Study: White People Are Pretty Dumb

Via Instapundit, a study about White People being pretty silly about race.

The study goes like this: Two people are partnered up. One can see the picture of a subject person; the other person must find the matching picture from a bunch of pictures only he can see. The person trying to make the match can only ask Yes/No questions of the person who can see the picture which they're trying to match. So the one question asks about gender, hair color, eye color, and etc., trying to figure out which picture his partner is looking at.

In the study, White People refused to ask a very basic question -- "Is this person black?" -- 43% of the time. When they were partnered with a black person, they refused to ask it 79% of the time.

There's a bad side and a good side to this. The bad side is obvious: Many white people are so scared of being seen as racist that they're not willing to talk about simple facts -- and, ironically, they end up being seen as racist as a result. Many whites' sensitivity to racism may have gone so far past the point of diminishing returns that it actively harms their relations with blacks. They place so much importance on demonstrating that black people don't make them nervous that black people make them nervous.

The good side is, of course, that overt racism has been well and truly stigmatized.

And yet it's been stigmatized to the point of absurdity and, actually, stigmatized to the point of racial condescension. When the stigma against racism turns into a stigma against merely acknowledging someone's race -- as if blackness itself were some kind of taboo condition which mustn't be mentioned in polite company -- an attempt to "appear sensitive" becomes its own sort of race consciousness.

posted by Ace at 01:19 PM

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