For most of my life, I believed the theory that inspired the Avenue Q song, “Everyone’s a little bit racist”.
Then, wondering how racist I was, I took the race test at Project Implicit. I was scared. Was I a little racist? A lot? I didn’t think I was especially racist, but I knew I had been raised “white” in a society that valued “whiteness”—maybe I was more racist than I suspected. All I could do was pray I didn’t have a strong unconscious prejudice for white folks.
The result:
Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American compared to European American.
That startled me, but when my wife and another "white" friend also found they had implicit preferences for African Americans, I realized the notion everyone’s racist is nonsense. Our biases come from our reaction to our culture, not from our culture itself—every culture creates people who want to improve it.
Project Implicit debunked the idea that everyone favors their race:
75-80% of self-identified Whites and Asians show an implicit preference for racial White relative to Black.
Saying everyone is racist is nonsense. Saying three-fourths of the population has some implicit preference for their race might be accurate, but as Project Implicit’s researchers note, an implicit preference may not have a practical effect on the way people live their lives.
More importantly, people may be less racist than Project Implicit implies.
In a series of scathing critiques, some psychologists have argued that this computerized tool, the Implicit Association Test, or I.A.T., has methodological problems and uses arbitrary classifications of bias. If Barack Obama’s victory seemed surprising, these critics say, it’s partly because social scientists helped create the false impression that three-quarters of whites are unconsciously biased against blacks.
Whether Project Implicit’s conclusions are right or its critics are, anyone who thinks everyone's racist has fallen for an unscientific notion promoted by their friends or is projecting on everyone else their recognition of their own racism.
Every test I’ve found rejects the idea that everyone’s racist. Here are two:
“Color Blind or Just Plain Blind?” tells of researchers who "created a situation in the laboratory in which white participants witnessed a staged emergency involving a black or white victim". They found:
When white participants believed that they were the only witness [to an accident] they helped both white and black victims very frequently (over 85 percent of the time) and equivalently. There was no evidence of blatant racism. In contrast, when they thought there were other witnesses, they helped black victims only half as often as white victims (38 percent versus 75 percent).
“The Police Officer's Dilemma” from Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory at the University of Chicago takes a pragmatic approach to uncovering implicit preference. In a videogame shooter scenario, you must distinguish between people of different races. Some are innocent. Some have guns. If you’re too slow to react, you may be killed. If you’re too fast, you may kill innocent people.
My first time through the test, I shot one or two more innocent dark people than pale ones—whether that's statistically insignificant or my encounters with SJ Warriors had made me a bit racist, I don't know. The second time, I shot one or two more innocent pale folks than dark ones. I'm content with the result.