Measuring Racism in America

[Flatlander]

Sooo, I posted a link to a study done regarding measuring neural responses in people in an attempt to uncover any supressed predjudicial tendencies.... that was on topic. Anyone care to discuss?

I think that it would be an excellent metric by which to measure racism in our society. I can envision an experiment wherein representative sample groups are gathered and interviewd, perhaps a few times per year, and trends are revealed and documented. Could work, assuming the method is reasonably accurate.

 

[Tgace]

Excellent paper on Affirmative Action from Stanford....

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/

One of the "problems" I have with the program is best summed up here...

Christopher Edley, the White House assistant put in charge of President Clinton's review of affirmative action policy in 1994-95, speaks of how, during the long sessions he and his co-workers put in around the conference table, the discussion of affirmative action kept circling back to the "coal miner's son" question.

Imagine a college admissions committee trying to decide between the white [son] of an Appalachian coal miner's family and the African American son of a successful Pittsburgh neurosurgeon. Why should the black applicant get preference over the white applicant?[68]​

Why, indeed? This is a hard question if one defends affirmative action in terms of compensatory or distributive justice. If directly doing justice is what affirmative action is about, then its mechanisms must be adjusted as best they can to reward individual desert and true merit. The "coal miner's son" example is meant to throw desert in the defender's face: here is affirmative action at work thwarting desert, for surely the coal miner's son -- from the hard scrabble of Harlan County, say -- has lived with far less advantage than the neurosurgeon's son who, we may suppose, has reaped all the advantages of his father's (or mother's) standing. Why should the latter get a preference?

 

[Feisty Mouse]

Interesting problem, Tgace.

I have faced a similar problem with a research program for undergraduates at several universities. Certain programs exist which underpriveleged and underrepresented students can apply for summer fellowships in which they can become research assistants in labs and find out more about biology, psychology, medical sciences, anthropology, etc.

These are great programs, and I think there should be more of them. My concern is thusly: on the application, students checked off if they were a) first-generation college student, b) minority, c) low-income (any or all could be checked off). One summer, I really liked one student's application, who had checked off both "a" and "c". It is my *impression*, however, that she was not accepted to the program, and I was asked to take a different student, because they had checked off "b".

I think all three of those checklist items are important and affect students. That "minority" seemed to win out over both "first-gen" and "low-income" bothered me.

That being said, I still think there is a bias against minorities, all other things being equal.

ETA:

I checked out the link you posted, flatlander. I thought it was pretty intriguing. I think the title, like most titles, is misleading - people are not stupider if it was OK to let their racist attitudes show, one might assume.

Another, conducted by Stanford's Gabrieli and other scientists, showed that the brains of white people process white and black faces differently from the moment they see them.

This study I'd like to read more about - I wonder how it might be different for, say, a black child raised by a white family, or a white child raised by a black family.