Are you racist? Maybe a little...(take the test)

November 3, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

According to Harvard's Project Implicit I have a slight preference for Arab/Muslim names over "others", a slight preference for darker skin colour over light skin colour, and a moderate preference for white faces over African faces.  OK...so tell me something I don't know.  Most of the people I grew up around were Indo-Trinis, many of them Muslim.  And while we were not Muslim, the extended family was, and there was clear subtext that south Trinidadian Indian Muslims were good people (and mostly were "pumpkin vine" relatives of some sort).

Had I simply taken the black-white face test, I might have been a bit less impressed.  Despite the fact that both my mother and my wife are white, white people - at least American and European ones - are still less familiar to me than are darker-skinned people.

No one should be surprised by the realisation that you react more positively to the type of people who are most familiar to you.  The important thing, I think, is that if you don't want to be a racist, you need to focus on how you treat people, not on how you react to people.  But it also doesn't hurt to become more familiar with people who are different to what you're used to.  After a few years at Michigan State University I realised that I could find a lot of common ground with people from just about anywhere in the world, except China.  (And, to a lesser extent, Korea or Japan.)  They didn't play cricket.  They hadn't grown up on American TV.  And I didn't know too much about China (and that, of course, is their fault!)  Mind you, it wasn't that I had a problem relating to Chinese people, ethnic Chinese - Trinidadian Chinese, or American Chinese - there was plenty of common ground with them. 

The core problem was familiarity.  It didn't help that the only Chinese grad student in ecology was American.  That changed in Oklahoma.  For one, there are more Chinese grad students, especially in ecology.  And I was interacting with them quite frequently.  That changed things.  The more I knew, the more familiar I was with them, the smaller the gap.  In the end, it all boils down to what you're used to.

H/T Hello, Negro, via Greg Laden.

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