Correcting
I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and the section on unconscious racial bias caught my eye. Gladwell took the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT) on race and found that despite his conscious assumption that races were equal, his unconscious had other ideas, caught deeper. He, like the vast majority of Westeners who take the test, found that it was easier and quicker to associate African-Americans with negative words than whites. This came as a great surprise to Gladwell, a self-professed liberal who happens to be half-Jamaican. You can do the test here.
There are a number of other association tests you can do, which prove that people are more prejudiced than they would like to think. People tend to be prejudiced against fat people, assume that women are linked to homes over careers, choose white over black people and straight over gay.
Gladwell's account of unconscious racism and negative stereotyping made me think about political correctness. The IAT test shows people are more prejudiced than they think, influenced by the dominant culture, media, socialisation, pre-existing stereotypes and the remnants of historical evils like slavery, manifesting in lower wages/lifespans/expectations for black Americans. But after the Nazis took eugenics and racial science to their logical extreme, the pendulum of public acceptability swung the other way, eventually producing political correctness as a means to police the thought of individuals and attempt to rectify unconscious stereotypes.
It seems to me that the reason political correctness has encountered such resistance is not only the thinly-veiled resentment of open bigots, misogynists and homophobes, but also that it patently attacks the end result of something most of us have very little control over. Correcting thought to the accepted norm does not touch the deeply buried biases we have accumulated and built over a lifetime and does nothing to address the socio-economic imbalances that further the existing negative stereotypes. Political correctness seems to be a New Labour-styled solution to entrenched inequality: lip service over hard work; gloss over substance.
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Also, this is an amusing headline.
I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and the section on unconscious racial bias caught my eye. Gladwell took the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT) on race and found that despite his conscious assumption that races were equal, his unconscious had other ideas, caught deeper. He, like the vast majority of Westeners who take the test, found that it was easier and quicker to associate African-Americans with negative words than whites. This came as a great surprise to Gladwell, a self-professed liberal who happens to be half-Jamaican. You can do the test here.
There are a number of other association tests you can do, which prove that people are more prejudiced than they would like to think. People tend to be prejudiced against fat people, assume that women are linked to homes over careers, choose white over black people and straight over gay.
Gladwell's account of unconscious racism and negative stereotyping made me think about political correctness. The IAT test shows people are more prejudiced than they think, influenced by the dominant culture, media, socialisation, pre-existing stereotypes and the remnants of historical evils like slavery, manifesting in lower wages/lifespans/expectations for black Americans. But after the Nazis took eugenics and racial science to their logical extreme, the pendulum of public acceptability swung the other way, eventually producing political correctness as a means to police the thought of individuals and attempt to rectify unconscious stereotypes.
It seems to me that the reason political correctness has encountered such resistance is not only the thinly-veiled resentment of open bigots, misogynists and homophobes, but also that it patently attacks the end result of something most of us have very little control over. Correcting thought to the accepted norm does not touch the deeply buried biases we have accumulated and built over a lifetime and does nothing to address the socio-economic imbalances that further the existing negative stereotypes. Political correctness seems to be a New Labour-styled solution to entrenched inequality: lip service over hard work; gloss over substance.
----
Also, this is an amusing headline.
posted by Doug @ 4/30/2006 03:00:00 pm
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