Reality check on racism

[calmloki]

Foo. Took this test yesterday at high speed to get the best result and found myself to be moderately racist. I knew I was somewhat racist, but had expected better of myself. Very interesting:

http://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/study.html O0

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

i'm prejudiced against anyone who isn't me, but i deal with it.

raised in neighborhood where it was still on the books that blacks had to get out of town by sunset, the first black family moved in coincidentally the year my family moved out.

we moved to st croix where it was 95% black & 5% white. so first i didn't know prejudice because there were no blacks and now i figured you better not show prejudice because yer a bit out-numbered.

then we moved to florida where high schools had been recently integrated. our school was closed down a few times because of race wars. unstrategically yet conveniently, i befriended the strongest black wrestler in school and never had a rock thrown at me.

on your test i'm in the 27% who strongly prefer european americans, no duh. i also strongly prefer being with gay people (3% catagory), go figure. i'm well behaved among str8s but really i just tolerate you. oddly though, on this gay test i'm rated at only 26% gay (i told you i was butch).

 

[Gumby]

I tried it and it said I was in the 2% who have a "Strong automatic preference for African Americans" . Given that I am pretty much as white as they come, I was surprised.

 

[dumpster56]

I tried it and it said I was in the 2% who have a "Strong automatic preference for African Americans" . Given that I am pretty much as white as they come, I was surprised.

I took the test three times and the same result Strong automatic preference for African americans. Now being a white 51 yo I was NOT surprised. I have worked and lived in a multiracial community for almost my entire life. Color was never an issue in my home. I even dated women from different races and quite frankly it was because they were nice people!

I believe the test is given and people who have never lived or worked with african americans or black humans would have racist undertones due to the medias coverage of them.

 

[bright eyed]

i had a slight preference for straight people! to my great surprise! i have much more fun with non-straight people!

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

since when is preference racism. i don't think str8 people are all dumb and smelly. i simply prefer to be with gay people. going to a gay bar to me is like entering a sanctuary. but that doesn't make me a racist.

just as associating and even dating a different race doesn't make you a liberal or mean that you are not racist. it might just be a fetish.

given all that, i'm not so sure the title of this thread coincides well with the test to which it refers.

 

[bright eyed]

it might just be a fetish.

aaah! wonder how the haahvud folks accounted for that?!

 

[calmloki]

...
just as associating and even dating a different race doesn't make you a liberal or mean that you are not racist. it might just be a fetish.

given all that, i'm not so sure the title of this thread coincides well with the test to which it refers.

Hmm. when i took the test yesterday and copied the link it went direct to the B/W preference test. I didn't even see the other tests.

 

[bright eyed]

your link took me straight to the haha straight/gay one...took that plus the b/w and the weird one about luck/no luck...

 

[bssc]

I got "Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Light Skin and Dark Skin."

I blame Armed Forces Radio and Television Service for brainwashing me.

It reminds me of a story that my dad told me. Rosslyn, Virginia has a bunch of goverment offices around it and a restaurant called Tom Sarris's Orleans house. In the 50s, Northern Virginia was very segregated. My dad was starting out as a Foreign Service officer and his integrated class went to the restaurant for lunch. They had set aside an area called the "Federal" section so that Negros (as African Americans were known) and Whites could dine together, probably violating Virginia State law at the time.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I think the test as administered is fundamentally flawed.

It starts by associating "good" with light skinned and "bad" with dark skinned. Then once you've become "trained" in that left/right hand ordering, it flips them on you and forces you to overcome that training...the process of overcoming the training produces slower responses...which they then measure as levels of racism.

I think this test principally examines and measures your ability to overcome rote training and prior short term experience...not racism.

 

[bssc]

I think the test as administered is fundamentally flawed.

It starts by associating "good" with light skinned and "bad" with dark skinned. Then once you've become "trained" in that left/right hand ordering, it flips them on you and forces you to overcome that training...the process of overcoming the training produces slower responses...which they then measure as levels of racism.

I think this test principally examines and measures your ability to overcome rote training and prior short term experience...not racism.

I wondered about that. If you said that you were dark skinned and preferred dark skin, would it start out with dark skin as being good and light skin bad?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Perhaps. It seemed curious as to why they'd ask you so many questions about you and your racial preferences if the test could figure that out adequately on its own.

As some people indicated above, they were surprised by the results. So i'm guessing the test feels it 'found' something different from what the test subject told it.

Maybe it was different for others, but I didnt find myself fighting an association of goodness/badness with skin color, but that I was used to the colors and 'goodness' parts being associated with one side of the screen and I definitely found myself fighting that prior training.

But then I did a lot of these sorts of behavioral tests for a living...which might mean i'm better at seeing the goofy parts, or perhaps the exposure made me resistant to some approaches to testing or changed the way I respond to them.

 

[bright eyed]

resistance is futile...

i tested neutral on the b/w test - so i don't think it's flawed at all!

 

[ladelfina]

I for some reason chose the gay/straight test. I'm hetero but scored a "moderate preference" for gays. This put me among only 6% of the people taking the test (which, based on the assumption that ~10% of us are gay.. is something!) It's not clear how much was based on the image pairings and how much on the 1-10 scale of self-declared preferences on the initial questionnaire. When asked which type of people I "felt most warmly towards".. it was hard to give hetero men/women a high score. I'm very picky! I didn't give anyone higher than 6, anyway. I think I have had mostly positive rapports with gay friends while my experiences with the larger population are quite mixed.

 

[bpp3]

Looks like I scored "strong automatic preference for gay people versus straight people." (But but but, some of my best friends are straight...)

Did anyone else find it odd that the "gay" images were all male-male pairings, no female-female ones? Or did women get the female-female ones? (Now I'm trying to remember whether they asked for one's gender before or after the test.)

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

It does ask for gender in the beginning. If it factors anything you say into its results, its skewing them by the subjects anticipated bias...which may or may not be accurate.

By letting the test subject know they're being tested and what they're being tested for, then creating a focused pattern and disrupting it, they're pretty much producing a bad result.

End result probably depends heavily on whether you tend to pick up repetitive tasks quickly and/or whether you can 'unlearn' them quickly.

Closest analog is rubbing your belly while patting yourself on the head, and then reversing it so you're patting your belly while rubbing your head. I'll bet if you can do this smoothly and without glitching, you do 'well' on these tests.

More flexible people in this regard would therefore score well in many of the tests, where more rigid people wouldnt. Bit of a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

[bright eyed]

my test had girl/girl pix...wonder if results would have been different if they were naked or kissing etc.! they were like old school victorian chicks and bathroom girl/girl pics...he he

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

If that were the case, I'd probably have to take the test again...maybe several times...to perhaps reassess my opinion.

 

[bosco]

I think the test as administered is fundamentally flawed.

It starts by associating "good" with light skinned and "bad" with dark skinned. Then once you've become "trained" in that left/right hand ordering, it flips them on you and forces you to overcome that training...the process of overcoming the training produces slower responses...which they then measure as levels of racism.

I think this test principally examines and measures your ability to overcome rote training and prior short term experience...not racism.

CFB, thank you. I was about to write the same thing, but you did it for me and saved me the bother.

Furthermore, how on earth does one calibrate such a test? Is there someone who is 'certifiably 80% racist' that they can use as a refernce standard?

total bs, imo. Which is not to say that I believe myself to be totally free of racism.

 

[bpp3]

For yucks, I tried the Japanese version of the test (click on flag at bottom), and scored a moderate preference for Japan over America. Well, ok, I guess it is lucky for me that I live here then... But I do think the order in which they present the training scenarios makes a big difference. (Also their unfortunate use of GWB to represent America, whom I consider to do no such thing... For Japan it was Koizumi, who while a relatively more likable guy, is no longer Prime Minister. I think my reactions would have been more negative were the current PM depicted.)

I also noticed a couple differences from the English version of the questionnaire:
1) For religion, the Japanese version has no option for "none," which I believe the English version did. The nearest option is "other."
2) For race, the options consist of Japanese, half-Japanese (3 varieties), and Other.

Somehow it seems the construction of the test itself seems to reveal something about the biases of the testers... or else about their notions of how their subjects should be expected to organize the world.

 

[ladelfina]

Yeesh. That's Harvard for you in a nutshell. Is it any wonder they managed to grind out an MBA for Bush? They are the absolute KINGS of self-justification and of the foregone conclusion. I worked with them for awhile so I know something whereof I speak.

bpp3.. being female I got mostly female gay images: two brides together plus rest-room-lady figures holding hands. I vaguely remember minor cameo appearances by 2 rest-room-guy figures, but distinctly do not recall two "grooms". I probably would have scored higher had not all of my mistakes come from thinking I saw a groom rather than a bride.. I was focused more on the heads/faces than the garb, but at that tiny size m/f features were less apparent.

Not sure how it helps them to weigh the test in this way, if it is weighted, since heteros (esp. men?) likely have differing inherent aversion levels to male homosexuality vs. female homosexuality.

Asking all your stats including gender came before the image/word test, as did the self-evaluation of "warmth towards" noted in my prev. post.

Also.. bpp3, that's wild about the photos (Bush=America? Koizumi=Japan?) Surprising they couldn't come up with less loaded pix.

CFB: right. It's hard to see how much the test measures mental flexibility/inflexibility versus true heartfelt tolerance/bigotry. One might say the latter flows from the former, but in that case why use "charged" words or images in the first place? Would anything random suffice instead?

I'm not even sure why they have you switch sides gay/straight. Do they factor in the aspect that, after n questions of a certain type, people are programmed to respond a certain way and then need to switch actions given the same stimuli? One would think the first response set, then, should be more reliable than the second. Or they should make the "sides" random as well.

Seems like a pretty badly-constructed survey and now I'm asking myself why I even bothered to write about it.. oh well. I think in hindsight there is more food for thought about how to construct a functioning survey and less about racism/sexism and so on.

 

[bright eyed]

i found that saying out loud - "good" "bad" "gay" "straight" helped me focus - and thus evened out my timing between the two sides - since i came up nearly even on all the tests...although i think they could be contributing to the trauma as you say out loud "good" "bad" with the affiliated issues!

 

[calmloki]

i found that saying out loud - "good" "bad" "gay" "straight" helped me focus - and thus evened out my timing between the two sides - since i came up nearly even on all the tests...although i think they could be contributing to the trauma as you say out loud "good" "bad" with the affiliated issues!

Well, is the point to achieve the desired rating ("helped me focus") or to see what the inate prejudices are? Quite sure that going slowly would have given me a more desirous result, and I don't feel i'm as racist as the test scored me, but isn't that the point? The person who just doesn't get it probably IS prejudiced. I recognize that I'm not color blind though I try to compensate, so a racist result wasn't unexpected. Gaming the test, while interesting in itself, wasn't the point for me. And, uhm, just 'cause GWB slid out of Harvard doesn't mean the school is producing a high percentage of dolts. Might even think that they produce a higher level canny folk than most other schools. But that's just my prejudice.

Did NOT matriculate from Harvard