Seeing the film Crash reminded me of an article I read in The Washington Post Magazine back in January. It was about a racial bias test called The Implicit Association Test, which anyone can take online (at the URL below). It measures our automatic associations, matching words, both positive and negative, with images of the faces of black and white folks.
I kept the article and just went to the website to take the test. The results showed that I have a "slight automatic preference for African American relative to White American," which did not surprise me that much. The results might be more surprising for other folks.
I do have to say that the whole process is pretty confusing and I question to what extent plain old muscle memory has to play in this study (being a drummer, I'm very aware of how muscle-memory works--I'd be a terrible drummer if I had to rely on brain memory and my short attention span!). But since this is a test coming out of Harvard, who can question it?
My questions aside, I don't think it would be a bad thing if everyone in the U.S. (particularly in Los Angeles!) took it and discussed the results. It might even be good if it were a requirement for candidates for political office.
Here's the URL so you can take the test:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
Posted by jeb at May 19, 2005 6:45 PM | TrackBack