Culture War Reporters

I am on choir tour and have limited internet. Thus, this post is a day late. Apologies to the world.

I took Harvard’s Implicit Association Test. I’m a racist.

Well, I guess more specifically, I show “a strong preference for European-American faces over African-American faces.” More more specifically, I associate negative words (like Agony, Hurt, Evil) more quickly with African-American faces and positive words (Peace, Wonderful, Laughter) with European-American faces. What’s more…most everybody does. Take it yourself.

There’s a lot of criticism of the IAT. I, personally, think it’s absolutely brilliantly designed – no, you can’t derive claims from it that aren’t there (everybody hates everybody but while people), but as someone trying to put together experiments, the design is really quite elegant. One of the more interesting things is the discussion of race discrimination and outgroup discrimination – is the association with negative words in reaction to African-American faces, or is it just due to the tendency (of babies, even) to prefer faces similar to our own and our families? Are my results indicative of deep-seated and individual subconscious racism or just an awareness of a cultural stereotype? One interesting report is that while self-described white people prefer white faces over black faces almost universally, self-descried black test-takers show about an even split between white-preference, black-preference, and neutrality. We could take this to mean that somehow black people are excluded from the universal tendency (observed in infants) to overwhelmingly prefer images of one’s ingroup, which seems unlikely and illogical to me, or we could take it to indicate (as I do, admittedly) that black Americans are affected by a widespread cultural stereotype and pattern negative associations. Also, Asian-Americans who took the test (to whom neither African-American nor European-American faces are an ingroup) showed preference for white faces.

Whatever the assessment of the test itself, it at the very least indicates the presence – somewhere – of the association of black faces with negative adjectives. Even just taking the test I could tell how difficult it was to not put the negative words on the side to which the black faces were assigned.

Last Sunday on Meet the Press, David Brooks referred to the IAT in reference to the Trayvon Martin case. As sticky as the case is, with the battle of media-bias accusations and omg-racist accusations fluttering around Facebook, I’m not going to touch it as I am not informed in the last. But the results of the IAT in reference to much of the discussion is fascinating. How are Americans – of any background – supposed to respond to our own natural ingroup-preferring tendencies? Humans are wired to prefer those who look like them and their families and, what’s more, mistrust those who are different from us. When nation-states were defined and connected by similar genetic background, this worked great. But in an experiment like the US, where we’re defined by our lack of ethnic connection, how are we supposed to counterbalance these neurological preferences?

The frontal cortex does a good job most of the time – we consciously suppress our negative reactions to different people groups. One study found that white subjects, when they looked at black faces, showed more action in their frontal cortex (the part of the brain associated with active thought and consciousness. It’s the part of the brain you’re reading this with right now, and the part of the brain with which you decide what to say and what to wear today.) than when they looked at faces similar to theirs. But then the researchers started flashing pictures of black faces too quickly for the subjects to consciously notice – but enough for their subconscious to be aware of the photo. When they were shown these pictures for only a few millionths of a second, subjects showed no frontal cortex response and a new response in the amygdala – which is the part of the brain (deeper inside, sort of in the middle, above your ears) that indicates fear, hatred, and feelings associated with negative stereotypes.

The point of this is that while a huge amount of people have an implicit association of negativity with outgroup faces, most people consciously suppress their negative stereotypes. This is a good thing, if it is depressing to know that it’s a necessary task for us. The more we are educated about our tendency to prefer familiar-looking people – and the more society becomes mixed, in terms of genetic background – the more we’ll be likely to suppress, if not conquer, the suspicion of difference which originally helped humans survive in an unkind environment.