Summations Only

Good. I think at least you, Faith, and I are in agreement on this one.We might also want to restrict the analysis to within individual police forces, since the different standards/norms from one locale to another could skew the data to the point of uselessness.

Follow the link in post #90.

Hey, that's you downplaying the racism again.We don't know if the cop(s) was/were racist or not, but you're already leaning towards the side that they aren't.Why is that? In which message were you called a racist?

I think you have that right: white kids are taught that resisting arrest is wrong; black kids are taught that resisting arrest is dangerous.Jaywalking isn't "wrong" in any moral sense but it can be dangerous. (By the way, I have occasionally "helped" aboriginal people across the street by walking with them because white drivers often won't stop for them.)

Then how about in this situation Faith? This man brought his gun into Sky Harbor International Airport and actually ended up pointing it at other civilians, yet no charges will be pursued in this case Neuroscientist won't face charges for taking gun into airportWhat about the situation at Cliven Bundy's ranch, when several guns were pointed in the direction of law enforcement officials? Would law enforcement have been justified because of the threat level in taking out a few of those people also?

I think that we are missing the point of the OP when we are discussing if this is an overt act of racism or not. The purpose of this thread was to take the tests that were offered and would give you an idea of what your subconscious thoughts on different groups were. In the cases of these police officers, shouldn't we be looking more at the systemic racism than the personal racism of the officers involved? With the weapons test in the OP, I was more prone to thinking of white people in combination with weapons. However, that is most likely due to my home state of Arizona where white folks with guns is a near constant every day. The interesting aspect was that in the weapon IAT, 72% of respondents have an underlying association of black people with weapons. this isn't overt racism, but underlying motivation that could be a factor. If we see this strong underlying correllation on assumptions, doesn't this paint the image of reaching for a pill bottle, a wallet, or a drivers license a little differently? I'm not claiming any of the officers were overtly racist, but what about the effects of the subconscious and assumptions that we make in every day life? Isn't that what the IAT was attempting to address?

That's not downplaying anything. That's just holding off on making a conclusion until all the facts are in.As she said, she saw no 'clear evidence' of racism. So the proper mindset would be to not conclude racism.It's not downplaying to treat unevidenced things as non-existent.And if it is downplaying, then there's certainly nothing wrong with it, and you should stop using the accusations as personal attacks to make your opponent look bad.

We aren't in agreement. Faith has already declared that none of the incidents under discussion involve racism. It is simply not possible to make that decision.

Yeah right. She's been downplaying the racism since the first sentence in her first post:

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In fact all the recent cases of supposed racism in the deaths of blacks by white cops aren't racism.

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further:

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The idea that white cops go into black neighborhoods with racist motives in this day and age is ridiculous.

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Well, I've been watching a bunch of the different videos of the Eric Garner incident at You Tube and my overall impression after all that is that the cops acted with undue force and I have no idea why they felt that necessary. Racism probably not, but overreaction for sure.

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The statistics might tell you that there is a problem when white cops confront blacks in their community when they've committed a crime, but it wouldn't show racism on the part of the whites any more than it could show it on the part of the blacks.

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. I'm curious.Why is her initial reaction to downplay the racism?She doesn't have a dog in this fight, what's the point?

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

The cops aren't going to attack when they have a chance at losing.They're all about safety so they only shoot at unarmed people.

I'm surprised how well that map correlates with the population:

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

Of course. If we did the same study with the US and the UK, and asked about Mexicans and Poles, how do you suppose it would turn out?

Absent evidence of racism, it's the only conclusion to come to.