New Project to Study and Combat Unconscious Racism, Identify What Triggers Racial Bias and Political Consequences

Keith Kamisugi — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:19:05 +0000

The election of President Obama shows how far America has progressed in overcoming the racial divides that for so long scarred this country. But while overt racism is less and less acceptable in America, unconscious racial bias still plays a large role in our politics and society, as a new project launched this week by the Institute for America’s Future seeks to explore.

EJS and our president, Eva Paterson, have been involved in the project, called “Americans for American Values,” (AmericansForAmericanValues.org) which will research the effects of unconscious racial bias on decision making and will develop strategies to support decision-making based on consciously held American values rather than on racial anxiety and stereotypes.

john powell, the project’s founder and executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, said racial equality and fairness are values widely supported by Americans, but hidden biases often undermine these values.

“As society tries to move beyond racial discrimination, a better understanding of implicit bias is needed,” said powell. “Our two-fold goal with this study is to help the American public better understand implicit bias and to give them ways to avoid triggering these biases.”

Institute for America’s Future co-director Robert Borosage, whose organization will be the fiscal sponsor for the project, said the first series of studies will examine the impact of undetected racially-oriented biases on our democratic process.

“The election of the first African American president has helped us see one another with new eyes,” said Borosage. “Yet, we still struggle both as a society stratified in large part by race, and marked by attitudes that congeal in a society still marked by racial divisions.”

The “Americans for American Values” project will begin with research over the next two years designed to identify all the forms of implicit bias and what triggers them. The studies findings will help make recommendations on how to avoid these biases. The project was made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was established in 1930. The organization supports children, families and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the southern African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Bradley Effect? The Boogey Man is Under Your Bed

Keith Kamisugi — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:37:39 +0000

Allow me to get irritated for a minute. The first article below (first link at the bottom) is an example of inciting unnecessary fear.

The so-called “Bradley” (a.k.a., Wilder, a.k.a., Dinkins) effect, of which there is sparse evidence, has been assigned to Obama for one reason: because he’s an African American candidate (and race and drama go hand in hand). Polls by their very nature are “retrospective” (snapshots of yesterday) not “predictive” (forecasts of tomorrow).

Most in the media who are talking and writing about a possible Bradley effect with Obama have very little theoretical understanding of survey research methods, polling, or research on racial attitudes in America. Moreover, there are plenty of times when black candidates run and there is no pre-election poll versus outcome discrepancy (see 2006, with Swann, Steele, Ford, and Patrick).

In fact, most of the differences in poll results before an election and the outcomes of an election are due to factors like bad polls (conducted improperly), margin of error + the undecided voters not being considered correctly, the different polling methodologies (i.e., phone vs. web vs. in-person vs. mail vs. interactive voice response), and other survey context effects (i.e., question wording, question order, interviewer effects, days/times of the week, etc.).

I won’t even get into all the other errors that are known to influence response: coverage error (is the call list representative?), non-response error (are the people who didn’t answer different than those who did?), and measurement error (are we really measuring the behavior we’re talking about?).

Trust me when I say, if there is any effect to “look out for” in this election it is the underestimate of young people turning out, and the lack of coverage for young people (who’s numbers are often weighted up) in polls.

This is not to say that people are completely truthful when they answer polls, we know they are not. But, this “ain’t” a single state (CA) election in 1982, or 1988 (Wilder), or 1990 something (Dinkins), this is a national sample of people, some of whom have plenty of reasons to say they wouldn’t vote for Obama, other than race. Please, don’t believe the hype.

At some point in our lives we’ve all been told the Boogey man is under our bed, and every time we look…..we see nothing. This is because 1) the boogey man isn’t real, and 2) if he was, why would he hide under the bed? The point is, when you look for the wrong thing in the wrong place, you wind up believing “it” could still be there.

Below are some articles (for bedtime reading only) to think about.

There is a Bradley Effect
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/13/obama.bradley.effect/index.html

There is a “reverse” Bradley Effect
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10397.html

Moving beyond the Bradley Effect
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/13/opinion/pollpositions/main4519166.shtml

Age and Cell Phones-Effects on Obama vote
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/964/

- David Wilson

Equal Justice Society » Polling

New Project to Study and Combat Unconscious Racism, Identify What Triggers Racial Bias and Political Consequences

Bradley Effect? The Boogey Man is Under Your Bed