0 comment Tuesday, October 14, 2014 | admin
I referred to this news release in an earlier post, and I think it's worth examining more closely, although there is nothing here that will surprise any honest observer of human nature:
New study discovers why few people are devoid of racial bias
Why are some individuals not prejudiced? That is the question posed by a provocative new study appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors investigate how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one�s own group.
Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college students who harbored either some or no racial biases. What is remarkable about the findings is that only seven percent did not show any racial bias (as measured by implicit and explicit psychological tests), and that nonbiased individuals differed from biased individuals in a psychologically fundamental way -- they were less likely to form negative affective associations in general.
Now, the fact that 93 percent of people exhibit what is termed 'racial bias' should be an indication that perhaps it is the default orientation of human beings. Of course I notice that the study seems to have included only white college students. Why is that? Were those who conducted the study wary of testing nonwhites, for fear they would exhibit a level of so-called 'bias' just as high as that of whites? Or perhaps even higher?
And are college students a fair cross-representation of the population? I would say it's well-accepted that college students are more likely to be socially liberal, and liberal on racial issues, than people in general. Young people are more thoroughly indoctrinated into the orthodoxies of our time, in which 'racial bias' or 'racism' are condemned more strongly than any other human tendency.
So if the vast majority of college students exhibit some 'bias', then the percentage might be close to 100 percent among the population at large.
If there are any people who even attempt to be 'colorblind', it is white people; every other group feels free to show ethnocentric pride and an open preference for their own group. Yet whites are consistenly berated for their 'racism.'
These kinds of studies, which tend to provoke a spate of articles from the knee-jerk leftist media, following their 'diversity' mandate of course, are so commonplace that it would seem very difficult to elicit the desired hand-wringing and soul-searching with each such article. The recent turmoil in Jena, and the heated discussion it provoked around the country, showed that there is a law of diminishing returns at work with the race-baiting. The race industry, which includes not only the brazen opportunists like Sharpton and Jackson, but the hack journos who crank out 'racism' stories, and the 'social scientists' who cook up these never-ending studies, must notice that they are not getting the results they used to get. They may find that they are creating a backlash, which has been building for some time now. And when I say backlash, I am not alluding to racist thugs roaming the streets, which picture the media like to invoke in any such context, but the phenomenon of average, law-abiding citizens who are simply fed up with the endless accusations and demands. You can only berate, accuse, and guilt-trip people so much before the accused develop a thicker hide, and refuse to respond to the tried-and-true stimuli.
Most Americans, and I think most white citizens of Western countries, have leaned over backwards, and then some, to accommodate hordes of demanding third-worlders, and have all but given their countries away, as I write this. Most Americans in my experience are scrupulously careful to treat everybody fairly, regardless of color or nationality. No; I take that back. That statement is wrong. Many -- if not most -- Americans are NOT fair as regards racial matters; they show a bias in favor of nonwhites. I have witnessed so many situations, in various parts of this country, wherein an employer, a colleague, a clerk in a retail store or restaurant, or whoever, will show open partiality to a person 'of color'. Sometimes this takes the form of excessive and fulsome politeness and friendliness. Sometimes it consists of giving the minority person the benefit of the doubt, or giving them some extra leeway, bending the rules, so as not to be accused of racism or prejudice. In many cases, the person showing favor to the minority or minorities is doing so not simply to avoid complaints (which complaints seem to occur frequently) but because they truly want to be liked by minorities, particularly black people. Black people have been portrayed in our entertainment and news media for decades in a very flattering fashion, with the result that some whites believe blacks (and to a lesser extent, Mexicans) to be our moral betters: they are the victims, we are the victimizers. Many people would rather identify with the righteous victims than with the wicked oppressors. So there are many white people, especially those whose contact with other races has been minimal or casual, who idealize and romanticize them. On some of the tabloid talk-shows back in the 90s, the guests were white people who dated blacks exclusively, and emulated their styles, speech, and behavior. We see this phenomenon mostly among young people who are searching for an identity, but even among some more mature people.
And we have the phenomenon of whites who will take the side of illegal aliens in demonstrations, to the extent of committing violence against their fellow white Americans, such is the strength of their identification with 'others.'
In all my travels in this country, from Hawaii to the West Coast to the South to the Northeast, I can say I have never seen an instance of outright racial 'hatred' on the part of whites. I have, however, seen such racial hatred directed toward whites: name-calling, threats, verbal abuse, insults, cruel 'jokes', crimes committed against them.
Where are the studies on non-white 'racism' toward whites? Or towards other non-whites, for that matter? If there is serious racial conflict or violence in this country, it seems more likely to be black vs. Hispanic, or either of those groups against whites. Some people are surprised when I mention the black vs. Hispanic riots that have happened in California and elsewhere; the media don't cover these things much. If the violence was white-on-black or on Hispanic, you can be sure it would be the top of the news, and CNN would be running specials about white racism -- which, come to think of it, they do anyway.
Yet according to the psychologists and the media and the government, the real threat is some nebulous 'extreme right' white groups out there, despite the evidence that there is any such organized threat.
But meanwhile, back to the psychobabble:
The results suggest that "whether someone is prejudiced or not is linked to their cognitive propensity to resist negative affective conditioning," according to the authors. Thus, reducing prejudice may require more than simply adopting egalitarian values. Instead, such change may require reconditioning of the negative associations that people hold.
"Just as it is difficult to change visceral reactions to aversive foods (e.g., lima beans) through sheer force of will," writes Livingston, "it may also be difficult to change visceral attitudes toward racial groups by acknowledging that prejudice is wrong and wanting to change." The authors argue that although negative affect cannot be reduced by reason alone, it could be reconditioned through positive interpersonal experiences or exposure to more positive images of Blacks in the media.''
[Emphasis mine]
This all sounds ominous: you can bet that we will be subjected to even more attempts at 'reconditioning' us 'through positive interpersonal experiences' -- now how can they arrange that? Our experiences out there in the real world militate against the rosy rainbow world the politically correct left tries to create. They can't give people 'positive interpersonal experiences' but they can arrange 'exposure to more positive images of Blacks in the media.'
Actually, I don't know if it is possible to create 'more positive images of Blacks in the media.' We already have them in every possible positive role, portrayed in a glowing light. Blacks are always judges, or savvy, streetwise police detectives, or computer experts, star athletes, all-around sages and wise men and women, doctors. They are always cool, hip, funny, smart, witty, confident, in control. So superior to awkward, nerdish whitey.
Blacks are even being depicted in situations in which they almost never were found in reality, such as in cowboy roles. There might have been a handful of black cowboys, somewhere, but they were not a common sight. And then Hollywood, in some of the most absurd casting, puts blacks into settings like medieval England: Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood, for example. There must be some unwritten law that blacks must appear in settings where they never existed in real life. But then I suppose the liberal answer will be to rewrite history and miseducate more young people into believing that there WERE blacks aplenty in medieval England, even hanging out with Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest. I don't doubt that Trevor Phillips' proposed 're-weaving the tapestry of history' will put blacks in medieval England. There have already been absurd claims by Afrocentrists that the Black Prince was actually a black man.
Nowadays, too, Moslems are gaining clout so that terrorists in movies are more likely to be neo-Nazis than Islamic jihadists. I suppose Mexicans are the next group who will claim their 'right' to be portrayed with haloes. We've seen this with the Latino demand to be included in Ken Burns' recent documentary on World War II; the Hispanics claim that they played a much bigger part in the War than they were given credit for, even though they constitued less than 2 percent back then.
As usual, we will give in and humor them in their childish demands, at the expense of our own people's accomplishments. When we are finished redacting the history books to make everybody else feel good, regardless of their actual accomplishments, we will have been reduced to invisibility or insignificance.
But beware of more politically correct 'reconditioning' in our media; they have to 'cure' us of our stubborn 'racism'.
I think these utopian social engineers will find, though, that their conditioning may be backfiring on them, too. Speaking for myself, and others I talk to, people notice this heavy-handed propaganda. It turns people off. It galvanizes us, in some cases, to resist their lies. We are not all so ignorant of history or so oblivious to what we see every day out there in the real world that we are easy marks for their manipulations.
New study discovers why few people are devoid of racial bias
Why are some individuals not prejudiced? That is the question posed by a provocative new study appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors investigate how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one�s own group.
Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college students who harbored either some or no racial biases. What is remarkable about the findings is that only seven percent did not show any racial bias (as measured by implicit and explicit psychological tests), and that nonbiased individuals differed from biased individuals in a psychologically fundamental way -- they were less likely to form negative affective associations in general.
Now, the fact that 93 percent of people exhibit what is termed 'racial bias' should be an indication that perhaps it is the default orientation of human beings. Of course I notice that the study seems to have included only white college students. Why is that? Were those who conducted the study wary of testing nonwhites, for fear they would exhibit a level of so-called 'bias' just as high as that of whites? Or perhaps even higher?
And are college students a fair cross-representation of the population? I would say it's well-accepted that college students are more likely to be socially liberal, and liberal on racial issues, than people in general. Young people are more thoroughly indoctrinated into the orthodoxies of our time, in which 'racial bias' or 'racism' are condemned more strongly than any other human tendency.
So if the vast majority of college students exhibit some 'bias', then the percentage might be close to 100 percent among the population at large.
If there are any people who even attempt to be 'colorblind', it is white people; every other group feels free to show ethnocentric pride and an open preference for their own group. Yet whites are consistenly berated for their 'racism.'
These kinds of studies, which tend to provoke a spate of articles from the knee-jerk leftist media, following their 'diversity' mandate of course, are so commonplace that it would seem very difficult to elicit the desired hand-wringing and soul-searching with each such article. The recent turmoil in Jena, and the heated discussion it provoked around the country, showed that there is a law of diminishing returns at work with the race-baiting. The race industry, which includes not only the brazen opportunists like Sharpton and Jackson, but the hack journos who crank out 'racism' stories, and the 'social scientists' who cook up these never-ending studies, must notice that they are not getting the results they used to get. They may find that they are creating a backlash, which has been building for some time now. And when I say backlash, I am not alluding to racist thugs roaming the streets, which picture the media like to invoke in any such context, but the phenomenon of average, law-abiding citizens who are simply fed up with the endless accusations and demands. You can only berate, accuse, and guilt-trip people so much before the accused develop a thicker hide, and refuse to respond to the tried-and-true stimuli.
Most Americans, and I think most white citizens of Western countries, have leaned over backwards, and then some, to accommodate hordes of demanding third-worlders, and have all but given their countries away, as I write this. Most Americans in my experience are scrupulously careful to treat everybody fairly, regardless of color or nationality. No; I take that back. That statement is wrong. Many -- if not most -- Americans are NOT fair as regards racial matters; they show a bias in favor of nonwhites. I have witnessed so many situations, in various parts of this country, wherein an employer, a colleague, a clerk in a retail store or restaurant, or whoever, will show open partiality to a person 'of color'. Sometimes this takes the form of excessive and fulsome politeness and friendliness. Sometimes it consists of giving the minority person the benefit of the doubt, or giving them some extra leeway, bending the rules, so as not to be accused of racism or prejudice. In many cases, the person showing favor to the minority or minorities is doing so not simply to avoid complaints (which complaints seem to occur frequently) but because they truly want to be liked by minorities, particularly black people. Black people have been portrayed in our entertainment and news media for decades in a very flattering fashion, with the result that some whites believe blacks (and to a lesser extent, Mexicans) to be our moral betters: they are the victims, we are the victimizers. Many people would rather identify with the righteous victims than with the wicked oppressors. So there are many white people, especially those whose contact with other races has been minimal or casual, who idealize and romanticize them. On some of the tabloid talk-shows back in the 90s, the guests were white people who dated blacks exclusively, and emulated their styles, speech, and behavior. We see this phenomenon mostly among young people who are searching for an identity, but even among some more mature people.
And we have the phenomenon of whites who will take the side of illegal aliens in demonstrations, to the extent of committing violence against their fellow white Americans, such is the strength of their identification with 'others.'
In all my travels in this country, from Hawaii to the West Coast to the South to the Northeast, I can say I have never seen an instance of outright racial 'hatred' on the part of whites. I have, however, seen such racial hatred directed toward whites: name-calling, threats, verbal abuse, insults, cruel 'jokes', crimes committed against them.
Where are the studies on non-white 'racism' toward whites? Or towards other non-whites, for that matter? If there is serious racial conflict or violence in this country, it seems more likely to be black vs. Hispanic, or either of those groups against whites. Some people are surprised when I mention the black vs. Hispanic riots that have happened in California and elsewhere; the media don't cover these things much. If the violence was white-on-black or on Hispanic, you can be sure it would be the top of the news, and CNN would be running specials about white racism -- which, come to think of it, they do anyway.
Yet according to the psychologists and the media and the government, the real threat is some nebulous 'extreme right' white groups out there, despite the evidence that there is any such organized threat.
But meanwhile, back to the psychobabble:
The results suggest that "whether someone is prejudiced or not is linked to their cognitive propensity to resist negative affective conditioning," according to the authors. Thus, reducing prejudice may require more than simply adopting egalitarian values. Instead, such change may require reconditioning of the negative associations that people hold.
"Just as it is difficult to change visceral reactions to aversive foods (e.g., lima beans) through sheer force of will," writes Livingston, "it may also be difficult to change visceral attitudes toward racial groups by acknowledging that prejudice is wrong and wanting to change." The authors argue that although negative affect cannot be reduced by reason alone, it could be reconditioned through positive interpersonal experiences or exposure to more positive images of Blacks in the media.''
[Emphasis mine]
This all sounds ominous: you can bet that we will be subjected to even more attempts at 'reconditioning' us 'through positive interpersonal experiences' -- now how can they arrange that? Our experiences out there in the real world militate against the rosy rainbow world the politically correct left tries to create. They can't give people 'positive interpersonal experiences' but they can arrange 'exposure to more positive images of Blacks in the media.'
Actually, I don't know if it is possible to create 'more positive images of Blacks in the media.' We already have them in every possible positive role, portrayed in a glowing light. Blacks are always judges, or savvy, streetwise police detectives, or computer experts, star athletes, all-around sages and wise men and women, doctors. They are always cool, hip, funny, smart, witty, confident, in control. So superior to awkward, nerdish whitey.
Blacks are even being depicted in situations in which they almost never were found in reality, such as in cowboy roles. There might have been a handful of black cowboys, somewhere, but they were not a common sight. And then Hollywood, in some of the most absurd casting, puts blacks into settings like medieval England: Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood, for example. There must be some unwritten law that blacks must appear in settings where they never existed in real life. But then I suppose the liberal answer will be to rewrite history and miseducate more young people into believing that there WERE blacks aplenty in medieval England, even hanging out with Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest. I don't doubt that Trevor Phillips' proposed 're-weaving the tapestry of history' will put blacks in medieval England. There have already been absurd claims by Afrocentrists that the Black Prince was actually a black man.
Nowadays, too, Moslems are gaining clout so that terrorists in movies are more likely to be neo-Nazis than Islamic jihadists. I suppose Mexicans are the next group who will claim their 'right' to be portrayed with haloes. We've seen this with the Latino demand to be included in Ken Burns' recent documentary on World War II; the Hispanics claim that they played a much bigger part in the War than they were given credit for, even though they constitued less than 2 percent back then.
As usual, we will give in and humor them in their childish demands, at the expense of our own people's accomplishments. When we are finished redacting the history books to make everybody else feel good, regardless of their actual accomplishments, we will have been reduced to invisibility or insignificance.
But beware of more politically correct 'reconditioning' in our media; they have to 'cure' us of our stubborn 'racism'.
I think these utopian social engineers will find, though, that their conditioning may be backfiring on them, too. Speaking for myself, and others I talk to, people notice this heavy-handed propaganda. It turns people off. It galvanizes us, in some cases, to resist their lies. We are not all so ignorant of history or so oblivious to what we see every day out there in the real world that we are easy marks for their manipulations.
Labels: Cultural Marxism, Media Bias, Political Correctness, Psychology, Revisionism