That whole thing is bullshit, starting by looking only at “African american” and “White american”.
Me is “European white Hispanic” 
Nava, the test was only for Canadians & Americans if I recall correctly. It does not claim to be useful for Europeans. I would guess it concentrates on White vs. Black as that is the largest divide in America. I am not sure if it is in Canada. I’ll leave that to our Canadian members to say.
Despite 60 years* of real progress, the black/white divide still exists.
Jim
- I conjecture the beginning of positive progress to be with the end of WWII and Jackie Robison breaking the baseball color barrier.
“Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between White and Black.”
Good.
Funny, I don’t feel racist.
33 year old white male here who (I used to think) doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.
It seems like the test is like a video game that you would get “better” at if you took it again. I might try again later and see if I can be less racist next time.
I have a moderate preference for white. And I think the test is bullshit. Same as last time, and for the reasons Dr. Who stated above.
Having just taken that test, I think what it revealed more than anything else was my years of training my brain to make automatic button-pushing gestures.
15 years of deliberate speed training in both typing and numeric data entry = my brain automatically imprints on the first pattern for button pushing I learn, and subsequent patterns get borked up until I retrain.
To test I did the damn thing twice.
First time I was strong automatic preference for white (first data pattern was the white/good, black/bad pattern).
Second time I was strong automatic preference for back (first data pattern was the black/good, white/bad pattern).
Imagine that.
The test is an interesting design, but it’s too obvious to be valid. In my case, as someone who is not good at those press-the-button-quickly tests*, I was slow and botching the answers left and right. When they aligned the four categories so that the obvious stereotypes matched, it went much more quickly and accurately because I had fewer things to sort. It’s hard not to implictly know that the stereotype is that _______ implies _______, and so I could group the sets by the obvious relationship. Another, related, problem is that the colors white and black have implications in our society, so that when the colors & races matched in that regard, it made it even easier. (In one experiment, they had accident & ticket-free drivers put single color bumper stickers on their cars. The people with the black bumper stickers got so many tickets after that that some had to be dropped from the experiment in order to keep their licenses!)
I think they did a great job mixing it up, and I’m sure the order of presentation is randomized. I just tend to think that what they’ve got is too obvious to be useful.
*I took one of those for ADHD. Though medicated, I still scored off the charts.
That’s where I got it from.
The whole point of this test is to prove that your subconscious mind operates at a different level from your conscious mind. We have very little control over our subconscious. If you had more negative experiences with black people over white people then your subconscious will warn you when a black person is around. That warning is usually an instinctual uncomfortable feeling. Is it the correct feeling to have in those types of situations? No, but your subconscious is designed to make quick judgments with very little information. It is designed to tell you to fucking move without thinking about it when you see a truck coming toward you. That is because it knows that a truck coming toward you means bad things. If you never had a negative experience with trucks hitting other people, you might not be so afraid because you would get no warning from you subconscious. The information that it picks up is not always accurate, but it served humans well enough over the years (keeping them alive) that natural selection has saw fit to keep it.
It is ok to have a preference for whites in this test because we have very little control over how our subconscious mind processes information. The only real way to get rid of a preference toward white people is to hang out with a group of good black people. If you can’t do that, then you would just have to recognize that your instincts (i.e. what your subconscious tells you) are wrong in this situation.
I got all this information from the book “Blink”. It is a very interesting if you wish to learn more about your subconscious.
Sure, sure. We can all agree that if you are mugged by a young black male, then you might feel nervous around other young black males. That stands to reason. If a dog bites you, you might get nervous around dogs.
However, that seems (to me) to be worlds apart from this test. For example, just because you get that uneasy feeling around black males post-mugging, doesn’t mean that you automatically associate black people with “anger,” or “depression” or whatever.
Moreover this test ignores, or rather preys upon, our societal associations of white = good, black = bad. We have black-hearted people, dark and stormy nights, black ops, etc. We have white lies, and light-hearted people, etc. etc. While it’s certainly an interesting question why these words were adopted — and whether they are racist in some way — it seems to me that this association is tested more than one’s “subconcious racism.”
Finally, I’ll just say (without dragging it out) that I still question the “training” aspect of the test.
All these things put together = a test that does not accurately diagnose what it purports to diagnose. You state that the whole point of the test is to show that the subconcious mind operates a different level than the concious mind. I can buy that conclusion. But this test also purports to prove whether one’s subconcious mind is prejudiced towards certain races — I question its ability to do that. If the point is to show that the subconcious / concious are different, perhaps it would be more appropriate to use something neutral to demonstrate that — something less inflamatory than race.
I would think that this would make a stellar Great Debate. Is it “wrong” to have a subconcious preference towards a particular race? Culturally it might be distasteful if you have a slight preference towards white people or black people. But if that preference doesn’t affect you in your daily interactions - and if you cannot really control it - is it wrong? Will it by necessity show through?
Like I said, the concept of subconcious racism is interesting. Just not sure that test really has much to do with it.
I already found out that I’m a commie because I don’t know squat about baseball (CS thread), there’s no way I’m taking this test and finding out I’m a racist too!!
Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Black American compared to White American.
47 Male Mixed other (but would be considered white)
Strangely enough, I didn’t do so well on the Native American/American test.
Both of these were surprising to me.
I was pissed there were wrong answers. Hell, if I think Laughter is Bad, I should be able to answer that way.
19 year old white Canadian female, got the same result. I’ve never met an African American in the US sense - we only have a handful of black families in my city, and they are all refugees or doctors from Africa that got their degrees back in their home country but came here to practice.
What shocked me was that my reaction time was lagging in the black = good section, so I thought it’d make me more predisposed to white = good, since I responded quicker. I had one mistake at the very start, I mixed up the race of one person (don’t remember which).
Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between White American and Black American.
40 year old white female here.
Like kushiel I was startled that the lag in my reaction time when the categories switched sides didn’t seem to effect the result much.
Am I the only one who received “Your data suggests no preference” or some such response?
I want everyone to F@#k Off equally.
I’m a 24 year old white chick. I don’t know if where I live influences that any, though. Or the fact the past two jobs I’ve held have had a clientele that’s about 80% black.
Well, shit.
24 year old white female here.
You know, we’re friends, and I’m white. Suddenly it all makes sense!
I am a 24 year old white female and the test told me I have an automatic preference for whites over blacks.
That goes against my very strong desire to lick this man, and therefore I think this test is bullshit:
http://home-video.ru/home-video/person/002200/002246.jpg
Well, it is probably bullshit for more reasons that that, but damn he is sexy!