Expert Explains the Power of Implicit Bias [Video] by Dr. Efren O. Perez

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- Follow Vanderbilt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanderbiltu, on Instagram: http://instagram.com/vanderbiltu and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vanderbilt. See all Vanderbilt social media at http://social.vanderbilt.edu.

The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America: School segregation, lynchings and mass deportations of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are just some of the injustices Latinos have faced

Read about important history that helps to explain the vexed relationship that exists between the U.S. Mexican and broader Latino, community in the U.S. today.  It is clearly linked to a history of violent, U.S. expansionism that continues in the symbolic realm as evidenced in the systemic subjugation of this knowledge of our history that could actually shed enormous light on our political and policy struggles today.

I would only amend this piece to point out that at its base—and the use of the generic term, "Latino," notwithstanding—this reflects a continuation of a history of violence against peoples native to this continent.  These invasions resulted in the elimination of our native names, languages, and identities, resulting in an imposition of European ones and to a degree that is so profound that we often fail as native peoples to acknowledge this.  Moreover, the system has succeeded and continues to dominate us if we think critically in these ways.

I say all of this as we begin our danza Mexican curriculum this morning at Academia Cuauhtli at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, Texas.

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AcademiaCuauhtli/

-Angela Valenzuela

#BrownContinent  #Decolonize #decolonization #mexicamovement #INDIGENOUS #lies #CritcalThinking #EthnicStudiesNow #danzaMexica

UPDATED:

AUG 29, 2018

ORIGINAL:

SEP 27, 2017

The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America

School segregation, lynchings and mass deportations of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are just some of the injustices Latinos have faced.

ERIN BLAKEMORE

Olvera Street is a Los Angeles icon—a thriving Mexican market filled with colorful souvenirs, restaurants and remnants of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles. But though the bright tourist destination teems with visitors, few realize it was once the site of a terrifying raid.

In 1931, police officers grabbed Mexican-Americans in the area, many of them U.S. citizens, and shoved them into waiting vans. Immigration agents blocked exits and arrested around 400 people, who were then deported to Mexico, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status.

The raid was just one incident in a long history of discrimination against Latino people in the United States. Since the 1840s, anti-Latino prejudice has led to illegal deportations, school segregation and even lynching—often-forgotten events that echo the civil-rights violations of African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South.

The story of Latino-American discrimination largely begins in 1848, when the United States won the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the war’s end, granted 55 percent of Mexican territory to the United States. With that land came new citizens. The Mexicans who decided to stay in what was now U.S. territory were granted citizenship and the country gained a considerable Mexican-American population.

As the 19th century wore on, political events in Mexico made emigration to the United States popular. This was welcome news to American employers like the Southern Pacific Railroad, which desperately needed cheap labor to help build new tracks. The railroad and other companies flouted existing immigration laws that banned importing contracted labor and sent recruiters into Mexico to convince Mexicans to emigrate.

Anti-Latino sentiment grew along with immigration. Latinos were barred entry into Anglo establishments and segregated into urban barrios in poor areas. Though Latinos were critical to the U.S. economy and often were American citizens, everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination. Anglo-Americans treated them as a foreign underclass and perpetuated stereotypes that those who spoke Spanish were lazy, stupid and undeserving. In some cases, that prejudice turned fatal.

According to historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, mob violence against Spanish-speaking people was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They estimate that the number of Latinos killed by mobs reach well into the thousands, though definitive documentation only exists for 547 cases.

The violence began during California’s Gold Rush just after California became part of the United States. At the time, white miners begrudged former Mexicans a share of the wealth yielded by Californian mines—and sometimes enacted vigilante justice. In 1851, for example, a mob of vigilantes accused Josefa Segovia of murdering a white man. After a fake trial, they marched her through the streets and lynched her. Over 2,000 men gathered to watch, shouting racial slurs. Others were attacked on suspicion of fraternizing with white women or insulting white people.

Even children became the victims of this violence. In 1911, a mob of over 100 people hanged a 14-year-old boy, Antonio Gómez, after he was arrested for murder. Rather than let him serve time in jail, townspeople lynched him and dragged his body through the streets of Thorndale, Texas.

These and other horrific acts of cruelty lasted until the 1920s, when the Mexican government began pressuring the United States to stop the violence. But though mob brutality eventually quelled, hatred of Spanish-speaking Americans did not.

In the late 1920s, anti-Mexican sentiment spiked as the Great Depression began. As the stock market tanked and unemployment grew, Anglo-Americans accused Mexicans and other foreigners of stealing American jobs. Mexican-Americans were discouraged and even forbidden from accepting charitable aid.

As fears about jobs and the economy spread, the United States forcibly removed up to 2 million people of Mexican descent from the country—up to 60 percent of whom were American citizens.

Euphemistically referred to as “repatriations,” the removals were anything but voluntary. Sometimes, private employers drove their employees to the border and kicked them out. In other cases, local governments cut off relief, raided gathering places or offered free train fare to Mexico. Colorado even ordered all of its “Mexicans”—in reality, anyone who spoke Spanish or seemed to be of Latin descent—to leave the state in 1936 and blockaded its southern border to keep people from leaving. Though no formal decree was ever issued by immigration authorities, INS officials deported about 82,000 people during the period.

The impact on Spanish-speaking communities was devastating. Some light-skinned Mexican-Americans attempted to pass themselves off as Spanish, not Mexican, in an attempt to evade enforcement. People with disabilities and active illnesses were removed from hospitals and dumped at the border. As one victim of “repatriation” told Raymond Rodriguez, who wrote a history of the period, Decade of Betrayal, “They might as well have sent us to Mars.”

Others, like Rodriguez’s father, did not wait for raids or enforcement and returned to Mexico independently to escape discrimination and the fear of removal. His wife refused to accompany him and the family never saw him again.

When deportations finally ended around 1936, up to 2 million Mexican-Americans had been “repatriated.” (Because many of the repatriation attempts were informal or conducted by private companies, it is nearly impossible to quantify the exact number of people who were deported.) Around one third of Los Angeles’ Mexican population left the country, as did a third of Texas’ Mexican-born population. Though both the state of California and the city of Los Angeles apologized for repatriation in the early 2000s, the deportations have largely faded from public memory.

Another little-remembered facet of anti-Latino discrimination in the United States is school segregation. Unlike the South, which had explicit laws barring African-American children from white schools, segregation was not enshrined in the laws of the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, Latino people were excluded from restaurants, movie theaters and schools.

Latino students were expected to attend separate “Mexican schools” throughout the southwest beginning in the 1870s. At first, the schools were set up to serve the children of Spanish-speaking laborers at rural ranches. Soon, they spread into cities, too.

By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Latino children in places like Orange County, California attended separate schools. Among them was Sylvia Mendez, a young girl who was turned away from an all-white school in the county. Instead of going to the pristine, well-appointed 17th Street Elementary, she was told to attend Hoover Elementary—a dilapidated, two-room shack.

U.S. President Barack Obama presenting the 2010 Medal of Freedom to Sylvia Mendez, a civil-rights activist of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent. At age 8, Mendez played a pivotal role in a 1946 landmark court case that desegregated California schools. (Credit: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)

Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

The bare-bones facilities offered to students like Mendez lacked basic supplies and sufficient teachers. Many only provided vocational classes or did not offer a full 12 years of instruction. Children were arbitrarily forced to attend based on factors like their complexion and last name.

Then Mendez’s parents fought back. In 1945, along with four other families, they filed a class action lawsuit against four Orange County school districts. Their goal: Ensure that all children could attend California schools regardless of race.

The case culminated in a two-week-long trial. In court, school officials claimed that Latino students were dirty and infected with diseases that put white students at risk. Besides, they argued, Mexican-American students didn’t speak English and were thus not entitled to attend English-speaking schools. (When asked, officials conceded that they never gave students proficiency tests.) “Mexicans are inferior in personal hygiene, ability and in their economic outlook,” said one official.

Mendez’s attorney countered with testimony from experts in social science. He argued that the policy trampled on Latino children’s Constitutional rights. When Carol Torres, a 14-year-old Latino girl, took the stand, she immediately proved that Mexican-American students in the district could and did speak English.
It took seven months for Judge Paul J. McCormick to render a decision. On February 18, 1946, he ruled that the school districts discriminated against Mexican-American students and violated their Constitutional rights. Though the school districts challenged the ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with McCormick. Thanks to Mendez v. Westminster School District, California officially ended all segregation in its schools.

Mendez, who was eight when the lawsuits began, later told reporters that she thought her parents were fighting for her right to attend a school with a nice playground. But the case accomplished much more than that. Soon, parents in Texas and Arizona successfully challenged school segregation. In 1954, a decade after Mendez was turned away from the whites-only elementary school, the United States Supreme Court ruled that all school segregation based on race was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

Though the case was a victory for the Mendez family, Sylvia was harassed and heckled by her fellow students when she attended the white school. Nonetheless, she pushed to succeed and became a nurse and civil-rights activist. She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010—and now, two Los Angeles-area schools are named after her parents.

Today, an estimated 54 million Latinos live in the U.S. and around 43 million people speak Spanish. But though Latinos are the country’s largest minority, anti-Latino prejudice is still common. In 2016, 52 percent of Latinos surveyed by Pew said they had experienced discrimination. Lynchings, “repatriation” programs and school segregation may be in the past, but anti-Latino discrimination in the U.S. is far from over.

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HISPANIC HERITAGE MEXICO LYNCHING

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 ERIN BLAKEMORE

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Girls have so much against them.  Important research on this with implications for teaching and parenting.

Angela

Why Young Girls Don’t Think They Are Smart Enough

By ANDREI CIMPIAN and SARAH-JANE LESLIE 

JAN. 26, 2017

New York Times 

 

By the age of 6, young girls are less likely than boys to view their own gender as brilliant.

In our research, published today in the journal Science, we’ve found that girls as young as 6 start to believe that specific activities are “not for them” simply because they think they’re not smart enough. Our research suggests that American children are picking up on cultural stereotypes about brilliance at an early age. Unfortunately, these stereotypes suggest that girls aren’t as smart as boys.

If you try to think of a character in a book or show who is brilliant, you may come up with someone like Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock, Sheldon Cooper from “The Big Bang Theory” – or some other man. Of course, there are exceptions, such as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series and Lisa Simpson in “The Simpsons.” Most often, though, our cultural stereotypes promote the idea that being intellectually gifted is a male quality.

Even if parents do not explicitly endorse this stereotype, evidence suggests that it affects their hopes for their children. A 2014 report found that American parents Googled “Is my son a genius?” more than twice as often as they Googled “Is my daughter a genius?”

In contrast, questions about physical appearance were relatively more common for girls: Parents Googled “Is my daughter overweight?” about 70 percent more often than “Is my son overweight?”

As it happens, boys are slightly more likely to be overweight than girls. And, even though teachers – like parents – tend to assume that boys have greater “natural ability,” in reality girls do better in school.

Do little girls pick up on what their parents and teachers think about their smarts?

In our most recent research, with the psychologist Lin Bian as lead author, we studied 400 children ages 5 to 7, recruited over the last several years from a middle-class community near the University of Illinois, where one of us was working at the time.

For one study, each of 96 children (half boys, half girls) was told two stories about a person whose gender was not specified. They were told that one was about a “really, really smart” person, and the other was about a “really, really nice” person. Next, the children were shown four pictures (two males and two females) and were asked to guess which one might be the person in the story.

At age 5, boys and girls were equally likely to associate intelligence with their own gender, but that changed quickly. At age 6, girls were significantly less likely to associate brilliance with their own gender. Many of them picked a male character to identify as the really smart person in the story, much as the boys did.

These stereotyped responses were given by both white and nonwhite children, and did not seem to vary as a function of parental education and income.

When we asked children to guess which of four children, two boys and two girls, would get the best grades in school, girls picked mostly other girls. In other words, the girls we tested were aware that girls do better in school than boys, but that didn’t change their ideas about who’s “smart.”

Our research also suggests that these stereotypes may have lasting effects. Once internalized, they begin to guide girls’ interests away from things that they perceive as “not for them.”

In another part of the research, 64 children ages 6 and 7 (half boys, half girls) were shown two unfamiliar board games and told that they were either for children who are really smart or for children who try really hard. They were then asked four questions to measure their interest in the games.

When told that a game was for really smart children, the girls showed less interest and motivation than boys. This didn’t have anything to do with the game itself: When we described the exact same game as being for kids who try really hard, girls were just as interested in it as boys.

The difference between 6-year-old boys and girls appears to be related to their emerging stereotypes: We found that 5-year-old boys and girls — whose beliefs about brilliance were not yet differentiated — were equally interested in the game for really smart children.

In later life, these differences in children’s perceptions are likely to be consequential. In fact, in a paper we published in the journal Science in 2015, we found that women are underrepresented in fields thought to require brilliance – fields that include some of the most prestigious careers in our society, such as those in science and engineering. It may be that the roots of this underrepresentation stretch all the way back to childhood.

What is to be done? Research provides some clues. The psychologist Carol Dweck has written that emphasizing the importance of learning and effort — rather than just innate ability — for success in any career might buffer girls against these stereotypes. The relevant stereotypes, already in place at the age of 6, seem to fixate on who is supposed to have innate ability. If innate ability is seen as secondary, then the power of these stereotypes is diminished. Other research indicates that providing girls with successful role models might similarly “inoculate” them, boosting their motivation and protecting them from the idea that they are not intellectually competitive. One study even suggested that witnessing a more equal distribution of household chores could help balance the career aspirations of boys and girls.

Early and consistent exposure to such protective factors – and to the countless contributions made by women – may have the best chance of convincing little girls that they are, in fact, smart enough.

Andrei Cimpian is an associate professor of psychology at New York University. Sarah-Jane Leslie is a philosophy professor and director of the programs in cognitive science and linguistics at Princeton.