By Daniel Payne
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
One of the more pervasive assumptions of modern American
society, particularly in my generation, is the notion that “everyone is
racist,” “society” has made everyone racist, and—most importantly—much of this
racism is “implicit” or “subconscious,” something that isn’t directly
observable but nonetheless real.
“They’ve done tests,” people insist. “These tests show
that you are more likely to have positive responses towards white faces and
negative responses towards black faces. It’s been proven by science. You’re
probably racist, too, even if you deny it.”
These “tests” have constituted a critical cornerstone of
the modern progressive view of racism: where no actual racial animus can be
found, liberals have often resorted to accusations of “unconscious” racism,
pointing to alleged research that shows an alleged subliminal streak of racism
deep within the hearts of us all.
What is most convenient about these accusations is that
they cannot readily be denied. If someone accuses you, without any specific
evidence, of harboring deep-seated racist tendencies, how can you possibly deny
it and prove yourself bigotry-free? You can’t, which is the point.
Well. There are indications that these “tests,” far from
being reliable or determinative of any kind of racial animus, are
actually—what’s the word?— bunk.
The Weakness of
the Implicit Bias Test
The first indication came earlier this year at New York Magazine, in the form of a
massive, 13,000-word essay that examines the ubiquitous racism-detecting
examination: the “implicit association test” (IAT). According to author Jesse
Singal, research shows the test “is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates
far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’
behavior.” Years of sensational coverage has made this test out to be a
foolproof predictor of racist belief. The evidence strongly suggests otherwise.
Over at Vox recently, German Lopez further examined the
IAT’s shortcomings. His own experience with this device would be fantastically
humorous if it were not so sad. He took the test three different times, each
with a different result. One showed him “free of racism, even at the
subconscious level,” one showed him with “a slight automatic preference for
white people,” and one more showed him with another
“slight automatic preference—only now it was in favor of black people.”
“At this point,” he writes, “I was at a loss as to what
this test was telling me. Should I consider the average of my three results,
essentially showing I had no bias at all? Or should I have used the latest
result? Was this test even worth taking seriously, or was it bullsh-t?”
Meditate on the cosmic absurdity of this situation: a
grown man struggling to determine whether he is a bigot based on the results of
an Internet test. It is hard to tell if this is modern liberalism at its peak,
or at its nadir. Maybe both.
The Test Doesn’t
Work Individually Or Collectively
Lopez’s investigation turns up solid evidence to suggest
this test is, indeed, bullsh-t. Lopez quotes Calvin Lai, the director of the
Implicit Project, who claims: “[The test] can predict things in the aggregate,
but it cannot predict behavior at the level of an individual.” He has only
taken the test once.
But as University of Connecticut researcher Hart Blanton
once pointed out, this is a self-defeating distinction: “If you’re not willing
to say what the positive [IAT score] means at the individual level,” he told New York Magazine, “you have no idea
what it means at the aggregate level. … If I’m willing to give 100 kids an IQ
test, and not willing to say what an individual kid’s score means, how can I
then say 75 percent of them are geniuses, or are learning disabled?”
This is eminently true. But perhaps the most shocking
aspect of the IAT is not that it is ineffective both individually and
collectively, it’s that, according to its creators, it doesn’t even measure racism. Lopez quotes Tony Greenwald,
another co-creator of the test, who says: “I and my colleagues and
collaborators do not call the IAT results a measure of implicit prejudice [or]
implicit racism…Racism and prejudice are explicit attitudes with components of
hostility or negative animus toward a group. The IAT doesn’t even begin to
measure something like that.”
Got that? The test that for years has been used to
justify countless accusations of racism isn’t
even designed to qualify racism. This, mind you, coming from the creators of the test!
This Test Has
Already Taught Americans a Lie
These revelations are bad enough. More disturbing still
that the implicit-association test has been around for some time, and has
become a pop culture touchstone—profiled, as Lopez points out, in books like
Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” and newspapers like the New York Times, among countless other places. The test’s supposed
ability to identity unconscious racism in individual test-takers has become one
of those things that “everyone knows.” It has been this way for years.
Yet for all this time the test creators have apparently
not mounted any significant effort to dissuade the public of these wrong
assumptions. It would have taken nothing more than a jointly authored op-ed in
the opinion pages of the Times or the
Washington Post to set the record
straight. Nothing of the sort seems to have been done.
More disturbingly, it seems as if many others aren’t
willing to push against the test’s assumptions. They may be too afraid. When
Lopez reached out to researcher Blanton for additional comment, Blanton
refused: “I’m mostly trying to extricate myself from that debate,” he said.
“It’s genuinely unpleasant.”
The lesson is clear: progressive racial politics, which
reach almost a fever pitch in colleges and academic circles, may frighten
dissenters into silence. Indeed, in the course of being interviewed for Singal’s
New York piece, IAT co-creator
Mahzarin Banaji claimed that at least a few critics of the test are simply
“aggrieved individuals who think that Black people have it easy in American
society.” Would you want to have that accusation lobbed against you, especially
in the ultra-liberal, hyper-sensitive world of academia?
Re-Examine Social
Stigmas Based on Predicted Animus
What does all of this suggest? Simply put, that much of
the liberal narrative surrounding race may be total nonsense. Of course that doesn’t
mean racism doesn’t exist, but it does mean we can’t trust this test or the
narrative that everyone or even most people are automatically biased against,
or likely to act out against, individuals with darker skin.
Common sense has always suggested the IAT is not
something we should take very seriously. A silly button-pushing test can’t
possibly plumb the depths of the human heart or even the human subconscious.
But what if, as appears to be the case, the creators of the test themselves subtly indicate that the test
isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? What if we have evidence that dissenting
voices on this topic have been cowed into silence? What are we to make of this?
It is worth honestly examining our society’s presumptions
regarding race and racism, “implicit” or otherwise, and determining whether
these presumptions hold up. There is no real indication that the vast majority
of our academies, much less American progressives, are up to the task; they
have bungled the conversation thus far and show no intention of fixing it. So
perhaps it’s up to the rest of us.
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