Being Racist is Not Your Fault, Prejudice is Subconscious, Say Scientists
Scientists have said that being racist may not be your fault. Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology researchers claim that most people have “built-in” prejudices, which “seeps into the subconscious from modern-day culture.”
Rather than blaming people themselves for being racist, scientists are instead saying that media outlets and even books are to blame for the prejudice.
Paul Verhaeghen who led the study carried out a word association test among volunteers. Some example questions that they were asked were whether the letters g-u-b formed a word, then if the letters g-u-n formed a word. He discovered that people answered faster if they were shown a black face before the letters g-u-n.
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He also measured response times to stereotypical word pairings, such as black-violence. “It suggests that most people associate black people with violence and this seems to be universal,” he said.
The research team then examined a collection of books, newspaper and magazine articles known as the Bound Encoding of the Aggregate Language Environment (BEAGLE), which psychologists believe is a good representation of works that are in the American culture. They discovered that many of the literature contained racist pairings of words, such as black-murder, and that the volunteers responded fastest to these pairings.
“What you have is stuff you’ve picked up, from reading, watching stuff on the internet,” Verhaeghen said.
However, he said: “How people behave towards one another is far more important than how they react instinctively to what they read or watch.”
He continued: “One of the things these findings suggest is that for those of us who, like me, very often feel guilty about these gut reactions you have and you're not supposed to have is those gut reactions are normal and they have very little to do with you. They have more to do with the culture around you. What is more important is your behavior, rather than your gut reaction.”
