More from this author Can you really teach kids not to be racist? Problem number one, the “implicit associations test”, or IAT, on which it is based, is essentially useless as a measure of prejudice it’s certainly not “widely accepted as an accurate measurement of unconscious racial bias”.Īnd problem number two, the “unconscious bias training” used to reduce the impact of this unconscious prejudice has not been shown to work, and in fact it’s just possible that it may even have a negative effect. But there are two huge problems with it, and they’re the same problems in our imaginary school, above: disease is real, but the test and the treatment are not. It’s powerful television, and incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Then, three weeks later, they take the test again and most of the class is apparently “near to the neutral position: very little or no unconscious bias”. white children in one room, non-white children in another, to talk about their experiences in their racial groups a mixed-race child strongly resents being forced to choose which room she goes in.
The kids are separated into “affinity groups”, i.e. They then make the kids embark on a three-week programme to reduce their unconscious bias. The test, they say, “is now widely accepted as an accurate measurement of unconscious racial bias”, something that understandably shocks the children.
The test finds that most of the children - 18 out of 24, in a class that’s 50% non-white! - “felt an unconscious bias towards white people”. It took a bunch of 11-year-old kids at a school and made them take an apparently scientific test to detect unconscious racial bias. On which note, there was an extraordinary programme on Channel 4 recently, The School That Tried To End Racism. “No, the disease is definitely real,” they tell you. So you say to the people who did the test, hey, what’s going on here? And they say “The disease is real! Are you suggesting the disease isn’t real?” No, you say, I know the disease is real, I’m just saying that the test you’ve run and the treatment you’ve administered doesn’t seem to have any relation to whether the disease comes or not.
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