A provocative new study from Northwestern University suggests that whites who are particularly worried about appearing racist seem to suffer from anxiety that may cause them to avoid interaction with blacks in the first place.
“The Threat of Appearing Prejudiced and Race-based Attentional Biases,” by Jennifer A. Richeson, associate professor of psychology and African-American studies and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern, and Sophie Trawalter, post-doctoral fellow, IPR, recently appeared in the journal Psychological Science.
The study participants - 15 white college students - tried to act in unprejudiced ways toward blacks primarily for appearance’s sake to avoid social disapproval — not because of their personal values.
And a related topic, “I’m not a racist; I have black friends”: black people love us
While men are more likely to tolerate of discrimination, everyone tended to accept the most prejudice against poorly educated immigrants and Arab American airplane travelers, according to a study by the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics.
Through both phone and internet surveys, researchers asked more than 3,300 people to evaluate five scenarios, each of which dealt with a form of discrimination targeting a distinct class of people: Arab American airplane travelers, seriously overweight people, the genetically disadvantaged, poorly educated immigrants and African American motorists.
Based on the phone interviews, men were 7.6 percent more likely to tolerate discrimination against the obese and 8.9 percent more likely to accept racial profiling of African-American motorists. And men were even more tolerant of discrimination in the Web survey: men were 19.6 percent more likely to tolerate discrimination against the obese and 17.4 percent more likely to accept racial profiling.
Tolerance Index: A ranking of acceptance of discrimination
Poorly educated immigrants - around 30 percent
Arab-Americans airplane travelers - around 20 percent
Seriously overweight people - around 14 percent
African American motorists - around 13 percent
Genetically disadvantaged people - around 5 percent
Conclusions: nearly one-third of people surveyed tolerate racism against brown people, one-third of the respondents suck and men suck more.
We should never tolerable discrimination and oppression.
And to mitigate this damage, they must to explain why they were upset. But it doesn’t bode well for men to explain why they were angered.
I wonder if the study from a former Hillary Clinton Congressional Fellow (Uhlmann) considered race and other social factors in their analysis.
Of course, white men are rational and everyone else should be presumed emotionally liable until proven otherwise. And yet, when a man explains himself, his peers lose a little of their credence in his reasoning ability. Perhaps, his actions are a little less justifiable - he is used to getting his way without needing to explain himself.
“I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this [climate change] problem,” Barack Obama said today. [CNN Political Ticker]
I wonder if he’d ask Gore to head the EPA. Wouldn’t that be a major change for environmental health?
This latest information from CNN adopts a slightly different tone from MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann’s ramble a few nights ago. The credulous Olbermann spent considerable time supposing a Gore victory in the democratic primary — as if it were in any way acceptable for delegates to throw away popular opinion and vote for someone who is not even running for office.
“If it goes into the convention,” said Representative Tim Mahoney (D-FL) last week, “don’t be surprised if someone different is at the top of the ticket.” [The Daily Mail]
“What? Does Olbermann smoke crack?” In the words of my friend, “Not a single democrat would be happy about that.”
