No, this has nothing to do with the collapsing case brought by a stripper against members of the Duke lacrosse team, but instead, a newly alleged rape of a white Duke student by a black male during a party in the fraternity house of Phi Beta Sigma, an African-American fraternity at Duke.

If you haven't heard of it, it may be because the same media, university administrators and Duke faculty that pre-judged the lacrosse players guilty seem to have be purposefully silent, and perhaps for all the wrong reasons.

While I can hope that those who attacked the Lacrosse team have simply learned a lesson on prejudging a case in which the details are far from known, the fact that local media purposefully sanitized accounts of the alleged crime to remove the race of the attacker leads me to beleive we may simply be witnessing a shameful double standard.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:20 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Ace of Spades found an interesting article at Slate over the weekend about a series of online bias tests called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, with the most popular one being the race IAT, to judges your biases (prejudices) based upon timed responses to paired words and images.

It works like this:

In the test's most popular version, the Race IAT, subjects are shown a computer screen and asked to match positive words (love, wonderful, peace) or negative words (evil, horrible, failure) with faces of African-Americans or whites. Their responses are timed. If you tend to associate African-Americans with "bad" concepts, it will take you longer to group black faces with "good" concepts because you perceive them as incompatible. If you're consistently quicker at connecting positive words with whites and slower at connecting positive words with blacks—or quicker at connecting negative words with blacks and slower at connecting negative words with whites—you have an implicit bias for white faces over those of African-Americans. In other words, the time it takes you to pair the faces and words yields an empirical measure of your attitudes. (Click here for a more detailed description of the test.)

The elegance of Banaji's test is that it doesn't let you lie. What's being measured is merely the speed of each response. You might hate the idea of having a bias against African-Americans, but if it takes you significantly longer to group black faces with good concepts, there's no way you can hide it. You can't pretend to connect words and images faster any more than a sprinter can pretend to run faster. And you won't significantly change your score if you deliberately try to slow down your white = good and black = bad pairings.

Banaji, now a social psychologist at Harvard, has found that 88 percent of the white subjects who take her test show some bias against blacks. The majority of all subjects also test anti-gay, anti-elderly, and anti-Arab Muslim. Many people also exhibit bias against their own group: About half of blacks test anti-black; 36 percent of Arab Muslims test anti-Arab Muslim; and 38 percent of gays show an automatic preference for heterosexuals.

Sounds interesting, no? A test that won't let you lie, even to yourself. I'd like to see how CY readers fare on this, so if you have the time (about 10-15 minutes), take the test at this link (follow the link on this page to the "Race IAT."

Then post your age, race, and state where you grew up, along with your results in the comments. I've already taken it, and I'll post a screen capture of my results page tonight.

Also tell me if your results surprised you, or if they were about what you thought they would be.
more...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:58 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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Punxsutawney Phil has emerged from his burrow and predicted and early spring. I can only surmise this means an early end to Chuck Hagel's presidential aspirations.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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