[chanakya]

ok. Perhaps that's what he's trying to do. If someone wants more evidence that current racism is a significant force in determining outcomes in society, where should they look for references? What convinced you to move past questioning?

[wpietri]

I'm not an expert here, so I can't say for sure, and the evidence you personally need will depend a lot on you. Perhaps take an online African-American Studies course and go from there?

Just from what I've read, I'd again recommend Loewen's Sundown Towns. He covers the post-Reconstruction past in the early chapters; latter chapters bring it to the present day. The combination of historical data with historical testimony was very convincing to me. The Atlantic has had a number of good articles on this over the last decade. E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=atl...

There's a lot in the employment world. A study that was really eye-opening for me was this one: https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

I also found some manager-focused classes on implicit bias very helpful in seeing how subtle the problem gets. An online course might help you as well. And the Project Implicit tests from Harvard helped me see some of my own implicit biases, which were notably different than my conscious beliefs.

And lastly, I strongly recommend breaking one's personal filter bubble: https://medium.com/@bjmay/how-26-tweets-broke-my-filter-bubb...

That was especially valuable for me in turning academic knowledge of the past into conviction about the present. When I listen to the daily lived experience of other people, it eventually became obvious to me that the same forces were at work. Racism has been diminished, and most racists know they can't speak openly [1]. But the problems have never gone away. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Evolution_(1...

[alentist]

The IAT is pseudoscience.

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-...

[wpietri]

What kind of person haunts 4-day-old articles to post long, off-topic comments like this? And that cites Jesse Singal of all people as some sort of authority?

What I said is that it was helpful to me personally. Which it was, in that it helped me recognize my own implicit anti-black bias. Unless you'd like to prove that the whole concept of unexamined biases is 100% unreal, please move along and let people have a discussion untainted with irrelevant interruptions.