Talk About Overstating the Obvious.......Black Individuality Might Cure Racism.....Duh!

While perusing the Wired site (by way of Black Voices), I came across a shocking revelation-racism aimed toward those of a darker hue might actually be ameliorated if they could only be viewed as individuals. Have you guys heard of such an absurd proposition? Okay, perhaps I'm overdoing the facetious indignation but really....just how easy is it for a research team to garner a government grant these days? I think this might be the next order of business that President Obama may need to look into-government waste. And I readily admit that Mr. Starks has always pushed (along side noted professor of psychiatry, Dr. Alvin Poussaint) the notion that racism is truly a mental disorder.

Ironically, one of the main reasons why we developed Afronerd (and the companion internet podcast) was to combat the debilitating monolithic depiction that all persons of color are on the same page. Our media almost preternaturally shows Whites in a myriad of positions, however in the case of minorities-not so much. But with a different political image on the horizon (as alluded to in a previous entry), it will be unavoidable to not see Black people accurately. At least one can dream. Sometimes, I think the minstrels are winning.....just an observation. But let's take a look at snippet from the Wired piece that puts forth the hypothesis of Black individualism:

As the first African-American president in United States history takes office, researchers have shown that it may be possible to scientifically reduce racial bias.

After being trained to distinguish between similar black male faces, Caucasian test subjects showed greater racial tolerance on a test designed to to measure unconscious bias.

The results are still preliminary, have yet to be replicated, and the real-world effects of reducing bias in a controlled laboratory setting are not clear. But for all those caveats, the findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that science can battle racism.

"Any time you can get people to treat people as individuals, you reduce the effect of stereotypes," said Brown University cognitive scientist Michael Tarr. "It won't solve racism, but it could have profound real-world effects."

Tarr's findings overlap with other results suggesting that the key to reducing racial bias — at least in a short-term, laboratory setting — is exposure to people in personalized ways that challenge stereotypes. This is hardly a new notion: it's the essence of the contact hypothesis, formulated in the mid-20th century and the basis of integrated schooling.

But unlike carefully structured social mixing, with precisely controlled conditions of interdependence and equality, Tarr and others raise the possibility of a a lab-based shortcut to bias reduction.

Underpinning this research is the Implicit Association Test, used by psychologists to measure deep-rooted, often unconscious biases. During the test, subjects are measured on the time it takes to associate faces with positive or negative words. If, for example, someone more quickly associates negative words with minority rather than white faces, they're likely to have a bias — a bias that translates into a tendency to hire same-race workers, choose same-race partners, and find minority defendants guilty.

If the bias can be changed, perhaps the behavior will follow.

And just as an aside, I will really try to decompress and not allow this blog to focus on racial construct storylines. Sure we discuss comics, politics and music but everything can't be about race......can it? Click on the link below for the article in its entirety:

Researchers Try to Cure Racism