Howdy y’all!

Fertile Ground for Trump’s Racism

Recently, I wrote about bias, and its increasing visibility in American society due mostly to the incredibly caustic rhetoric of the Trump campaign. In that blog post, I referenced the Harvard Project Implicit and invited people to comment in the comments about their experience taking the implicit bias tests that they give there. I thought then and think now that it would be an excellent challenge to write a blog post about.

The Challenge

The challenge is to blog about your experience:

• your experience of taking the test,
• your experience with the results,
• your experience being the target of bias, your experience being biased (perhaps the bravest topic since while we are all biased, few of us will face the social sanctions imagined to come with such an admission),
• what you’ve done to address bias, or
• any other topic or angle related to bias

This is a difficult topic to blog about because bias, prejudice, discrimination, and racism are so thoroughly vilified in our society, yet we all experience them everyday. We don’t have a forum to own up to our own shortcomings. We don’t have a safe space to discuss our concerns or to bare our souls concerning these issues.

Instructions

There are several steps involved here:

• Go to the Harvard Project Implicit
• Because it is a real research project — your responses are data that will be added to their aggregation of data! — the registration process is more involved than what you might expect.
• Immediately after registering, you will be taken to a study test, but it is not the one we are interested. While it is interesting in and of itself, you needn’t take it if you don’t want. You can simply go back to the login page and login for the Project Implicit Social Attitudes.
• You then start answering questions. It can be quite involved so make sure you have 15 to 30 minutes free to do the test. I find these types of tests pretty tedious: there’s lots of press a button with your left hand or with your right hand to indicate your answer and go as fast as you can. I found it fatiguing, but worth it.
• Once you’re done with the assessment, you can select other assessments of the ironically white privileged: European American (white) vs African American; Euro-American vs Hispanic-American; Euro-American vs Asian-American; and then ones on sexism and ageism. Do all that you’d like.
• Get your results.
• And, blog away.
• Use the tag, ImplicitBiasChallenge

Challenge Length: Complete by Sunday 11 September!

I look forward to reading your blog posts, y’all!

Huzzah!

Jack