Implicit Bias: Racial Bogeyman Debunked

Social psychologists and liberals who yearn for evidence that America is a racist nation have been disappointed by the fact that racial prejudice has declined sharply in the U.S., and has done so steadily since the first comprehensive survey was done in 1944.

Very few Americans say they would not vote for a black for president, or that they object to interracial marriage, and virtually nobody says they favor segregation.

So what are people who want to see themselves as social justice warriors, fighting the scourge of racism, going to do?

Simple, they have to find a new way to label people racist. One way to do this is to test them for “implicit bias.” Administered by computer, the Implicit Association Test typically shows that people have a preference for white faces rather than black faces.

The test works by measuring how quickly people can, for instance, associate African-American faces with positive words versus European American faces with those same positive words. In one round of the test, you’re instructed to press a particular key if a positive word like “pleasure” or “wonderful” flashes on the screen and to press that same key if a white face appears. Then, in another round, the program will tell you to press the same key for darker faces and positive words. It tracks how many mistakes you make and measures how quickly you press those keys, right down to fractions of a second. The site also offers tests that measure bias against other groups, including obese people, the disabled, and the elderly, though it’s the race results that tend to dominate the discussion.

Favoring white faces certainly sounds prejudiced, but does it show anything other than the fact that people associate negative things with black people? If so, how do we interpret that?

First, we have to remember that a lot of negative things are empirically associated with black people. Black people are more likely to be poor, to have limited education compared to whites, to be dependent on government assistance, to have been born out of wedlock,  to commit crime, etc.

Not nice thoughts, but the truth. So does the implicit bias test simply mean people know the truth, even if it isn’t politically correct to admit it? That would explain why even liberals who pride themselves on being unbiased and black people themselves show a preference for the white faces.

Does it Relate to Behavior?

But even empirically justified ideas about racial differences are unfair if they lead to people being treated according to the stereotype, rather than their actual individual merits.

It seems, however, that implicit bias has little relationship with how people actually behave. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

But the link between unconscious bias, as measured by the test, and biased behavior has long been debated among scholars, and a new analysis casts doubt on the supposed connection.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard, and the University of Virginia examined 499 studies over 20 years involving 80,859 participants that used the IAT and other, similar measures. They discovered two things: One is that the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought. They also conclude that there is very little evidence that changes in implicit bias have anything to do with changes in a person’s behavior. These findings, they write, “produce a challenge for this area of research.”

That’s putting it mildly. “When you actually look at the evidence we collected, there’s not necessarily strong evidence for the conclusions people have drawn,” says Patrick Forscher, a co-author of the paper, which is currently under review at Psychological Bulletin. The finding that changes in implicit bias don’t lead to changes in behavior, Forscher says, “should be stunning.”

The Cut notes similar research:

Given all this excitement [generated by the IAT], it might feel safe to assume that the IAT really does measure people’s propensity to commit real-world acts of implicit bias against marginalized groups, and that it does so in a dependable, clearly understood way. After all, the test is hosted by Harvard, endorsed and frequently written about by some of the top social psychologists and science journalists in the country, and is currently seen by many as the most sophisticated way to talk about the complicated, fraught subject of race in America.

Unfortunately, none of that is true. A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such. The history of the test suggests it was released to the public and excitedly publicized long before it had been fully validated in the rigorous, careful way normally demanded by the field of psychology. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Harvard shouldn’t be administering the test in its current form, in light of its shortcomings and its potential to mislead people about their own biases. There’s also a case to be made that the IAT went viral not for solid scientific reasons, but simply because it tells us such a simple, pat story about how racism works and can be fixed: that deep down, we’re all a little — or a lot — racist, and that if we measure and study this individual-level racism enough, progress toward equality will ensue.

And the liberal New York Magazine has expressed skepticism.

We can be more blunt about why the test has been so popular. It offered a neat explanation for the situation of black Americans — and one politically correct people find congenial. Facing the truth would require discussing the culture of the black inner city: the number of kids born out of wedlock, the prevalence of crime, schools that are poor in spite of high levels of spending, attitudes hostile to a “straight” life of work and achievement.

That has to be avoided at all costs.

Obama Promotes Racial Discrimination in School Discipline

From the Daily Caller:

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

“African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline,” said the order, titled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence.”

Because of those causes, the report suggests, “over a third of African American students do not graduate from high school on time with a regular high school diploma, and only four percent of African American high school graduates interested in college are college-ready across a range of subjects.”

“What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for, “because school officials will try to level punishments despite groups’ different infraction rates, predicted Hans Bader, a counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is a former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and has sued and represented school districts and colleges in civil-rights cases.

“It is too bad that the president has chosen to set up a new bureaucracy with a focus on one particular racial group, to the exclusion of all others,” said Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity.

“A disproportionate share of crimes are committed by African Americans, and they are disproportionately likely to misbehave in school… [because] more than 7 out of 10 African Americans (72.5 percent) are born out of wedlock… versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites,” he said in a statement to The Daily Caller. Although ” you won’t see it mentioned in the Executive Order… there is an obvious connection between these [marriage] numbers and how each group is doing educationally, economically, criminally,” he said.

The order created a “President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.” It will include senior officials from several federal agencies — including the Departments of Education, Justice and Labor — which have gained increased power over state education policies since 2009.

The progressives campaign for race-based discipline policies also won a victory in Maryland July 24.

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional level of school penalties, regardless of the behavior by members of each group.

The board’s decision requires that “the state’s 24 school systems track data to ensure that minority and special education students are not unduly affected by suspensions, expulsions and other disciplinary measures,” said a July 25 Washington Post report.

“Disparities would have to be reduced within a year and eliminated within three years,” according to the Post.

The state’s new racial policy was welcomed by progressives, including Judith Browne Dianis, a director of the D.C.-based Advancement Project. “Maryland’s proposal is on the cutting edge,” she told the Post.

Dianis’ project is also a law firm that litigates race-related questions, and it gains from laws and regulations that spur race-related legal disputes.

“The combination of overly harsh school policies … has created a ‘schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,’ in which punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior,” claimed the group’s website.

This “is a racial justice crisis, because the students pushed out through harsh discipline are disproportionately students of color,” the group insisted.

The administration had previously advertised its support for the campaign to impose race-based discipline policies.

In February, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that “we’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled.”

“This is, quite simply, unacceptable. … These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed,” he said in his speech, given in Atlanta, Ga.

Holder’s speech did not, however, include any evidence of discrimination toward any individual African-American student. For example, he offered no evidence that school infractions by African-American students prompt stiffer punishments than similar infractions by white, Hispanic or Asian students.

The progressive campaign to impose race-based rules on schools relies on various judges’ decisions, which penalize so-called “disparate impact” in hiring.

According to progressive lawyers, “disparate impact” may occur when companies or state and local governments hire and promote people at rates different from their percentage in the local population.

Because of judges’ decisions, juries can force companies and state agencies — such as city boards that hire police officers and firefighters — to pay heavy financial penalties to plaintiffs, even when hiring policies are recognized as color-blind.

When facing a disparate impact lawsuit, employers have to justify their hiring practices, for example, by showing that the job demands special skills possessed by relatively few members of a racial or ethnic group.

In 1997, however, the Seventh Circuit appeals court barred the practice of racial balancing in school discipline to avoid disparate impact lawsuits, said Bader.

Progressives say the “disparate impact” claims are supported by the 1964 Civil Right Act.

Critics, such as Clegg, say “disparate impact” law is used to trump popular and effective color-blind practices, such as civil-service tests by governments and employment-suitability testing by companies.

Another critic, David Rettig, head of the National Character Education Foundation, told The Daily Caller in February that apparently-disproportionate school discipline practices can be a reflection of local crime reports.

“Outside the walls of the school, how many of these kids are coming from not just dysfunctional homes, but homes that are not supportive of their children?” he told TheDC.

Of course, when it becomes difficult or impossible to discipline black students because of a quota of punishments, who gets hurt?

White students in suburban high schools? No. The vast majority of their students are white, and the black students are likely to be middle class, either because their parents live in the district, or because their parents particularly care about their education and have taken advantage of some transfer program.

So who gets hurt? Students trapped in inner city schools with black student bodies, were faculty and administrators can’t maintain discipline.

On this issue, as on so many others, the race hustlers (who dominate the Obama Administration) are not representing the interests of blacks against whites. They are promoting the interests of thugs and punks against the interests of black students who want to work and achieve and move up in American society.