“He’s a racist. So are you. So am I.”

Blogging is kind of like that time in a conversation with a vague acquaintance when you still have two more blocks to walk together and you’re searching for anything interesting to bring up. Except since the whole class is presumably reading these, it’s like walking with 25 vague acquaintances. So gather ‘round, here is my interesting tidbit for today:

The Michael Richards stuff is pretty sad, and generally I haven’t been seeking out articles about it because it all seems self-evident given the basic run-down of what happened. But the title of this article (same as the title of this post, at least in the physical LA Times) caught my attention.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/
la-oe-shermer24nov24,1,5226012.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Michael Shermer sends readers to Harvard scientists’ Implicit Association Test, which has suggested that Americans of all races associate “good” with European Americans because of ubiquitous cultural stereotypes. The same test also shows that most Americans prefer young to old, thin to fat, and straight to gay, and we prefer our women to be family-oriented liberal artists, and our men to be career-oriented scientists. Michael Shermer is convinced that this test will prove all of us racists, and I tend to agree with him (though he goes overboard when he says we should “thank him for having the courage to confess in public what far too many of us still harbor in private, often in our unconscious minds”). The test is here:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

It would be interesting to test whether similar associations also exist in cultures less pervaded by western media – whether mass media presents individuals with more homogenous perspectives on the world, or more diverse ideas of beauty and good guy/bad guy (/girl) stereotypes.