Implicit Association test - What do you prefer, Black vs White?

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MJP35

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With all of the recent discussion of Haitians vs Dominican lately and how many feel this is not an economic problem but rather a race problem. I thought I should add this to the debate.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1

I know topics are supposed to stay away from race but this is an interesting test for all those people who think they see people the same regardless of race. Interesting to note that results are identical regardless of the testee's race.

It's a short and interesting test. Post your results if you wish.

I am a White Canadian who is married to a Latina, I grew up in Ottawa and have traveled and lived all over Latin America including Haiti and Belize which are "Black" nations. I tested as having a only a slight preference for White people although I feel like I have no preference. Shows how much a person can kid themselves.
 

dv8

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nevermind. found it and that's 10 minutes of my life that i will not get back and i could have spent napping.
strong preferences towards the white, which does not surprise me. i am white, grew in a predominantly white country and first saw a living black person when i was in my twenties and went to london. also, i did not figure out i could use both hands for the test (automatic) and only used left hand (i am right handed). not that it would affect the test, i guess, apart from speed.
 

cobraboy

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"Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Light Skin compared to Dark Skin."

???

I never really understood the concept of what I was supposed to do. I kept getting red "x's"...and I kept getting confused as to what I was supposed to be judging.
 

MJP35

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It's actually quite straight forward. Each side is assigned a variable or variables, you are then shown a picture or a word and asked to assign it to the correct side. The 'X' denotes that you did not assign it correctly. The variables are then switched and mixed making it necessary to rely more on automatic responses. The test takes into account how many time you answer incorrectly and also how long you hesitate before answering.
 

MJP35

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Regardless of ones race or background or where they were born geographically the test consistently shows that almost everyone has a preference for lighter skin to some extent. White = Good, Black = Bad, admittedly we all know this is wrong but we all, white and black and everything in between, have been socially programmed to make that connection.
 

troyonline

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Hmm, Allow me to digress, if only slightly depending on your perspective...

First of all this was a very interesting test of sorts. And I'm not going to dismiss the merits of it's findings nor am I advocating it's accuracy or methodology. To me it's just a study that yielded some results that may very well reflect the social constructs of society.

My background; I'm of mostly African ancestry, born and raised in the UK with a short span in Singapore, and as an adult lived in the Caribbean for a couple years (Jamaica), in Brazil for three years, and 14 years to present in the USA. I grew up not being exposed to or knowing much about discrimination and/or prejudice, aside from what I saw in Hollywood movies until I arrived in the USA. And talk about baptism by fire as it came at me from all angles, blacks, Asians whites.. you name it. But that really isn't my point here!

The results show that I associate the races going from good to bad as follows with good at the top and bad at the bottom:

Asian
White
Black
Hispanic.

For me personally, I'm not particularly shocked at the alignment of my "preferences". But what these results don't show is whom someone from my background considers to be black, white etc... Why wouldn't someone like me who is clearly black (by American standards) have black at the top of the list? Well to understand that, you'd have to have a clear understanding of what is "black".

"Black" is a North American construct, short for Black American, not African. Having been born in England, I?m well aware that the term Black wasn?t widely used in Europe until American ideologies started crossing borders. We mostly identified Negros as African (even if you nor your parents were born in Africa), and Bi-racial was more widely used than it was in the US to describe people who fit into that descriptive category. Or simply enough we called them Brits! Yup, like the whites and Asians and all the other races living in the UK. Also having lived in the Caribbean for a few years, I?ve learnt that people of African descent do NOT like to be identified as Black American, or for short ?Black?. For example, in Jamaica they prefer to be called West Indians. This is in no way to suggest that they more identify with Mongoloid (native Indians) than their Negroid ancestry. In fact, they are quite proud of their African ancestry. In Brazil, due to different social and political pressures, people identify with their African ancestry differently. They have a variety of terms; Moreno, Mulatto, Negao, Claro? amongst others. And they were not derived in any efforts to dismiss and/or disguise their Negroid genes. The same applies to The Dominican Republic. You cannot apply North American ideologies to the rest of the Western World and expect everyone to fit neatly into your social constructs. Their history and culture evolved differently than in the U.S. and therefore their ethnic identities were molded accordingly.

Going away to college in the USA was a difficult time for me because blacks didn't readily identify with me and my funny accent, and my lack of being down with the lingo. I was questioned, where is my cultural identity? How do blacks talk in the UK? Well my black brother they talk just like white people do!... And you can already see the disconnect forming! Whites were more accepting, not because they were nicer people. I think they just loved my British accent, as it was part of "their" ancestry and they probably thought it was somewhat nostalgic or just cute. So, from a social point of view, in my 10+ years in the USA I never managed to align my self with Black Americans the way I had hoped. On emotional and spiritual levels and sometimes even politically, I certainly do align my self with Blacks here, but not so much culturally. So in hindsight this test doesn't address my personal situation. And rightfully so, it was designed for the masses not for the individual.

As far as blacks are concerned, here's what I do believe this test does bring to light. The word "Black" has an insurmountable amount of negative connotations attached to it. And most of them have nothing to do with race. You don't have to look very far either. Just go to the English dictionary for pete sake. Aside from it's reference to hue, the word black is used to describe almost everything negative; dark and gloomy, to erase, obliterate, or suppress, dirty, filthy, soiled, sad, depressing, somber, doleful, mournful... and the list goes on! This is what lives in our subconscious minds. And on the contrary, (go look up white); pure, bright, clean...etc. So while you are sitting there doing this word association survey comprised of negative words along with a picture of a black person, and then a white person, and shades in-between, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what kind of results to expect. The results are mostly a representation of your subconscious mind and your paradigms at work. And less a reflection of your convictions about race. The danger is when your paradigms regarding these specific associations start bleeding into your rational thought process and you find yourself on the wrong side of hatred without even knowing how you got there.
 

VJS

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As far as blacks are concerned, here's what I do believe this test does bring to light. The word "Black" has an insurmountable amount of negative connotations attached to it. And most of them have nothing to do with race. You don't have to look very far either. Just go to the English dictionary for pete sake. Aside from it's reference to hue, the word black is used to describe almost everything negative; dark and gloomy, to erase, obliterate, or suppress, dirty, filthy, soiled, sad, depressing, somber, doleful, mournful... and the list goes on! This is what lives in our subconscious minds. And on the contrary, (go look up white); pure, bright, clean...etc. So while you are sitting there doing this word association survey comprised of negative words along with a picture of a black person, and then a white person, and shades in-between, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what kind of results to expect. The results are mostly a representation of your subconscious mind and your paradigms at work. And less a reflection of your convictions about race. The danger is when your paradigms regarding these specific associations start bleeding into your rational thought process and you find yourself on the wrong side of hatred without even knowing how you got there.

The test does not use any colour words, - neither black, nor white, nor yellow etc. Not once.
 

troyonline

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The test does not use any colour words, - neither black, nor white, nor yellow etc. Not once.

VJS, please take the flipping test before you start commenting. The colors 'Black" and "White" are plastered all over the test. without having done an accurate count, I'd say about 75-80% of the test pages refer to black or white. Unless you are being sarcastic, in which case, hahaha... pretty funny.
 

cobraboy

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Maybe my eyes are old.

I could barely tell the minute shades.
 

VJS

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VJS, please take the flipping test before you start commenting. The colors 'Black" and "White" are plastered all over the test. without having done an accurate count, I'd say about 75-80% of the test pages refer to black or white. Unless you are being sarcastic, in which case, hahaha... pretty funny.

I did the Race IAT page from the linked page and it does not use any white or black colours anywhere that I can see, only blue and red, as well as Afr-Amer and Eur-Amer as race descriptions. I was using ipad to access it, maybe a different experience from a PC. And yeah, it tells me I am fricking racist apparently.
 

dv8

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As far as blacks are concerned, here's what I do believe this test does bring to light. The word "Black" has an insurmountable amount of negative connotations attached to it. And most of them have nothing to do with race. You don't have to look very far either. Just go to the English dictionary for pete sake.

listen, this is not the fault of a white supremacist man that the night is dark and the day is bright. and during the day you see the danger and can protect yourself and that at night you cannot see and you get scared. some of the associations are also purely cultural, in japan white represents death and mourning, not black.

in any case, i take my results as realistic value. my aesthetic preferences are white. a perfect woman is white, thin, blonde and blue eyed. a perfect man is white, tall, chubby and with hairy chest. this is what i like. individual taste, purely, not a moral statement of any kind. as a product of my language and culture i also prefer white because of the linguistic associations. lastly, i am white myself. not a source of pride, not an achievement, not something that defines who i am. i was born this way. we cannot help who we are.
 

Chip

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Since I no longer generally classify people according to race I wasn't able to take the test. It is what should be expected after living in the DR for so ling.

It is clear though that this test is a good example of the warped American perspective on race, should we really have expected anything else?
 

cobraboy

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When they didn't have "Driud" as a race, I knew it was bogus...
 

troyonline

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listen, this is not the fault of a white supremacist man that the night is dark and the day is bright. and during the day you see the danger and can protect yourself and that at night you cannot see and you get scared. some of the associations are also purely cultural, in japan white represents death and mourning, not black.

in any case, i take my results as realistic value. my aesthetic preferences are white. a perfect woman is white, thin, blonde and blue eyed. a perfect man is white, tall, chubby and with hairy chest. this is what i like. individual taste, purely, not a moral statement of any kind. as a product of my language and culture i also prefer white because of the linguistic associations. lastly, i am white myself. not a source of pride, not an achievement, not something that defines who i am. i was born this way. we cannot help who we are.

DV8, First of all, lets pretend we're having this conversation at the local Starbucks with smiles on your faces. we're not banging heads here, we're simply having an enlightened conversation. So feel free to let your guards down, nobody is convicting the other...

1) My references to black, white and most common English dictionaries was not a effort to indict any white supremacists group of manipulating the dictionary to shed a bad light on people of color. Please... I'm more intelligent than that. I was exposing why the test results might come out a bit jaded. The test was constructed to get you to respond subconsciously to the terms black, white.. etc. when they are aligned with negative terms. Most of our paradigms already associate negative connotations with black and positive ones with white. So when we are forced to respond instinctively, this is what comes to the surface. This has been found to be true while conducting countless other experiments/studies. Therefore, the context within which this study was carried out is inherently flawed especially when dealing with English speaking people from the western world.

2) Now, we're talking about a test that had absolutely nothing to do with physical beauty and I totally cringed when you said, "i take my results as realistic value. "This is exactly what I was talking about when I wrote my last and final comment in my previous post. "The danger is when your paradigms regarding these specific associations start bleeding into your rational thought process..." I can only hope that your "aesthetic preferences" aren't what you are using as reference to define what is inherently good, bad or better about any race. I could not care less about your or anybody else's aesthetic preference (I have mine too). Believe me, I'm in the business of aesthetics. Volume, color combinations, texture, proportions, spatial relationships, etc... I'm an Architect, aesthetics (form) is half of my equation, function is the other. I have the best group of friends in the world and we all like a different woman. In fact, we always joke that when we go out we never step on each others toes, because we all go for something different. So please, you do not have to justify your aesthetic preference to me or anyone. But please recognize the difference between physical beauty which is subjective and human beauty with crosses all racial lines.

3) I'm at the point where I am assuming that this (as a product of my language and culture i also prefer white because of the linguistic associations) was just a space filler and not that important. I dismiss this because, of the dozens of languages spoken in Europe. How many do you speak which are not common within other races? I'm assuming not many. Spanish, English, Portuguese, French (are common).. spoken throughout Africa and Latin America. Not a real reason to align yourself with any particular race, really (a mute point). Culturally??? this is where the fun begins. Slavic, Danes, Brits, French, Germans have almost nothing in common culturally, short of the euro and some Caucasoid ancestry. Hey we can throw in white Americans and Canadians too. In fact, it's safe to say that your experiences in Europe wouldn't be that indifferent than mine thinking that in coming to America, I'd have so much in common with Black Americans.

And lastly, in response to your last sentence. You were born white (assuming that you are). You have no control over that, but you have every bit of control over who you are!!!
 

troyonline

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Since I no longer generally classify people according to race I wasn't able to take the test. It is what should be expected after living in the DR for so ling.

It is clear though that this test is a good example of the warped American perspective on race, should we really have expected anything else?

Chip you are way ahead of the curve. Keep up the positive thoughts, the rest of the world will catch up sooner or later. People don't realize that pure racial identity is becoming a minority in this world. To the point where America has started inventing races. Hispanic??? That's an ethnicity, not a race... ugh. As the world turns.......
 

dv8

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troy, you understand irony, i hope? because that's where "white supremacist" stuff came from. and it's hard to see that in the pseudo-intellectual mash you are trying to feed me. spare me about human beauty. beauty is beauty, the same to all whose eyes can see. i am not interested in inner values, i look at the outside and i judge by the outside this is why strongly leaning towards white did not surprise me all all. i like white. that i do not find a black girl as attractive does not mean she is worse as a human being to me. only uglier, no more, no less. and i speak polish. narrow and exclusive enough for your hipster tastes?
 
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