You do not have to be a hardcore crusader for social justice to have heard of the "implicit bias" tests that have been making the rounds for some years now. Perhaps you have even taken one of these tests. If not, be my gues--but unless you want to be deceived into believing a falsehood, you would be better advised to wait until you finish reading this. For those unfamiliar with such tests, the idea is to trick good, upstanding (and generally left-of-center) citizens of these race-obsessed shores into feeling guilty about the fact that, unbeknownst to them, they are, to their absolute horror, unwittingly guilty of what has been elevated to the rank of the single worst offense against humanity, common decency, good morals and social respectability: RACISM!!!
In fact, as you will see if you follow the link above--again, keep resisting the temptation for now--you can use the tests to convict yourself of a whole range of crimes against tolerance: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, fat-shaming and so on, but racism is the most high-profile crime, the one that gets you the harshest sentence in the eyes of the social media commentariat and the one that these tests have been largely disseminated to uncover.
The tests work on a very simple principle: people, even those who do not think they are racist, have an easier time associating positive words and concepts with white people than with black people, and many whites and blacks alike will go faster and make fewer errors when they are asked to group whites with positive concepts and blacks with negative concepts than if the categories are reversed. For a good anti-racist liberal, going through this unpleasant but necessary journey of self-discovery is supposed to be eye-opening, revelatory. It is, in the sage words of the most authoritative purveyor of conventional elite liberal opinion, The New York Times, "A Shocking Test of Bias," revealing that, whether we like it or not, whether intentionally or otherwise, the vast majority of us (70%, including about half of blacks themselves) harbor prejudices against black people.
To aid us in dealing with this devastating revelation, the, um, "social scientists" who put the test together helpfully include this FAQ, which purports to answer questions such as "What can I do about an automatic preference that I would rather not have?", with advice "to seek experiences that could undo or reverse the patterns of experience that could have created the unwanted preference," including "reading and seeing material that opposes the implicit preference," "interacting with people that provide experiences that can counter your preference" and "remain[ing] alert to the existence of the undesired preference."
And, our friendly social scientists add--nudge, nudge--"you may decide to embark on consciously planned actions that can compensate for known unconscious preferences and beliefs." Like a would-be child molester who compensates for his illicit desires by volunteering to help sexually abused youth, you can atone for your crime of implicit racism by performing community service as a maniacal social justice warrior.
Okay, enough absurdity. Let us take a step back from our racial hysteria and ask ourselves what the results of these tests actually mean. The answer, if we give it a bit of thought, is actually quite simple and saves us a lot of needless self-flagellation. In fact, it is so simple that, contra The New York Times,I would have been "shocked" if the test did not show most of us to have an easier time associating negative concepts with blacks than with whites. This is because such an association exists. It is not just in our minds. It is in our world.
Black people, you might have noticed, are disproportionately poor in America. Poor people, you might also have noticed, tend to be and do all sorts of things most of us (legitimately!) do not like. They tend to be less well-educated, less well-dressed, less well-mannered and less well-spoken. They tend to be involved in more crime, alcohol and drugs. They tend to have more broken families, higher unemployment and/or lower-skilled jobs. They tend, disproportionately, to come across like thugs, hoodlums, idlers, bums and all-round losers. This is not necessarily their fault. Poverty just does that to people.
Thus, as I have suggested, the association between black people and all kinds of negative stuff is, as much as we might not like it, out there in the real world. It is in our headsbecause it is real, not because we are racists. We are not racists but realists. We would have to be deaf and blind not to have such an association, both consciously and otherwise. The social justice brigade can drum anti-racism, self-flagellation and self-hatred into white people's heads as much as they want, and it is not going to change the reality we see when the condescending lecture is over and we go outside or online or watch the evening news.
The way to fight racial bias, whether explicit or implicit, is not to browbeat white people for beings bigots or for harboring secret deep-seated racism. That heavy-handed approach breeds little more than anger and alienation and brings about reactionary tremors. What we need to do, instead, is to stop looking at the simplistic fiction of rampant racism and start looking at the complex reality of black poverty. Every immigrant group that once constituted an underclass in America--Irish, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Catholics, Eastern-Europeans, you name it ...--was thought genetically inferior and undoubtedly would have summoned up all those same implicit biases of ours until that group overcame whatever obstacles were out there and got integrated, making it into the middle class and beyond. There is no earthly reason the same exact thing will not happen when black people and white people become regular fixtures in each other's neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families, interacting on equal terms.
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Whatever Ta-Nehisi Coates and all the other polarizing race-baiters now strutting about in in America want you to think, this really is about class, not race, regardless of what it might have been about in earlier moments in our history. Indian and Pakistani Americans have skin color that is often even darker than that of many African-Americans, and yet they do not face anything like the discrimination faced by blacks. Racially, ethnically or religiously marked underclasses are the objects of scorn, contempt and prejudices of all sorts. This has been the case throughout human history all over the world, and it remains true today.
And now, if you still have any urge to scratch the itch, go click on that link. Take the test. Think of it as the frivolous, distracting clickbait that it actually is. All I ask is that if you want to waste your time this way, you also take the opportunity to do something a bit more constructive: give those race-baiting researchers peddling their brand of balkanization a piece of your mind. They have graciously offered you their contact info. Use it. Tell them you do not appreciate the politically motivated cheap trick to which they have resorted to make you think there is something wrong with you. Tell them to stop perpetuating our obsession with the mere surfaces of people and phenomena that only obscures the real underlying issues and makes it harder to have honest conversations stripped of race-based recriminations and unproductive acrimony. Tell them that, having taken their test, you have uncovered a shocking form of implicit bias: their implicit bias against reality.
Alexander Zubatov is a partner in a New York law firm and attended Harvard Law School and Yale University. Alexander's work has appeared in Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Fortnightly Review, nth position, The Montreal Review, New English Review, Culture Wars, Senses of Cinema and the Bright Lights Film Journal. I have also previously had my poem “Cartography: a Jungle Travelogue” win the 1999 top poetry prize offered by the Dudley Review (vol. v), a publication in which I have also had fiction published in 2000 (Dudley Review, vol. vi). Additional poetry of mine is forthcoming in Fjords Review
