First we were told that “diversity” reduces binge drinking (and here).
Now we’re told that racism makes you stupid. (Link via Howard Bashman)
That is the message of an unusual and striking new series of experiments conducted at Dartmouth College, with the help of brain-imaging equipment and a crew of undergraduate volunteers.
According to the findings, the more biased people are, the more their brain power is taxed by contact with someone of another race, as they struggle not to say or do anything offensive. The effect is so strong, the team found, that even a five-minute conversation with a black person left some of the white subjects unable to perform well on a test of cognitive ability.
Gee, I’d say they need a drink, but we know now that contact with blacks causes whites to drink less.
Addendum – If this study is accurate, you’d think that contact with blacks would make whites (most of whom are racist to one degree or another, according to multicultural theory) want to drink more, not less.
Integrationists, advocates of busing, etc., have long been criticized for appearing to assume that blacks learn better when exposed to whites, just as diversiphiles assume that whites learn better when exposed to blacks, but this is the first argument I’ve heard that being exposed to blacks actually makes whites dumber.
I haven’t read the study, but I wonder if it anwers the suspicion that racists are stupid to begin with, that exposure to blacks merely reveals their stupidity and doesn’t cause it.
This is neo-phrenology.
This is science? I am not amused.
This article is so outrageous that I hardly know where to begin fisking it.
Richeson and her colleagues began by recruiting a group of white Dartmouth undergraduates and asked them to perform an “Implicit Association Test,” a test that is widely used to measure unconscious racial bias.
Just think of the uses this test could be put to. Companies can test all of their employees and fire all the ones who are prejudiced. Universities can remove all prejudiced students from campus. We can also eliminate all those “biased” questions from the SAT. All we have to do is test each person who develop the SAT test questions and fire the ones who are biased.
What! Are they serious? They have a method of measuring unconscious racial bias? This is the biggest piece of garbage I have heard in a long time. Compared to this, astrology is a hard science.
This, Richeson said, is a sign the brain is struggling not to think inappropriate thoughts.
I am sure that after we send them to a reeducation camp they will no longer think inappropriate thoughts. Or better that that, we can put a collar around the person’s neck and every time that section of the brain activates we could give the person an electric shock. Sort of like an invisible fence for bigots.
it is part of a nascent movement to study the neurological basis of social phenomena, in particular racism. One study, by Elizabeth A. Phelps at New York University, found that biased people are more likely to have greater activity in their amygdala, a portion of the brain associated with negative emotions like fear, when shown the picture of a black person they don’t know.
Were these the same type of people that practiced the “science” of phrenology? There is nothing new about this type of research. In the past they used it to eliminate “inferior” people. Now we are going to use it to eliminate “prejudiced” people. What a brave new world we live in.
Another, conducted by Stanford’s Gabrieli and other scientists, showed that the brains of white people process white and black faces differently from the moment they see them.
You notice that they only study the brains of WHITE people. Where is the study of non-Whites. Oh, excuse me. I forgot for a moment (give me another electric shock please), only white people can be prejudiced.
This is truly frightening if this is what passes for research nowadays. In the old Soviet Union they sent dissidents to mental institutions. It actual made perfect sense. You must have been crazy if you were not happy in the workers’ paradise. Now we can send people to reeducation camps to remove their inappropriate thoughts. After all who could be against eliminating prejudice from society?