UK - Channel 4's "How Racist Are You?" - Racist against white people?

reply to post by Koka

We all make judgements based on skin colour

We don’t, we make judgements based on explicit and implicit stereotypes. These don’t necessarily have to have anything to do with colour and many people can be shown to hold no race based stereotypes via priming or implicit association tests.

We are all susceptible to developing stereotypes based on skin colour but we don't all actually do that.

Using blues versus brown eyes with the group shown on this show was always going to be a point of failure given that the result in dividing in such a way would place, pretty much, only white people into the blue eyed group. In the 60's, the environment this exercise took place in would have yielded far different results as the subjects would have been almost 100% white and as they could not focus on skin colour, eye colour would have been far easier to focus on. It was always going to be hard for the subjects to get passed this issue.

EXACTLY! That’s what I’ve been trying to say, race should not have come into it until it was discussed after the experiment when it was clearly explained what had happened to them.

It’s also why I think the discriminator should have been height which would have allowed for each group to be a mix of ethnicities.

I think one should look into the results of other "experiments" to weigh the racism value of the brown vs blue experiment. There is more at play than racism. It's how we as humans find value in placing ourselves in groups and then finding those groups to be superior to others.
To be of real value experiments such as these have to be highly controlled and have impartial supervisors. I did not find this to be true and it's outcome was clouded from the start.

Look at the Stanford Prison Experiment and contrast it with the Brown vs Blue.

www.prisonexp.org...

news.stanford.edu...

I watched this programmer and was on the verge of kicking my Tv screen in. It was utter crap.

They claimed they were segregating the groups based on eye colour so that skin colour didn't factor into it, but then they divide along blue vs brown eyes?

I'm sorry, I cannot recall the last time I ever came across a blue eyed black or Asian person, so it was always going to be a mixed group containing ethnic minorities and some whites vs a solid white group. Hardly scientific.

then we have the "brown eyed group" regalling the "blue eyed group" with stories of PERCEIVED racism, not actual examples.

The guy with the dreadlocks said he didn't pick his daughter up from a predominately white school because HE FEARED THE OTHER PARENTS RESPONSE, not because of anything they had done to him. He was the one with the race problem, not a bunch of other people who had never met him!

He made the assumption that, even though his daughter had yet to receive any racist abuse whatsoever, if he showed up then all of a sudden she'd be labelled black and be abused. What utter tosh.

As for that other stupid lady in the "brown eyed" group who bitched on about young black men being stopped and searched in her area, oh my god.

First of all, it is no coincidence that in predominately black areas, the most people to be searched are going to be black. In white area's, like where I live, police are always stopping and searching the chavs who gather at the local park.

(EDIT: I'll add here that whilst there may be "black" and "white" area's, this isn't done conciously, but rather as a result of living in the country seems to be a white thing and living in the big city's seems to be a black thing. There are people from both "sides", as it were, living in either place however.)

Secondly, in places like London, where I believe she was from, the vast majority of knife and gun crime is committed by Blacks on Blacks, this is why the Met have Operation Trident setup and have done for years. It's a major problem! Or would she only be happy if loads of innocent whites where stopped as well to make up the numbers.

I felt more racism coming from the brown eyed group towards white people than going the other way. Even so, they should not have had any against "white people", as I thought the exercise was about eye colour?

Silly me....


[edit on 1/11/09 by stumason]

Originally posted by Mike_A
reply to post by Koka

 

We all make judgements based on skin colour

We don’t, we make judgements based on explicit and implicit stereotypes.

Agreed, and in the case of this debate those stereotypes are associated with skin colour.

These don’t necessarily have to have anything to do with colour.....

Which is the reason I actually said:

We all make judgements based on skin colour together with a multitude of other factors we take in, even if we do not realise it.

....and many people can be shown to hold no race based stereotypes via priming or implicit association tests.

They can only gauge they are not conclusive, it still relies on the input being truthful.

We are all susceptible to developing stereotypes based on skin colour....

Agreed

.....but we don't all actually do that.

Then we will have to agree to disagree on that particular point.


[edit on 1-11-2009 by Koka]

reply to post by Koka

Agreed, and in the case of this debate those stereotypes are associated with skin colour.

But it is important to note that not everyone bases these stereotypes on skin colour.

Which is the reason I actually said:

I think there's a difference between saying skin colour together with other factors and saying skin colour or other factors. What you said implied that skin colour is always a factor but not the only factor.

They can only gauge they are not conclusive, it still relies on the input being truthful.

Not at all, racist stereotypes exist on three main levels, explicit public, explicit private and implicit.

Explicit public stereotypes are those that you know you have and allow to actively affect your behaviour. These can be tested for pretty easily by observing behaviour or even just asking the individual.

Explicit private stereotypes are those that you know you have but you try not to let them change the way you behave and you probably won't admit to them openly. These are reliably brought out in situations where the subject remain anonymous.

Implicit stereotypes however are unconscious beliefs that, though you don't know about them, still affect your behaviour. You have no choice but to do what these beliefs tell you to do.

It's safe to say that anyone with explicit racist views will also have implicit racist views and vice versa.

Priming and implicit association tests determine the extent to which people hold these implicit negative stereotypes. So no it is not the case that these tests can only be inconclusive, they can and are very good indicators that a person does not hold any racist views. And many people don't use stereotypes based on skin colour.

reply to post by Mike_A


I did toy with highlighting my error in using the term "together" and was going to change it to "as well as".

I will concede to your greater knowledge on the association tests and thank you for the explainations given, I will be looking into these a little more.