No truth in advertising

A white supremacist group sneaked an ad for its website, victoryforever.com, into a San Francisco high school newspaper. The creators of the $30 ad apparently put up a prop website that had links to innocuous music offerings and showed that to students at the Lowell High School paper. The creators then changed the site to the one that's up now, which includes links to white resistance music and racist videos.

Racism by reflex

There's plenty of conscious racism out there, but research suggests we're still biased despite our best intentions. From the Boston Globe:

The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. sparked allegations of racism, followed by fierce denials that race played a role in the 911 call or the police response to the report of a possible break-in at his Cambridge home. But social psychology research indicates that regardless of people’s stated attitudes about race, unconscious racial biases can influence their behavior in surprisingly powerful ways.

That means that people who are not racist may unknowingly behave in ways that reflect racial stereotypes, even when they may disagree with such ideas. One study found that doctors with more unconscious bias against blacks were less likely to give African-American heart attack patients clot-busting medication than white patients. Another found that when participants in a computer simulation were told to shoot criminals but not unarmed citizens or police who appeared on the screen, more black than white men were incorrectly shot. Other work found that children perceived ambiguous, but aggressive behavior as more threatening if the perpetrator was black. ...

“I think our data, obtained from millions and millions of people, show a real disparity between who we think we are, who we say we are . . . and what actually goes on in our heads,’’ said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard psychology professor who is a leader in studying such implicit bias.

Read the full article here.

Tune in, turn off or drop out?

Not since roll up windows came to the automobile has pent up rage had a better release valve than news sites allowed reader comments. Rather than scream uselessly at the television or stab at the newspaper with a butter knife, the enraged and repressed can adopt anonymous handles and type out all manner of obscenity and epithet. Ask any reporter who's covered illegal immigration or gay marriage and they'll you how quickly, and predictably, the trolls descend.

This leaves news sites with a few choices - turn off comments on stories that raise sensitive issues (and shut out thoughtful commentary in the process), shut down comments altogether, or make some effort to manage comments.

Patrick Thornton at Poynter recently asked various publishers what they do. First he defined the problem:

Stories that elicit hateful and racist speech -- those dealing with immigrants, homosexuality and crime, particularly sexual assault -- are the first to go. "What makes crime comment threads go sour?" Publish2's Ryan Sholin asked on Twitter, and then answered: "Racism, hate, dislike of the police, and racism, I'd say. Also, racism." ...

Melissa Coulter, community editor of the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, and Brianne Pruitt, Web editor at The Wenatchee World in Washington, both said on Twitter that their news sites do not allow comments on sexual assault stories because of the risk of someone posting the victim's name. ...

Stephanie Romanski, Web editor of The Grand Island Independent's site, said on Twitter that her news org removed all commenting from the site and now has a "tweet this" link that enables users to take the discourse to Twitter. In a blog post in May, she explained why her news org decided to turn off commenting:

"We are also sending away the headaches that go with it and the drivel that can sometimes negate the integrity of the journalism. The latter is something our publisher has always pointed out regarding comments -- the ones who post rumors, the ones who post incorrect facts, the ones who tread the fine line between personal attack and playing by the rules -- those kinds of comments, he feels, can drag down a story and therefore our reputation."

-snip-

Not everyone, however, agrees with limiting comments even on controversial stories. Mathew Ingram, communities editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, said in an e-mail that his paper usually only closes comments on stories involving legal issues around contempt of court or libel. Ingram believes that a lot of important discourse is lost by limiting comments to only uncontroversial stories.

In another post, Thornton argues more active engagement is needed to prevent the threads from turning into "comment ghettos." That may be true, but it strikes me as impractical and unwise to ask reporters to get involved with defending a story, or responding to anonymous posters bent on suckering the writer into a rabbit hole.

Nobody's fault

Phillip Goff, a UCLA professor and psychologist, is working with the Denver Police Department on ways to lessen or eliminate racial and gender bias in its ranks. Goff is considered an expert in something called "racism without racists."

Say what?

Goff explained the "racism without racists" philosophy to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times back in October:

“When we fixate on the racist individual, we’re focused on the least interesting way that race works,” said Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at U.C.L.A. who focuses his research on “racism without racists.” “Most of the way race functions is without the need for racial animus.”

The Kristof column continues:

John Dovidio, a psychologist at Yale University who has conducted this study over many years, noted that conscious prejudice as measured in surveys has declined over time. But unconscious discrimination — what psychologists call aversive racism — has stayed fairly constant.

“In the U.S., there’s a small percentage of people who in nationwide surveys say they won’t vote for a qualified black presidential candidate,” Professor Dovidio said. “But a bigger factor is the aversive racists, those who don’t think that they’re racist.”

Faced with a complex decision, he said, aversive racists feel doubts about a black person that they don’t feel about an identical white. “These doubts tend to be attributed not to the person’s race — because that would be racism — but deflected to other areas that can be talked about, such as lack of experience,” he added.

So, we have one professor who uses the phrase "racism without racists" to describe why bias persists despite a general belief that we are not racist people, and another professor who uses the term "aversive," which means causing avoidance of unpleasant things, to explain the same phenomenon.

My guess is that Goff's language gets you in the door of places like the Denver PD while Dovidio's language is more honest.

Otherness*

How big of a factor is Barack Obama's race in the race for president? An AP Yahoo News poll indicates it's substantial:

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

It may be impossible to quantify the effect prejudice will have on the election. Certain other factors could compensate for or even magnify feelings about race - Obama's age, how closely he resembles black stereotypes, rumors he's Muslim, McCain's age, etc.

To the extent the Obama campaign can make the election one of issues rather than one of affinity, the chance that race becomes a decisive factor in the voting booth diminishes. And so McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, an affinity candidate, becomes all the more important to the Republican side.

It's in that regard that the Palin pick could pay off for McCain among Hillary Clinton supporters. It's not that she's a woman, it's that she's an attractive choice to those looking for a reason not to vote for Obama (despite their general agreement with him on the issues).

From the poll:

Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes.

*Update: Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com has some interesting observations about the poll results and the so-called Bradley Effect (see comments).

Who, indeed?

Mitt Romney gets back to his black roots.