Summations Only

I've often wondered where prejudices began, the "them vs us" was too simplistic ...There are several different tests here that cover different biases ...http://politicaltruths.info/...ientific-analysis-racism-read

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... The research on rapid-fire, implicit biases, meanwhile, should restart a debate over the role of mediathe news segment that depicts immigrants as hostile job snatchers, the misogynistic lyrics in a songin subtly imparting stereotypes that literally affect brain wiring. Indeed, you could argue that not only does the culture in which we live make us subtly prejudiced, but it does so against our will. That’s a disturbing thought.

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So how do we break the cycle? We could require lawmakers to engage in exercises to recognize their own unconscious prejudice, like the Fair and Impartial Policing program does. Or we could even go a step further and anonymize emails they receive from constituentsthus taking implicit bias out of the equation.

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Short of that, you can do something very simple to fight prejudice: Trick your brain. UNC-Chapel Hill’s Payne suggests that by deliberately thinking a thought that is directly counter to widespread stereotypes, you can break normal patterns of association. What counts as counterstereotypical? Well, Payne’s study found that when research subjects were instructed to think the word safe whenever they saw a black faceundermining the stereotypical association between black people and dangerthey were 10 percent less likely than those in a control group to misidentify a gun in the Weapons Identification Task.

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To be sure, it will take more than thought exercises to erase the deep tracks of prejudice America has carved through the generations. But consciousness and awareness are a startand the psychological research is nothing if not a consciousness-raiser. Taking the IAT made me realize that we can’t just draw some arbitrary line between prejudiced people and unprejudiced people, and declare ourselves to be on the side of the angels. Biases have slipped into all of our brains. And that means we all have a responsibility to recognize those biasesand work to change them.

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... On his giant monitor, Amodio shows me a big blob of data, a cluster of points depicting where people score on the Implicit Association Test. The test measures racial prejudices that we cannot consciously control. I've taken it three times now. This time around my uncontrolled prejudice, while clearly present, has come in significantly below the average for white people like me.

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That certainly beats the first time I took the IAT online, on the website UnderstandingPrejudice.org. That time, my results showed a "strong automatic preference" for European Americans over African Americans. That was not a good thing to hear, but it's extremely common51 percent of online test takers show moderate to strong bias.

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Sometimes you're asked to sort African American faces and "good" words to one side of the screen. Other times, black faces are to be sorted with "bad" words. As words and faces keep flashing by, you struggle not to make too many sorting mistakes.

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And then suddenly, you have a horrible realization. When black faces and "bad" words are paired together, you feel yourself becoming faster in your categorizingan indication that the two are more easily linked in your mind. "It's like you're on a bike going downhill," Amodio says, "and you feel yourself going faster. So you can say, 'I know this is not how I want to come off,' but there's no other response option."

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And I scored about where I expected to be on both race and sexuality, but haven't done the others yet.Don't feel you need to share your results, just whether they came out as expected or not.Maybe try again next year and see if you improve ...?Enjoy.

I think there is so much low level racism in society that it is very difficult not to absorb some bias. The first part of solving a problem is recognizing the problem. Then you can work on it, subconscious or not.Enjoy.

More like the difference between a real gun and a toy.The boy in the store shot dead
The boy in the playground shot deadA little more time before jumping to conclusions may have made a difference.Enjoy

Supposedly they are looking at the time it takes to make the appropriate response, with usual associations being faster.Problem is that one may be more familiar with one side than the other ... is lack of familiarity a bias?I also did the weapons one and got "Your data suggest little or no association between White American and Black American with Harmless Objects and Weapons."This does not surprise me as I just do not see that many people with weapons (and I like it like that). Sure I know people with weapons, but they don't wave them around in public.Enjoy.

You mean like the cap guns I used to have and would pretend shoot at everyone?

You really believe that?Video: Cops Shot, Killed 12-Year-Old Two Seconds After Arriving at ParkThe kid in the park, Tamir Rice, had an "airsoft" bb pistol, the cops shot him dead within seconds of their arrival ... there were no questions asked.There are so many, so many, so many ... it can't be just coincidence.Edited by RAZD, : type of gun

and I keep thinking about "Black Like Me"Black Like Me, 50 Years Later | Arts & Culture| Smithsonian Magazinemay want to read it again ...Enjoy

Good job. Correct. ALSO clearly, there had been NO shooting by the kid (or the shooting of bbs was not noticed by anyone - air-guns don't make much noise).As such there was a potential for danger - enough to proceed with caution -- but NO "clear and present danger" for the police to come in with guns blazing. Correct again, and again there were no reported shooting of the gun. It could have been a toy gun, a real gun with no ammo, or a loaded gun that had not yet been fired. Indeed. He quit his previous rural police job before being let go, and applied to the big city to "see some action." So he was predisposed to violent response. As the racism test here (that you denigrated and declined to complete?) shows, people, especially white people are likely to have\harbour racist tendencies even when they think they don't. I scored higher on that than I thought I would. One of the things in that test was whether you associated violence with blacks more than with whites.So the question is not whether the policeman was racist but whether he was more inclined to think a black kid had a real pistol than he would think a white kid had a real pistol in a similar situation.I think the answer for a LOT of people to that question is yes, even if they don't think they are racist, but because of news reports associating black kids with crime and shooting more than white kids. Not the overt racism of the old south, but the lingering racism embedded in our culture, especially in the culture of fear. I've lived down south and been told by the people there that they've "come a long way" ... but what I saw was that maybe 1 step out of 100 had been taken, that most of it was lip service. One lady told me "I love them, love them to death ... but I just don't want them in my neighborhood." The first part doesn't white-wash the second part.Enjoy

Like the statistics that show a black male is 21 times more likely to be shot by police than a white male in spite of blacks being 12% of the population?The statistics that show that people with lower income are more likely to commit violent crimes and the statistics that show black income is lower than white income?So once you normalize the data by race and income to compare apples to apples I expect that a large portion of the 21 fold kill rate will still be significant.Enjoy.

Except this is just you claiming it without providing substantiation for your position. These are the kinds of answers one gets from cognitive dissonance. Curious that nobody else has your problem with the tests ... they are just indicators of tendencies not results that label you for the rest of your life.Enjoy.

Indeed, the question is not whether specific officers are racist within the police forces, but whether there is a systemic association of blacks with one kind of behavior and whites with a different kind of behavior.It seems to me that across the board on the examples provided that whites are given the benefit of doubt about their actions, while blacks are given the assumption of guilt.This crossed my desk this morning: Across America, whites are biased and they don’t even know it

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Most white Americans demonstrate bias against blacks, even if they're not aware of or able to control it. It's a surprisingly little-discussed factor in the anguishing debates over race and law enforcement that followed the shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers. Such implicit biases -- which, if they were to influence split-second law enforcement decisions, could have life or death consequences -- are measured by psychological tests, most prominently the computerized Implicit Association Test, which has been taken by over two million people online at the website Project Implicit.

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Based on this data, it appears that whites in some states may exhibit higher levels of implicit bias than those in other states. The following map, courtesy of Project Implicit, shows the states with the highest level of implicit bias (high number, red) and lowest level of implicit bias (low number, blue). Gray represents states with a middle amount of implicit bias; Michigan is the median state. Overall, the map reflects the scores of 1.51 million individuals, ranging from a high of 99,660 test takers from California to a low of 1,722 test takers from Hawaii.

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A cautionary note: The people who have taken the IAT at the Project Implicit website are not a random sample of Americans, either nationally or on a state-by-state basis. Rather, they're people who, for some reason, chose to take an online test measuring their implicit biases -- which may actually mean they are less biased than average. (After all, at least they wanted to know how biased they are.)

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It is very important to note that implicit racial bias is not the same thing as conscious racism. People who harbor implicit biases may not think of themselves as prejudiced, and in fact, might consider prejudice to be abhorrent. They also may not know they even have these biases.

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With this background in place, one key thing to notice about the map above is that white people in every U.S. state are biased. Their mean scores vary by state, but participants from the median state, Michigan, show an average, positive IAT score of 0.402. According to Xu, a score of .35 is the "cutoff point between 'moderately prefer white' and 'strongly prefer white.'"

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Overall, looking at a map like this one tells us something pretty crucial to our understanding of racial bias: It is everywhere, from north to south, from Maine to California. It is present among liberals and conservatives, men and women, young and old.

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We have a huge amount of work to do.

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According to this map I brought the state of RI down a little ... but I still have a 'moderately prefer white' bias, and I'll have to work on that.So there is a large unconscious element of racism in America, and this would apply to the police forces as well as to the general citizens.Enjoy

Indeed. One may almost be forgiven for thinking maybe "familiarity breeds contempt" ...However I also ran across this: Does the Implicit Association Test (IAT) Really Measure Racial Prejudice? Probably Not.

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The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was created by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues [1] and measures the strength of automatic associations people have in their minds. Many people have taken the test online and have found that they are faster to associate positive words with names of white people rather than black people. Mass fear has ensued that perhaps most of America really is racist. An even greater fear is that Americans are racist but don't even know it; a situation that seems difficult to change.

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Should people be this concerned about their results on the IAT, or is everyone worrying needlessly?

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Recent research is shining new light on the IAT, offering an alternative explanation of what the IAT really measures. And the results have important real-world implications.

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It's well known that people are prejudiced against the "out-group". Perhaps the IAT-effect is just a result of the human capacity to associate positive stimuli more easily with their in-group, and negative stimuli more easily with their out-group. In other words, perhaps the IAT is tapping into a more general quirk of human nature rather than a specific race effect.

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Instead, they prefer an explanation put forward by another group of researchers [5] that it is more intuitive processing a positive word associated with an in-group than a positive-word associated with an out-group. Processing a positive word with an out-group requires a switch in mental set in order to retreive the correct category membership and this takes up more time.

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Taken together, these studies suggest that the IAT-effect is due to in-group/out-group membership and is not based on racial prejudice.

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This doesn't mean we are in the clear. Throughout the course of evolution humans evolved the ability to quickly categorize those who are in the "in-group" and those who are in the "out-group". This skill can be adaptive when processing a lot of information, but can also be harmful to society when it influences racist thoughts and behaviors. Therefore, we should be very careful how different groups are portrayed in the media, schools, and society. The faster we can automatically associate people with our in-group, the less likely we will be to implicitly and overtly demonstrate racial prejudice toward them.

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So it appears that we are back to where I started ... Enjoy

Well, not "crappy" per se so much as that one must be careful of the conclusions reached from the data. As noted in Message 133 further study shows a stronger relationship between "in-group" and "out-group" than it does to racism per se.Of course when your "in-group" is predominantly white and your "out-group" is predominantly black there is a lot of overlap and the in\out division can be due to unconscious bias.Another factor I would like to see studied is poor to not poor and how the perceptions break down on those lines. Personally I would expect them to align as well, especially for conservative watchers of FauxNoiseNutwork.Enjoy

Comparing blacks killed by cops to blacks killed by other blacks is a red herring logical fallacy.or even to whites killed by other whites .. why?Because we expect MORE from the police who are there "to protect and serve" and who are purportedly trained to make critical distinctions -- things we do NOT expect of other civilians, whether black or white.It is because they are police and because they are supposed to the long arm of the law, of justice, and of protecting citizens.That is why white people as well as black people are outraged and are participating in these civil demonstrations across the nation. It's not about death, it is about justice and accountability; it is about equality under the law, and respect as human beings.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : oops

Faith,Do you think that this may have something to do with police shooting young black men more than young white men? Super Predators (April 1, 1999):

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The arrests became top-of-the-broadcast news and sent a shivers across the country. Here were the stone-cold predators that Princeton political scientist John DiIulio Jr. had warned about human harbingers from the coming generation of the young and the ruthless, in the phrase of Northeastern University criminologist James Fox. These were the morally bereft members of the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known, that DiIulio, moralist William Bennett and crime expert John P. Walters wrote about in their 1996 book, Body Count.

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Last summer, America seemed to have found its super-predator prototypes.

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The discovery began in Chicago with the killing of an 11-year-old girl, Ryan Harris. Found in an alley on July 27, she had been bludgeoned to death and molested. Her bike was stolen.

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The case drew little national notice just another kid killed in a big city until Aug. 10, when police announced that they had confessions from the killers: two black boys, ages seven and eight, from the South Side of Chicago, each about four feet tall and 60 pounds.

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The arrests became top-of-the-broadcast news and sent a shivers across the country. Here were the stone-cold predators that Princeton political scientist John DiIulio Jr. had warned about human harbingers from the
coming generation of the young and the ruthless, in the phrase of Northeastern University criminologist James Fox. These were the morally bereft members of the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known, that DiIulio, moralist William Bennett and crime expert John P. Walters wrote about in their 1996 book, Body Count.

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The case appeared to confirm Americans’ worst fears about kids. More and more, we are seeing child-play replaced with predatory behavior, said a Chicago Sun-Times editorial.

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There was one catch: DNA evidence showed the boys didn’t do it. Far from super-predators, they were victims of exploitive behavior by cops who talked them into a confession.

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The case was an embarrassing, unwarranted and diabolical rush to judgment by the police, prosecutors, the media and the public, says R. Eugene Pincham, a retired judge from Chicago’s South Side. It exploited the public’s anxieties about juvenile violence, and it reinforced this demonization of our children in black communities, this belief that they can and will do anything.

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To one degree or another, a dozen criminologists and youth advocates recently interviewed peg that demonization to a single term: super-predator. A Justice Department administrator and Fox himself say the word focused needed attention on a growing juvenile crime problem. But most others have little good to say about the headline-making term that sprang into the national crime lexicon three years ago.

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The phrase has nettled crime experts, titillated journalists, inspired politicians, frightened citizens and apparently humbled its creator. Numerous experts call the super-predator scenario junk sociology, but the fingerprints of the word can be found all over national justice policy.

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We’re living with John DiIulio’s legacy, says Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in Washington, D.C.

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We’re going to be living with the results of the super-predator thing for a very long time, says Jerome K. Skolnick, co-director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at the New York University School of Law.

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How did an idea that has been so discredited get so big?

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Lineage of a Soundbite

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DiIulio apparently first used the phrase in a Nov. 27, 1995, commentary in the conservative Weekly Standard under the headline, The Coming of the Super-Predators. But its genesis goes back to a study of delinquency among boys born in 1945 in Philadelphia. The study, published in 1972, reported that six percent of the boys had accumulated five or more police contacts before their 18th birthday. The conclusion: a small percentage of chronic delinquents is responsible for a high proportion of delinquency incidents.

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Enter James Q. Wilson, a prominent conservative criminologist at UCLA (and DiIulio mentor) who has written about morality and crime for years. In 1995 Wilson predicted a crime spike in 2010, when the U.S. would have a half-million more adolescent males. Based on the six percent figure from the Philadelphia study, he predicted 30,000 more muggers, killers and thieves.

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DiIulio has said the Wilson projection confirmed his sense that young inmates today show hardly a flicker of human emotion. That fit with a conversation he’d had with an inmate at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, who described juveniles there as stone-cold predators. DiIulio ratcheted up Wilson’s prediction by coining super-predator in the Weekly Standard.

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The phrase was introduced to a national audience in the Jan. 15, 1996, issue of Time under the headline, Now For the Bad News: A Teenage Time Bomb. The story, which quoted (James) Fox and DiIulio, began, They are just four, five and six years old right now, but already they are making criminologists nervous.

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The Juvenile Superpredator Myth

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A professor of politics and public affairs on the political science faculty at Princeton University, John DiIulio, created and popularized the super-predator concept. He coined the term superpredator (1995b) to call public attention to what he characterized as a new breed of offenders, kids that have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future. . . . These are stone-cold predators! (p. 23). Elsewhere, DiIulio and co-authors have described these young people as fatherless, Godless, and jobless and as radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more teenage boys, who murder, assault, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious [linked] disorders (Bennett, DiIulio, & Walters, 1996, p. 27).

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The superpredator myth gained further popularity when it was linked to forecasts by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio of increased levels of juvenile violence. Wilson (1995) asserted that by the end of [the past] decade [i.e., by 2000] there will be a million more people between the ages of 14 and 17 than there are now. . . . Six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offendersthirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready (p. 507). DiIulio (1995a, p. 15) made the same prediction. Media portrayals of juvenile superpredators have created the impression that juveniles are most likely to be armedheavily armedand to use guns in attacks.

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A year later, DiIulio (1996a) pushed the horizon back 10 years and raised the ante, projecting that by the year 2010, there will be approximately 270,000 more juvenile super-predators on the streets than there were in 1990 (p. 1). DiIulio based his projection of 270,000 on two factors. First, he assumed that the 6% figure that the Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study found in relation to Philadelphia boys who were chronic offenders in the 1960s would remain constant. Second, he factored this figure in with projections of the growth of the juvenile population made by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. According to these projections, the ages 0—17 population group in the United States was expected to grow by 14% (4.5 million) between 1996 and 2010 (Box 1.2)

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DiIulio (1996b) warned that juvenile superpredators would be flooding the nation’s streets, coming at us in waves over the next 20 years. . . . Time is running out (p. 25). He also used inflammatory language, warning, We must therefore be prepared to contain the [‘crime bomb’] explosion’s force and limit its damage (DiIulio, 1995a, p. 15). However, he expressed hopelessness, saying, This crime bomb probably cannot be defused, and asserting that the superpredators would be here within 5 years (i.e., by the year 2000) (p. 15). They never arrived.

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John DiIulio Retreats From His Super-Predator Theory of Black Teenagers

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John DiIulio, until recently the head of the President's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives but who is now back at his former post teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, has changed his view on the behavior of young urban blacks.

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In the early 1990s DiIulio made headlines as a result of his view that America was a demographic time bomb which was about to explode. According to DiIulio's thesis, a large increase in the number of young black male teenagers would lead to an unprecedented crime wave. DiIulio said at the time that many of these children had been raised in "moral poverty surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings.

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You have to sign up to go further on that post.In other words young black men were branded as inherently dangerous because of a false theory (recanted by the author) which was used to formulate draconian law enforcement policies that are still in effect.Is this racist? Not directly, but it still distinguishes between young black men and young white men and leads to different treatments -- ie the behaviors we have seen talked about on this thread -- by police and law enforcement.I call it a racial bias, that black youth are inherently perceived as more dangerous than their white cohorts ... don't you?and because of a false theory that still rebounds in law enforcement circles.Enjoy.