is complicated by the fact that in a biracial situation, the person is assigned the status of the "lowest" person in the mix. Black parent + white parent = black offspring. Never did understand that.

[Rethabile]

You have completed the Black-White IAT.

The line immediately below summarizes the results of your task performance.

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"Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between European American and African American."
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Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. If you have a question about the effect of order, please read the answer to FAQ 1 on the page of FAQs for this test.

The interpretation shown above is described as 'automatic preference for Black' if you responded faster when Black faces and Good words were classified with the same key as opposed to White faces and Good words. It is marked 'automatic preference for White' if you were faster when giving the same response to White faces and Good words. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic preference may be described as 'slight', 'moderate', 'strong', or 'little to no preference'.

Rethabile says: Will someone hand me the halo, please? I concur that it is hard not to associate black with negative words, and white with positive words. Any mistakes I made were in the direction of "black --> bad, negative, etc," which is a sorry state of affairs indeed.

[leonard]

Not as sorry as these here whitey synapses! My training under the full service apartheid package still occasionally surfaces with a virulence that makes me wonder if there isn't an argument to be made for genetically imprinted paranoia of 'the other'.

[Bryan Wilhite]

Rethabile: "If one day white people feel insulted when labeled white, then the revolution will have gone too far, don't you think?"

rasx(): No. Your question is based on the assumption that you know how far is "too far." I do not have confidence in the instruments you use for measuring distance. Do not be insulted by this. Just understand that we do not share the same confidence. This is yet another aspect of cultural diversity.

NEXT TOPIC: Earlier I said, 'Blacks get stupid when they mistake huge chunks of "high" culture for white values.' You asked for elaboration. The best example I like to give is the old Black radical rant against "white music": just because "do re mi fa so la ti do" is from some kind of Renaissance Italian the Black radical dismisses this as white music. This makes the Black radical stupid. The Black radical failed to listen to flute that was pulled from the Egyptian tomb---he has lost more of himself and the Indo-European egyptologists smile with masonic glee.

[Rethabile Masilo]

"I do not have confidence in the instruments you use for measuring distance."
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Ha..., I understand you. I'm wary of them, too. But I think we need to drag them (the instruments) as close to the midline as possible, then use them.

"...we do not share the same confidence."
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Because our experience of life is different?

[Rethabile Masilo]

BW: "The Black radical failed to listen to flute that was pulled from the Egyptian tomb."
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Thanks for the vivid example. I now understand what you meant. I agree that all stupid people commit the same error.

If job interviews were to take place behind a curtain, black people and other minorities would start appearing, as by mystery, in the nation's higher managerial echelons. Of this I'm convinced