re: #277 iceweasel

Project Implicit rocks. I posted some links to it in my first weeks here. Highly recommend to all.

Here’s an interesting thing:

I took the test when I was living in the Tenderloin, first. It’s a rough mainly-black neighborhood in San Francisco, packed with drug dealers, con artists, and massive drug use. So my day-to-day interaction with black people tended to be negative, especially since I worked at an all-white joint. I hung out with a few of my black friends, but our scheduled didn’t really jive so I didn’t actually see much of them during that time period.

So that first time I took it, during that time period I scored pretty concretely associating negatives with blacks and positives with whites. I took it two more times, because, you know, when you first take it it can make you feel kinda ashamed, but the results came out the same.

I moved out of that neighborhood some months later, to a much nicer neighborhood that still had a heavy black population, but more families trying to make it good, poor but honest type neighborhood. Near a hospital, too, with lots of black nurses hanging outside.

I retook the test after a few months of living in that neighborhood, and whaddyaknow, I suddenly had a slight positive association with blacks.

So I think that the implicit association test might not reveal deep-rooted stuff so much as it reveals surface stuff. It’s interesting as all get-out.