This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, and Ethnic Studies at the state and national levels. It addresses politics in Texas. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
I encourage all to listen to Dr. Efren O. Perez' presentation on the topic of implicit bias. His biography is interesting, considering that he is a "Political Psychologist," a pairing of terms in a professional title that I've not come across myself until now. Currently, Dr. Perez is a Professor of Political Science and Psychology, UCLA, where he also serves Director of the Center for American Politics and Public Policy.
Understanding implicit bias is of obvious importance to an increasingly diverse nation where intergroup relations are oftentimes fraught with emotion and serious consequences. See informative synopsis below.
-Angela Valenzuela
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Biases that people hold below the surface are influencing how they view this electoral season, as well as major political issues before them, such as race relations, gun control and immigration, according to a Vanderbilt University researcher.
Vanderbilt professor Efrén O. Pérez, author of Unspoken Politics: Implicit Attitudes and Political Thinking, is available to talk about “implicit bias”.
Pérez, associate professor of political science and sociology at Vanderbilt, calls implicit bias “an umbrella term for a variety of attitudes, beliefs and knowledge, and stereotypes that we all carry to some degree. They tend to be automatically triggered, hard to control, and can often influence what we say and do without our awareness.”
Pérez says our mind picks up on patterns that we see in society, the media, and other places and forms snap judgements before our mind has time to process all the information in a more deliberative and controlled manner.
“One of the best examples in the United States concerns its racial hierarchy: the idea that racial and ethnic groups are arrayed in descending order of social status and dominance, with whites atop and minorities to varying degrees below. Even if someone explicitly disavows this state of affairs,” Pérez explains, “a part of one’s mind recognizes that in the U.S., whites are more socially esteemed than non-whites.”
LATINOS AND IMMIGRATION
He gives the example of immigration.
“I've done work showing that many people in the mass public have an implicit attitude toward Latinos, which tends to be negatively charged—and opposite of what they self-report to pollsters. This implicit attitude emerges, in part, because people’s minds detect patterns in immigration news coverage, where one group is constantly paired with negative information, irrespective of whether the information is valid or not. Part of our mind learns a negative evaluation of this group and stores it memory. So, when the issue of immigration is broached, it draws out this implicit attitude, which colors people's thinking about immigration politics.”
POLICE, GUNS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS
Pérez says despite all the training police officers receive, when it comes to split decisions, implicit bias often comes into play. And that implicit bias often consists of a mental association between African Americans and weapons that many people—including trained police officers—possess.
“Even with all the motivation in the world to make a calm and controlled decision, implicit bias can get the best of people if they don’t have sufficient time and clear enough information to wholly analyze a situation,” said Pérez.
POLITICS
Pérez says studies show that people in polls who claim to be undecided actually have an implicit preference for a candidate as much as four weeks before an election. That implicit preference ends up predicting who they vote for.
And often, instead of spending time getting more information, people try to rationalize their initial thoughts. Pérez says if there is “just something” about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump that a voter doesn’t like, without digging deeper into substantive issues, it’s probably because that person is relying on their implicit attitude toward either candidate.
“A lot of what we consider to be deliberation is, at the end of the day, a verbal rationalization of those implicit responses we all have,” said Pérez
TESTING IMPLICIT BIAS
One way to reliably measure implicit bias is through the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a timed computer-based measure that can detect “blind spots” in one’s thinking.
Pérez believes continuing this area of study will help us go beyond the traditional public opinion survey to better understand what voters really think.
“In many ways, what we’re learning is that implicit cognition is primary to what we characterize as explicit cognition. So that means that the tip of the iceberg—or what people are willing to talk about in a survey— is often heavily influenced by what is submerged below—things that people either don't want to or can't report,” said Pérez. “Nonetheless, these thoughts still leave an imprint on what individuals ultimately believe.”
-VU-
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See all Vanderbilt social media at http://social.vanderbilt.edu.
Emilio and I are proud to be Luz Elena's parents. Here, she is performing a cover titled, "Havana," by Camile Cabello, that she recorded today, July 11, 2018. Please consider subscribing to her Youtube channel, luzamora. Luz Elena Valenzuela is a recent graduate of Southwestern University, holds a bachelors degree in Fine Arts, musical performance opera, with plans to attend Graduate School in the near future. She sings in many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, French, and of course, English. As you can hear from this cover, she is a versatile singer—and she'll be performing soon in Scotland as part of the Don Juan Project musical theater at the Fringe Festival in the month of August, 2018. Her parents will join her and I'll be blogging from there, as well. :-) Angela Valenzuela (a.k.a. "Mami") #ShamelessMomhttps://youtu.be/vxDoO7KSK5Q via @YouTube
Boasting an excellent set of studied presentations, this press conference video was recorded today on July 18, 2016 at the Texas Education agency in Austin, Texas.
In order of presentation by highly-regarded Mexican American Studies scholars, they collectively amount to a solid protest primarily against the controversial Mexican-American textbook authored by Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle titled, "Mexican American Heritage," that is currently getting considered for adoption by Texas' State Board of Education (SBOE).
The SBOE will take up the matter at their September 13, 2016 meeting (which continues through Friday, September, 2016), with a final vote on the textbook taking place at their November 15, 2016 meeting—both in Austin, Texas, William B. Travis Building, 1701 North Congress, Austin, TX.
PLEASE PUT THESE TWO DATES ON YOUR CALENDARS SO THAT YOUR VOICE CAN BE HEARD.
Today's press conference takes place on the heels of the June 16, 2016 Mexican American Studies Summit that took place in San Antonio, as well as on 4 years of organizing by the NACCS-Tejas Foco statewide organization that is a regional member site of its national parent organization by the same name (i.e., National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies).
The San Antonio summit addressed the textbook and other matters pertinent to Mexican American and ethnic studies, generally. What follows are scholar's expressed critique of the textbook:
Dr. Emilio Zamora-UT-Austin
Dr. Liliana Patricia Saldaña-UTSA
Dr. José María "Chema" Herrera-Cotera-UTEP
Kathy Miller, Director of the Texas Freedom Network, along with others that made comments like Dr. Emilio Zamora, Juan Tejeda, and Anita Quintanilla who caps off the whole press conference by saying that Texas and the Southwestern United States is our "Motherland" and that we (Mexicans/Mexican Americans) are not illegal.
Excellent, brief history in this 11:21-minute video on the birth of the KKK. It actually fronts an entire excellent series titled, "The Georgia Way of Life," that follows this on Youtube looks at the deep history of institutionalized racial prejudice and discrimination. I'm teaching a Foundations in Education Policy class this semester and so I'm really focused right now on origins.
Finding clear expression in strategy, here's the historic appeal of the Klan. They appealed to a broad spectrum of whites by widening their hatred beyond African Americans, to include Jews, Catholics, and immigrants (today, it's Mexicans, too, despite their decisive contributions to the re-building of Georgia in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, as well as their central role in the building of the Olympic Park in anticipation of the 1996 Olympic Games).
As we all know, they also appealed (and appeal) to sacred symbols of Christianity and the American flag while exploiting the public's fears against "the other."
The Klan was born on June, 1866 in Pulaski, TN. All should consider the implications today of this deep history.
-Angela c/s
The Georgia way of life -The birth of Stone mountain- part1
