Measure Your Own Unconscious Race Bias

There is much speculation about how race bias is affecting the presidential election. A friend and colleague of mine who has a PhD in behavioral psychology predicts that McCain will win by a hair because latent race bias will have an effect on voting day, no matter what the polls say. I certainly hope he is wrong (and instead is inoculating himself against that possibility,) but he is referencing significant studies that look at the individual unconscious and how it influences on the spot decision making. The best way we can control this is to at least have an honest look at our own race biases. Nicholas Kristof provides links in his editorial today to two studies where you can take an online test that measures your unconscious race bias and provides results back to you immediately.

Harvard Implicit Association Test

University of Chicago Shooter Effect Test

University of Chicago Shooter Effect Results

I took them this morning with some fear of what I would discover. It is always hard to face unconscious suppositions. They have a propensity to poke holes in who we think we are. But they are there and faced or not their influence remains in effect. Let's drag them out into the light where we can all, even alone as individuals, deal with them. In the Harvard site there is a series of tests you can choose from. If you scroll 2/3 down the screen, there is a test specifically designed to test race bias in association with Barack Obama and John McCain.

I have written before about how race bias is present in this election here and here.

Addendum: If you do take these tests, and don't like the results that you get back, here are some thoughts on what that means. For one, these tests are supposed to measure unconscious bias. They do so by asking you to respond quickly to stimuli that are loaded in racial, cultural and political ways. Your responses are measured by accuracy and time. Psychoanalysis has been exploring free association for over a century, recognizing that if you simply react to visual and verbal stimuli, attitudes and truths come forward that the ego and the persona are not dealing with. In the open, these unconscious contents can be explored and integrated into one's overall sense of self. However, discovering them can be both difficult and disturbing. If the results challenge your sense of who you are, ie. you are white and liberal and test with a bias against blacks, as many have, you are presented with information that is in conflict with your personal sense of self. These latent attitudes would be there anyway had you not looked into them, but knowing that they are there can push you to more consciously integrate that personal ambivalence towards race. Also, consider the unconscious to be a force of nature, something that you are responsible for but have little input into its contents. There is no blame for what you find there. Only the responsibility to recognize those influences and face them as best you can. This process can be upsetting enough that the Harvard site requires you to respond to a disclaimer saying that you may find results that you strongly disagree with before you take the test.

gone into the ether

Digital Railroad has announced that they have run out of capital and are shutting down within 24 hours. According to the announcement that I received, archives will be unavailable after tomorrow. My work is all backed up already, but lost are hundreds of hours organizing and working with clients, as well as a sense of continuity and security. It is a sobering reminder of how ephemeral this whole internet experience is. And somehow it feels oddly freeing.

I am sad to see them fail. They did a lot for their photographers and I think their hearts were in the right place. Evan Nisselson and his team personally opened up a number of opportunities for me and I am grateful for that. If there ever was a model that sought to make an agency level platform that was available to anyone who wanted to use it, it was DRR. It has been hard to watch them struggle. Their fate to some degree is our fate, at least to the extent that a profitable business model might be possible where the platform is open to all comers. I don't see that happening again soon. Anything similar will have to be profitable based on user fees. Rob Haggart's Photo Folio may be the new model.

A Particle in the Mass

"The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity."

C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Revised Edition, Vintage Books, 1989, pp 235-236.

Guest Posting

I have been guest posting this past month at No Caption Needed. Links are below.

What We See And What We Know

Underground Democracy

All Reality Is Perception?

...here are the words of Ronald Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, as recorded in one of the main Reagan strategy documents from 1980: "People act on the basis of their perception of reality; there is, in fact, no political reality beyond what is perceived by the voters."

From Thomas Frank's opinion piece in today's The Wall Street Journal.

It is worth noting that in 1980 Reagan beat Carter by a landslide 489 to 49 votes in the electoral college. It would seem that this has been a key strategy since then. The current market situation is evidence of how wrong this position is. The past 25 years in politics are also evidence of how effective it can be if the conditions are right. The failure and cynicism of this position comes evident when that which is indeed a reality but is outside the perception of voters comes into dramatic play, as in the current market collapse. The first half of the statement is true. People do act based on their perceptions of reality. And those perceptions are shaped largely by their own knowledge bases, by the information that they access and by the forms in which it arrives to them.

Sarah Palin and the "Other"

Starting at the Republican National Convention I noticed a rhetorical pattern beginning in Sarah Palin's acceptance speech and now carried through on the campaign trail. While Barack Obama and Joe Biden named John McCain repeatedly in their speeches, sharpening their criticisms of him and directing them personally, Palin and McCain have done the opposite. The words "Barack Obama" have been replaced largely by the words "my opponent" or "our opponent." In Palin's speech, she uses names only once, and then deep into the speech. Frequent references to Obama and/or Biden are through the words, "Our opponent(s)," "This is a man," and "The Democratic nominee." I count 23 references to Obama or Obama and Biden in her speech before she mentions their names in her 24th and final reference to them.

This is played out repeatedly in the sound bites that reach national play on the nightly news. From a fundamentalist perspective, there are several strategic reasons for this move in the McCain campaign. It seems that Obama has succeeded in branding himself as the candidate for change, and that it is change that Americans want in the face of the massive and mounting issues facing us today. In this case the very words "Barack Obama" activate that same brand, even if spoken by McCain and Palin. McCain and Palin run the risk of activating the positive message Obama has attached to his name even when they use his name in a critical context. To break this, they need to remove his name, criticize the generic designation of "opponent" and then hope to turn the tide in their direction.

A more sinister interpretation points to the ability of fundamentalist thinking to activate threats, fears, hates, hurts, prejudices, scapegoating, and otherwise dark psychological material and project it onto the Other--the one who is different and unlike me. It is much easier to do this with the generic non-personal "opponent" than it is to go up against the brand that Obama's name projects. If McCain and Palin can successfully detach voter's opinions of Obama and Biden from their names, then they have more opportunity to activate that unconscious material in the audience and use it against the Democrats. If anyone thinks that they aren't attempting this, simply watch the attack strategies that they have both put in place. Fear of the "other" rules the language. "(He is) palling around with terrorists." "Who is he? Do we really know?" "Too risky for America." Need I go on?

How this works is written into the grammar. A name denotes a person. It is a pronoun, the highest form of words in the English language. "Opponent" is a category, and thereby reduces the person to a group. We know that prejudices and biases operate based on categorizing entire groups of people so that all members are assumed to have the same traits as the stereotype. To get to know a person, as Obama has so effectively presented himself, is to break those categories and get to the sense of an individual.

This categorization of a person is especially effective where one of the groups that they belong to is the collective recipient of such projections as have been leveled towards blacks by whites in this country.

We know that there is an amount of latent unconscious racism at work in this election. Across the board among voters Obama is given an estimated 6 percent handicap. [This has been contested in recent polling.] In some groups the handicap is much higher. Currently Palin is drawing huge crowds of the party faithful with her self-described attack dog in lipstick rhetoric. I have written before on the dangers of evoking such strong and volatile affect in masses of people without critique or context. Her speeches seem designed specifically to avoid either of them.

Addendum: Back in May I wrote a piece on John McCain and hate speech where I called for him to categorically reject hate speech as a tool for his campaign or as a tool of his campaigners and followers. He was then benefitting from a series of virulent and hateful email campaigns that were in circulation in support of McCain for president. The seeds of this hate speech spoken out at his town hall meetings have been long sown and he has avoided taking a stand against it.