The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

The point I was making is that labeling a racist, IMO, should require a conscious action linked to a bias along racial groupings, just like sexism and ageism do as well because it implies so many very negative characteristics that should only be linked to someone making a conscious decision that they hate some race, sex, age, or whatever. I guess I'm arguing how we should go about addressing the underlying problem and I don't agree that classifying someone racist and crucifying them, in the systemic context, is the way to go about making positive change.

I don't think labeling people purely ignorant of these side effects in a directly negative and confrontational way is productive at all, it might instead insight resentment and further entrench these stereotypes.

When you observe an example that was stated above where a hiring person said they "don't look like an engineer" or something to that effect, you may instead ask them to clarify what they mean--force them (politely) to ponder what are those attributes that make someone look like an engineer? What is the stereotyped biased picture they hold in their mind.

Chances are that person just picked up or borrowed a pattern they saw and have nothing consciously against black people or some other race. By pushing someone to consciously identify and quantify those characteristics you bring their biases to light and hopefully a connection quickly clicks and that person now realizes "holy crap, was I stereotyping against that person and not trying to look at it objectively? Did I just unknowingly discriminate against that person based on purely on race?" I've seen this happen many time when people are made aware of their biases and I've seen people genuinely try to change as a result.

Some people may require a bit more directed questioning to make these observations and surfacing the stereotype alone won't get you all the way there.

This is how you stamp out these biases: you make people consciously aware of their biases. Once they're aware of the bias, it becomes a conscious act of deciding if they want to reject that bias or continue to adopt it. If they reject the bias, they're probably not what I would call a racist. If they accept the bias, then that's a racist. We're all surrounded by bias and I'd argue there are biases deeply embedded in humans previously used as survival shortcuts that no longer apply or run counter to modern cultures and rules of societies. What matters is how we consciously identify such biases and how we then act on those observations and work to improve ourselves to become less biased, especially when the bias harms others for no good reason.

Yes, and this premise is flawed. You’re thinking of “racism” as one phenomenon weaving together the enslavement of Black people and skepticism about Chinese food. My point is that this is not a useful way to understand what’s happening.

Look at it this way. In Bangladesh, where I’m from, we also have many negative stereotypes of Chinese food. My impression is that such sentiments are common across the sub-continent. But obviously we don’t share what you’re calling “America’s lasting, endemic racism.” What you’re calling anti-Chinese racism is an expression of the xenophobia that exists in nearly every human society.

Anti-Black racism in America is completely different. It didn’t cause slavery. It was constructed to justify slavery and colonization: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/europe.... There is a superficial similarity, insofar both involves in-group versus out-group antagonism. But anti-Black racism isn’t just one expression of the ordinary out-group antagonism that exists all over the world. It’s something quite distinct.

The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]

> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.

The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]

> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.

Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]

[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...

[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...