RACIAL STEREOTYPES ARE DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN OUR CULTURE

Everyone should do the Implicit Association Test on racism mentioned below. Very, very interesting. Good for classroom use, too. -Angela

RACIAL STEREOTYPES ARE DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN OUR CULTURE
By Cynthia Tucker
Sat Jan 19, 7:56 PM ET
After a recent column describing Barack Obama as "a presidential candidate who happens to be black -- not a black presidential candidate," I received countless responses from readers, a handful of them odd. That odd handful declared they take no notice of superficial traits such as skin color, and they took me to task for making any reference to Obama's race.

"I thought of (Obama) as a person. I did not see black or white or Hispanic or that he was a man -- I saw a person! If people really, truly want racial equality, then the first step has to be to STOP looking at skin color," wrote one reader.

"When I look at a person, the last thing I think about is skin color or heritage," wrote another.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. While I am sympathetic to any desire to get past dated and useless habits of mind -- especially the contentious politics of the color line -- that's just nonsense. None of us, black, white or brown, is colorblind.

Those readers may think they don't notice skin color, but it's just not so, says University of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald, an expert on implicit biases and common stereotypes. "Even if they can't see anything out of their eyes, they're not colorblind."

That's not a condemnation, not a presumption of malicious bigotry. It's just an acknowledgment of the peculiar burdens of humanity, especially in these United States. Assumptions about race and ethnicity are so deeply embedded in our culture that we can hardly help noticing skin color.

Each of us is stuck with prejudices, and I'm using the denotative meaning here -- "an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought or reason," according to Webster's. But we don't have to be governed by them.

Cutting-edge work by Greenwald and his colleagues, who include Harvard University's Mahzarin Banaji and the University of Virginia's Brian Nosek, suggests that people can learn to put aside their biases to make rational, fact-based judgments about people who may be black or Mexican or Mormon. "To the extent that we can influence what we learn and believe, we can influence less conscious states of mind," Banaji says.

But the first step -- as in any self-help project -- is to own up to the problem. Many people don't realize they're prejudiced because, well, they really don't realize they're prejudiced. That self-knowledge is not necessarily difficult to acquire, but it's quite often difficult to accept.

Racial bigotry is a social taboo in this country, so much so that only an extremist fringe -- assorted neo-Nazis and skinheads -- admit their rank prejudices. That may explain why some volunteers who have taken Greenwald's Implicit Association Test, which uses word association to detect unconscious biases, are furious when the test shows they hold hidden negative views of black Americans.

"Some people have a concept of themselves as non-prejudiced, so anything indicating a chink in that armor is threatening," Greenwald said. But his research has also pointed out that most people simply aren't aware of their implicit assumptions.

Take the current Democratic primary, with its history-making narrative. Greenwald and colleagues modified the Implicit Association Test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit) to search for unconscious biases among Democratic voters. When asked who they planned to cast ballots for, a sample of voters reported strong support for Obama, who held a 42 percent-to-34 percent lead over Hillary Clinton among the sample, with John Edwards coming in at 12. But when the same people took the Implicit Association Test, measuring their unconscious preferences, Clinton was "the runaway winner," favored by 48 percent of them, and Obama was dead last, with 25 percent. Edwards was favored by 27 percent, according to the researchers.

And here's one finding that upends conventional wisdom: According to the test, black voters, too, held implicit biases that worked against Obama. But how could it be otherwise? Black Americans are products of the same culture as white Americans, with its myriad stereotypes of black incompetence. And black Americans have internalized many of the same stereotypes.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a day when his children would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But that day has not yet arrived. We might hasten its dawning if we'd admit that what we see is not necessarily what we believe.

Oops! In a column about rigid voter ID laws, I mistakenly referred to the Bill of Rights in underscoring the right to vote. I knew better. The right to vote is explicit in the 15th, 19th and 26th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.