Am I still a racist?
Posted by levi on January 3, 2010
Introduction
On September 28, 2008, I learned that I have a strong automatic preference for whites over blacks by taking an Implicit Association Test at Project Implicit.
The IAT is a test that uses your response time to gauge how closely you associate different stimuli. So, if you’re asked to associate something good with a black person or Hitler, and it takes you a bit longer (a few milliseconds) than it wouldv’e taken you for a white person, the IAT deems that you have an implicit association of goodness for whites over blacks. If IAT people read this, don’t hate me for any simplification or error I make in the description.
UPDATE: After taking the test, I realized that it works a little different than described above. There are about 7 or 8 ‘good’ words like ‘love’ and ‘flower’ and 7 or 8 ‘bad’ ones like ‘hurt’ and ‘agony’. Using the ‘e’ and ‘i’ keys on your keyboard, you have to select pictures of african american faces and european american faces and good words or bad words. If you take it, you’ll understand what I mean.
The Idea
I will take the test again, after having spent 13 months in southern Africa, and a 3 week holiday back in the states. I will then return to Africa, result in hand, for another 11 months to complete my Peace Corps service. I live in a mud hut on a homestead with a Bantu family. If you’re interested to know, they are from the Nyemba, Mbundu, and Kwangali tribes.
Hypothesis
My hypothesis is that, after having spent a year in southern Africa, my score will become more neutral. Since this is essentially a subconscious test, it is very difficult to predict what will happen, but as it stands, my score has nowhere to go but down towards black love.
Results
Well, I took the test, but there were too many errors made to determine a result. I was probably trying to go too fast. I’ll wait a few hours and try again.
Ok, I took it again, twice, just to be sure that the results didn’t change with a retake as some people have claimed. I think those people just get edgy and angry at tests that might imply someone is anything but saintly, but maybe they’re just honestly criticizing the test.
Anyways, I’m happy to report that both times, my result was “Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American.” I would have liked to get down to slight, but I’m happy enough with this result. Changing an implicit bias is probably a really hard thing to do.
A screenshot of levi's result on the Black White IAT
I’d like to repeat this experiment again later and see if there are any further changes. Good luck to all of you back here in the states! I’m off on a plane to Africa in 18 hours.
jennie said
I sincerely hope that the test controls for the obvious confounders: the fact that the “e” and “i” keys are not equally easy for your hands to press (usually one will be pressed with the dominant hand and one with the non-dominant, and dominant and non-dominant have different reaction times), and also for the fact that where the image and word are, both relative to each other and in absolute position in the visual field, will affect processing time based to some extent on the demands placed on the corpus callosum and on how much processing the visual stimulus and the word itself interfere with each other, and possibly even based on Stroop effects, depending on what the text color is. Hopefully, they chose a text color that was not “black” or “white” for this test.
levi said
Thanks for the interesting comment Jennie! I honestly don’t know what kind of controls they use, but if I recall correctly they did it once where ‘e’ was good, and once where ‘i’ was good or something like that. I also think the text was standard black on white.