Subconscious racism can be corrected

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There's a NYT article by Nicholas Kristol that revisits previous studies on issues of unconscious racial biases that black people experience in our society, You know, things like resumes with names like "Jamal" get thrown into the round file, but resumes with names like "Brendan" of "Lauren" get called for an interview. Job applicants with those same names are also 50% more likely to get call backs from job interviews also.

We all know about apartment and home rental situations where callers with black sounding names seeking to rent are quite often told that there are no vacancies when there actual are vacancies when white applicants apply.

One thing that surpised me this unconsciouls racism manifests itself in the sports world with officials. Black players in basketball are called for more fouls, black baseball pitchers get more "ball" called against them, same thing in football with more flags thrown against black players.

We even see here on DU with the foul "Stockholm Syndrome" post and others (maybe I should take that back as that post and others were so blatant maybe their authors were exhibiting anything but subconscious biases).

But there is a cure. Make people more aware of their unconscious biases and they can show marked improvement because they begin to recognize it through awareness and familiarity with their former attitudes when situations that come up that can be handled differently from before.

Here's a link to a free online test that's worth exploring: www.projectimplicit.com

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1. Lots of victimized groups identify with their persecutors. Not a racist thing

Some AAs show symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, and display it by their attachment to the most conservative wing of the Democratic Party. The same is true of many formerly exploited and reviled white ethnics who became Reagan Democrats.

It's an attraction to power and authority. It's a disorder of the misguided and oppressed that can be seen worldwide across all races, religions and ethnicities. Everyone has a choice - join the man, or take him down.

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2. Ahhh . . . after that post, you might want to take the test on that site that helps one . . .

identify subconscious racism.

[Igel]

3. The "resume research" is pretty consistently misreported.

Because that's what sells.

If "Brendan" (take that as a "white" name) and "Jamal" each submit an otherwise identical resume, Brendan gets more calls. That was the original research in the first article, and a review bounced it. Before asserting it's just race, make sure it's just race. So there was a second round of research.

If "Brendan, white male", "Brendan, Af-Am male", and "Jamal, Af-Am male" each submit an otherwise identical resume, Brendan still gets more calls. There's a small difference between the two Brendans. But the difference between the black Brendan and Jamal is nearly as large as the difference between the white Brendan and Jamal. The researchers have to conclude that it's not skin color, because nobody monitors calls. They monitor hiring rates. It's not like you're going to call in people you know ahead of time you're not going to hire because there's just not all that much of an upside for most companies. (Some do track interviews, I'm sure.) In any event, the tracking "observation paradox" would apply to "non-raced" Brendan and Jamal, as well.

The researchers twist themselves into knots to justify this in terms of racism, but ultimately they come down to redefining racism as "perception of race-based cultural differences". Of course, cultural differences often correlate with race and ethnicity, but they're not genetically linked (whatever some racists have said and still may say). This is a horrible problem for most other studies, as well, because it introduces a confound that weakens the conclusion and therefore the assertion that most such researchers want to make.

What the resume researchers didn't bother with in terms of justifying their conclusion was having a split white cohort--all whites are homogeneous, which is a very common but false assumption. That, however, would have led them far, far from their original research. Still, the only way to make sense of the difference for blacks was to split the black cohort in some way that wasn't simply skin albedo.

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4. So in the second round the two "Brendans" still get more calls than "Jamal"?

Wouldn't that show an assumption by the callers that the two "Brendans" were white and the "Jamal" resume submitter was black (that is of course, if the submissions were electronic or by mail), thus still indicating racism because of the calls to the two white-sounding names?