Another “We’re All Racist!” Study, With A Faux-Lincoln Gloss From Time

Time Magazine celebrates yet another study arguing that we’re all racist, that if we think we’re not racist we’re wrong, that our efforts to be tolerant crash inexorably against the rocks of our deeply “ingrained” racial biases.

Here’s the abstract of the study from Science:

Contemporary race relations are marked by an apparent paradox: Overt prejudice is strongly condemned, yet acts of blatant racism still frequently occur. We propose that one reason for this inconsistency is that people misunderstand how they would feel and behave after witnessing racism. The present research demonstrates that although people predicted that they would be very upset by a racist act, when people actually experienced this event they showed relatively little emotional distress. Furthermore, people overestimated the degree to which a racist comment would provoke social rejection of the racist. These findings suggest that racism may persevere in part because people who anticipate feeling upset and believe that they will take action may actually respond with indifference when faced with an act of racism.

In other (but fewer) words, racism continues because people believe they are more upset by racism than they really are. The authors conclude (why are we not surprised?) that their “results suggest attitudes so deeply ingrained that protective legislation and affirmative action programs are required to overcome them.” Perhaps some future study will reveal exactly how “protective legislation” (like the “protective legislation” for women that an earlier generation of feminists angrily rejected) and “affirmative action” can “overcome” deeply ingrained racist attitudes.

Read the study in Science if you have a subscription; read the discussion in Time (linked above) if you don’t. Veteran readers of DISCRIMINATIONS will know (and new readers will not be surprised to hear) that I’ve never been impressed by this style of morally pretentious social science whose purpose is to confirm the political biases of its authors, and this one strikes me as even weaker than most.

The study, by researchers at Yale University and York University in Toronto, involved 120 non-black students who were told they were being recruited for an experiment on team-oriented problem-solving. They were broken into three groups. The members of the first group were individually placed in a room with a black actor and a white actor, both posing as fellow participants in the study, and watched as the black actor slightly bumped the white actor while leaving the room. After the black actor left, the white actor played out one of three scenarios, saying, “I hate it when black people do that,” or “Clumsy n—–,” or nothing at all. None of the people in the two other study groups experienced the interactions directly; one group watched them on videotape and the other simply read about them. (See The Cure for Racism.)

After the incident, students were asked to choose one of the two actors — still posing as fellow participants — for the teamwork assignment. Over 80% of the students who watched a racist exchange on video said they would not work with the white student. Those who read about racist behavior showed a similar aversion, with 75% preferring the black actor as a teammate. Participants in both groups said they were deeply upset by the racist comments.

The same did not hold true for the participants who experienced the racist event firsthand. None intervened to correct or disparage the white actor, nor did they report being upset by his comments when questioned later. In fact, 71% of the students chose the white actor as their partner for the assignment when he made a racist comment; a similar percentage chose the white partner when he did not make a racist comment.

I will leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions about what, if anything, this experiment proves, and especially whether it demonstrates the “impact bias of affective forecasting” trumpeted by the study’s authors. But I can’t move on without noting that the subjects of this experiment weren’t even Americans. They were Canadians.

Finally, unimpressed as I am by this study, I am even more scornful of Time’s treatment of it, in no small part because of its opening paragraph:

Abraham Lincoln concluded his first inaugural address in 1861 by expressing confidence that the “better angels” of the American psyche would one day prevail over racism. But as the country prepares to inaugurate its first black president on Jan. 20, new academic evidence suggests that the demons of unconscious racism still hold startlingly powerful sway.

It is sadly apparent from this paragraph that Eben Harrell, the author of the Time article, knows little or nothing about Lincoln, and probably hasn’t even read his First Inaugural address, an address that, in its own terms and for its own time, was deeply impressive but to the modern sensibility “deeply ingrained” in Time’s writers and most of its readers would be, if they read it, profoundly disturbing. And I’m not even referring to Harrell’s almost humorously ahistorical assertion that Lincoln spoke of “the American psyche” as opposed to his actual reference to “our nature.” Anyone presuming to edit Lincoln’s speech needs to take care to keep anachronistic, alien concepts out of it. In fact, Lincoln’s concluding paragraph is one of the masterpieces of American speech, and is worth reading here in its entirety:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

But Harrell’s real crime here is not merely his obtuse, presentist putting modern jargon in Lincoln’s mouth. It is that he fundamentally misrepresents the meaning of Lincoln’s near-mystical reference to “the better angels of our nature,” a reference that had absolutely nothing to do with “confidence” that we “would one day prevail over racism.”

When Lincoln delivered the First Inaugural on March 4, 1861, the Civil War had not yet begun. Seven states had seceded (four more would do so after the attack on Fort Sumter in April), Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America two weeks earlier, but Lincoln’s speech was a last, eloquent attempt to induce Southerners to turn back from the precipice of separation and war, to remain loyal to the Union.

One can say many things about this speech. Though unsuccessful, it was eloquent (especially that last paragarph); it was a powerful evocation of a mystical nationalism. But one of the things it definitely did not express was a confidence about overcoming racism. Far from it.

In order to persuade Southerners that they had no reason to leave the Union, Lincoln

• reiterated that he had

no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so;

• stated that he had no objection to a proposed Constitutional amendment, already passed by the Congress, “to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States” [i.e., slavery]. Although he believed there was no need for such an amendment because the Constitution already protected slavery where it existed, he emphasized that he had “no objection to [that guarantee] being made express and irrevocable”;

• pledged his support for continuing enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Lincoln’s First Inaugural, for all its eloquence, neither expressed nor implied any more “confidence that the ‘better angels’ of the American psyche would one day prevail over racism” than, well, observing how three groups of white Canadian students respond to a racial slur in their presence, on video, or in a report confirms the ongoing need for “protective legislation” and racial preferences for American blacks.