A Little Afternoon Helping of Insanity

[Thanks to World O' Crap for finding this item, and basically doing all the work for me.]

If you had to take a guess...just a random guess...Which group would you imagine contains more racists? Those who defiantly support George W. Bush, or those who oppose him? Come on, just a random guess.

Well, a study cited by the Washington Post seems to back up what any reasonable person would have already hypothesized...Racism and Bush votes seem geographically associated in some interesting ways.

For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people's associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations between explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435 congressional districts.

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

Obviously, this study doesn't prove anything. Neither its authors nor the Washington Post claim it does. You can support George Bush, I suppose, without being a racist, although you'd have to be somewhat unaware of what's going on around you (which isn't all that rare). But it does seem to confirm a concept that is already observable. For a variety of reasons, The Republican Party and George W. Bush appeal to white American racists far more than John Kerry and Democrats.

Surely, conservatives would want to argue against this contention, and provide counter-arguments for this survey. I would think the most compelling would be the argument I just made...All the study does is provide a demographic correlation - areas carried by the President also tended to include more racists - without any verification of causation. We don't even know if the racists overwhelmingly voted for Bush (although that's what I'd guess). All we know from this study is that places where they lived reflected a high level of Bush support.

Unfortunately, thiskind of rational, straight-forward counter-argument isn't quite enough of a "debunking" to satisfy Dafydd over at Big Lizards. No, he goes a few steps further, bizarrely arguing that virulent reverse-racism has actually turned innocent, non-racist whites into hate-mongers against their will!

The fallacy here is, naturally, the error of predetermined causality: is the correlation between Bush voters and people who find it "more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces" due to innate racism? And if so, do racists just naturally tend to gravitate towards Bush?

Notice how Dafydd has already missed the point of the study. Even if it proved beyond a doubt that more racists voted for Bush (it doesn't), that still wouldn't mean racists naturally tend to gravitate towards Bush. It would indicate how successfully Bush has marketed his brand to American racists. You don't assume a certain group supports a politician just because...The entire field of polling and market research is based around the idea that the public's ideas about politicians are shaped by media representations and advertising.

Or could it be that when blacks learn that a Caucasian is a Republican, they direct such a torrent of hate and racial bigotry towards him that they virtually guarantee that he won't be able to associate his tormenters with "positive concepts?"

No, Dafy, that could not be. It's ridiculous on its face. How many White Republicans walk around all day being personally berated and accosted by blacks? Wouldn't it take at least one or two bad personal experiences with black hostility to magically turn into a racist who automatically associated black vaces with negative images?

How do these hypothetical angry blacks who have turned all the whites against them even know which white people are Republicans and which are Democrats, and accordingly not appropriate targets for harrassment? Do they just seek out "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers and goofy cowboy hats?

If black leaders -- such as Harry Belafonte, Cynthia McKinney, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barak Obama -- to the enthusisatic applause and cheering of ordinary, middle-class blacks, routinely show rampant and hysterical intolerance of anyone to their right; if they prattle incessantly about racial preferences and "reparations" for slavery; if bad employees who happen to be black constantly threaten an EEOC lawsuit whenever a company tries to let them go -- is it really a racist reaction for someone to have a hard time associating various "positive concepts" with blacks, given the recent history?

Oh, I see, mean ol' Al Sharpton turned white people against th eblacks. Right, right...Because black people file lawsuits against racist employers or push back against Republican programs that dismantle their communities bit by bit or occasionally note publicly that the American government or corporate sector has made no attempt to repay them for the hundreds of years of free labor provided by their ancestors...racism is okay.

To answer your question without sarcasm, Dafy, YES, IT IS RACIST TO JUDGE ALL BLACK PEOPLE BECAUSE YOU DO NOT LIKE THE BEHAVIOR OF A FEW OF THEM. That is the very definition of a "racist reaction."

It's like showing pictures of Arab faces to Israeli Jews and concluding that the latter must be racially prejudiced, because they have a hard time associating "positive concepts" with Achmed, Ramzi, and Mohammed.

Actually, Dafy, I know you mean for this example to highlight the correctness of your argument, but it in fact does the exact opposite. That would be racist, if a Jew saw an Arab man and immediately said "That looks like an evil terrorist killer!"

Dafy could not provide any deeper insight into his worldview if he tried. Arabs are, by definition, not to be trusted. The notion that someone could see a photo of an Arab and see him as anything other than a stereotypical jihad-minded assassin is actually ridiculous to Dafy, a laughable concept.

Yikes. Believe it or not, this next paragraph gets even more deluded and insane. If such a thing were possible. Seriously. He has already argued that, because of outspoken black celebrities like Harry Belafonte (whom Dafy oddly calls a "black leader" despite the fact that he's just the guy who sung "Banana Boat"), white people are justified in their racism. And yet, the post is about to become even more dubious and morally questionable.

But if such wariness is a rational response, then this study shows only that districts that produce more Bush voters are likewise more rational; while districts that produce more Democratic voters are more likely to be living in a fantasy of cultural relativism, where every culture is equally good, and we cannot in fact even judge them except by their own terms.

Wow...I mean...Wow...

Okay, so Dafy thinks that his stellar Harry Belafonte example actually proves that the only reasonable reaction to American blacks is prejudice, such that viewing a photo of a black man would stir negative feelings bordering on intolerance.

Therefore, the places with the most smart, reasonable people are also the places with the most racists. Sure, under this metric, you'd expect places like Mississippi and Arkansas to be the cultural and academic centers of American life, when in fact California morgues have a higher literacy rate than both of them put together...But we're not going to let a thing like evidence stand in the way of a surrealist masterpiece like this Dafydd post!

For this to say anything about latent racism, we must first assume that Republicans have no more reason to be wary of blacks than do Democrats... which is of course patent nonsense: of course we do, because blacks are so much more likely to hate Republicans than Democrats (many blacks do not hate Democrats... they despise them, which is an altogether different emotional response, albeit no less ugly).

Okay, I don't understand the distinction he's making between hating someone and despising them...But I also think he's just barking up the wrong tree here. There have got to be better ways to justify your racism than claiming it's a reaction to prejudice from black people against your Republicanism. How do all these theoretical blacks even know your party affiliation? Is Dafydd arguing that when black people on television decry Republicanism in general (like Kanye West claiming that George Bush doesn't care about black people), it personally affects him and makes him hate blacks?

Why not just come out and admit that you don't like black people, and they make you afraid or whatever? You'll probably feel better, and we won't have to wade through these contorted arguments just to figure out the obvious.

I would bet that if the authors of this study were to ask the same questions of blacks, they would find an even larger percent of black Republicans who have a hard time associating those "positive concepts" with black faces. It would not, however, be "self-hatred" or prejudice, but rather post-judice: black Republicans have an enormous load of history to back up their angry reaction to most "brothers." How do you love someone who nakedly hates you?

I'd be very interested to see a response to Dafy's post from a Black Republican. Just as he's waging that they'd back him up, arguing that angry blacks turn people off to their cause, I'm thinking he's exactly the kind of Republican they're trying to distance themselves from or silence. He's clearly a racist...Here's a tip. If you ever see anyone trying to justify clearly racist behavior - like automatically reacting negatively to a photo of a black person - that person is racist.

It's just like Andrew Sullivan when he goes on and on about how the Bell Curve guys were right all along. He wants to demonstrate that it's "okay" to think that black people are inferior. That there is scientific evidence to support this claim. That's all Dafy's doing here. He's trying to use tortured logic to make it seem like there's a good, solid, empirical reason to dislike blacks. There isn't.