Boy, Waffle House, a restaurant chain I hadn’t heard of until the shooting, is not having its best week, is it? First, there was racism-inspired shooting at its restaurant outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I tell you what, when you can’t even go out and close the bars and stop off at a waffle joint to finish the evening off without some mass shooter coming in and trying to mass shoot everybody, the country has gone to the dogs. This is beyond bad, it is just plain madness. Drunk people have got to be able to have they chicken and waffles on the way home in peace without fear of being in a mass shooting.

And, another thing America, when the po-po in cracker-white America takes your guns because you are too cray-cray to have them, don’t be giving them back. There is a reason the rural Christian conservative county government took them guns in the first place. Hell, I understand if it were some dumb gun-grabbing liberal court what took them guns, but a god-fearing Second Amendment-loving rural county court taking your guns? That’s some serious shit right there.

And then there was the racism-inspired violent arrest of a young woman the very next day! And, her crime? She was disputing plastic fucking cutlery. Hell, at least she weren’t minding her own bidness like those two lads up to Philadelphia in the Starbucks.

What the fuck, though? Plastic cutlery? Seriously? That’s a thing  to dispute over? Wallowing and rolling around on the ground like that. Threatening to break her arm. Exposing the poor woman’s breasts. What the fuck kind of arrest procedure is that? For plastic cutlery? Jesus Christ, when the police don’t show up to that call, laugh and tell everyone to go home, we’re so fucked if this what we’ve come to. Don’t take my word for it, just watch the video your own self.

Implicit Bias

Mixed in amongst all of the well-deserved outrage over all the racism liberally littering each of these incidents and the racism of the non-responses by the usual conservative suspects — correct me if I’m wrong, but I haven’t even read many thoughts and prayers responses to the shooting — is this little nugget from Vox: an extension the Harvard’s Project Implicit study of implicit racism. This time, though, it is in the form of a shooter game! And, it has been used on real live cops to see if they have a propensity for shooting unarmed black men over armed white men (spoiler: they do). And, now you too can see if you prefer shooting unarmed black men over armed white men! Isn’t America wonderful!?!

The Game

Air Cav infantry Soldiers compete in company challenge
What’s Your Bias?

The game is easy to play, you just use your right hand to press the “j” key if you want to shoot the mo’fo,’ and your left hand to press the “f” key if you want to let the mo’fo’ live. You got one second to make your choice to kill or be killed so don’t tarry on your way to shooting some unarmed black man.

The Scoring

The scoring goes like this: You get five points if you choose not to shoot an unarmed person. You loose five points if you take too long and don’t either shoot or don’t shoot an unarmed person, but it is a whopping -50 points if you dither over an armed person, and you get the friendly message, you’re dead. If you shoot an armed person, you get ten points, and if you shoot an unarmed person, you loose between twenty and forty points.

The Game, Again

The game begins with a practice round. It’ll tell you when its done, so just keep shooting or not shooting until then. You get a series of three to five pictures of landscapes both urban and country before you get a person Photoshopped into one of the pictures. That person is either armed or not but is always holding something. After you shoot or don’t shoot, you get another series of three to five landscapes. Expect to spend about ten to fifteen minutes playing the game.

Once you’re done,  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

My Take Aways

I was disappointed that by the end it did not give a break down of whether I was a scum-sucking racist preferring to shoot unarmed black men over all else or an angelic race ally refusing to shoot unarmed black men. Here are my other take aways:

  • I may have a wee bit of an implicit bias just judging by how often I shot the poor kid who was kneeling facing my right-his left and holding a black wallet in his left hand. I must’ve shot him three times. In my defense, I shot the white guy who was standing on the left side of the screen holding a cell phone in his right hand at least twice.
  • Cell phone and wallet manufacturers might could take a lesson from this game and make their products more easily and readily distinguishable from guns. I tell you, when the object is black, it is easy to confuse it with a gun.
  • The people standing at the sides with an object in their outside hand were the hardest to figure out. It must be a peripheral vision thing.
  • The good guy or teacher with a gun thing really takes a big hit. It is damn hard to decide who and what to shoot even without the necessity of aiming and only having one possible target in your field of vision. Seriously, you have a second to make your choice. If your field of vision were crowded with panicking, fleeing, hiding people, and someone was shooting at you, you’d be hard pressed not to just empty your clip at everything that moved. Christ, the idea that in a very confused situation, anyone without extensive training is going to do anything besides cause more death and misery is just a pipe dream.
  • If the object is obscured by blending into something into the background, you’re likely to shoot, too. Anything that interferes with your ability to see the outline of the gun clearly, is likely to cause you to shoot an unarmed person: appearing on the periphery of the screen, holding the object even further towards the periphery (left, right, up, or down), blending with the background, two hands extended, two objects held.