Reply to Affirmative Action and Race Discussions Should Be Moved to Its Own Forum

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[quote=Anonymous]Correcting the HTML tags that were disabled.

[quote=Anonymous]
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race - I believe a famous Bethesda resident once said that.[/quote]

NP here.  I typically lurk and virtually never respond to comments in the college section since my kids are way younger than that, but this comment caught my eye.

This is a common mantra of the white anti-AA community.  They believe that if you just stop thinking about race, you will automatically create a race-blind society and process.  But unfortunately, that is overly simplistic and only panders to the white majority.  The truth is that after decades and centuries of racial bias, there is no such thing as "all other things being equal."  Attitudes towards race are now inherently biased in favor of the white majority.  You do not counter the subconscious biases of hundreds of years in just a decade or two because you tell people to think differently.  While I do believe that there is a small minority (maybe 10-15%) of people who really do live a race-blind life, I don't think it is anywhere near a large enough sample to assume race-blind processes and procedures yet.  Maybe in my children's lifetime, but definitely won't be in my lifetime.  And for the record, I'm Asian and not African American, so I don't have a strong commitment to the black cause, I just see the subconscious racism that is evident all around us.

There have been multiple cases of people doing "blind" testing to see what people's automatic reaction to race is.   You can find one here:
[url]https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/agg/blindspot/indexrk.htm[/url]
In addition to the expected counting of your answers matching the photo/word, there is also a comparison from the earlier the stage 3-4 tests to the stage 6-7 tests where they see how long it takes to get the answers right.  In general most people can handle the Caucasian/positive vs Black/negative associations significantly faster than the Caucasian/negative vs Black/positive associations.

But the issue here is that while many people in decision making situations seem to be color-blind, there are many more that subconsciously do make race-based decisions.  You can see from the tests where two equal candidates are submitted for college admissions or job applications and the only difference are names with traditional names vs very ethnic names.  The candidates with traditional names get significantly more calls than those with ethnic sounding names. 
[url]http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html[/url]

There are many situations where when given a choice, people choose the person/background they are more comfortable with or more closely resembles their own.  Since there are signficantly more whites in management and hiring positions, that definitely creates a bias in favor of whites.  For many, the subconscious decisions for why they prefer one candidate to another are as critical as the conscious criteria.  It's often hard to make people "stop discriminating based on race".  It's not nearly as obvious as it sounds.[/quote]

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