Josh Myers is a member of the Kwame Ture Society (KTS), a student organization founded to further the development, dissemination of knowledge, and the advancement of the Africana studies discipline. Members of KTS will be regularly contributing to The Liberator.
Message to the ELC: Global Awareness on the Impact of Business on our Environment (by Josh Myers)
The Executive Leadership Council is an organization of African-American business executives. This is an entry to their 2008 Essay Contest (which I was forced to participate in). Their focus was on “going green.” I thought I’d use the space to go a step further and voice a greater concern.
Howard University has historically produced leaders in every imaginable field. From Wall Street to Accra the impact of individuals trained at the Mecca continues to be felt. In creating this institution, the Freedmen’s Bureau and many other benefactors sought the effective education of the newly freed bondsmen, and believed their acculturation into mainstream America would foster a more equitable existence. As African-American teachers and intellectuals descended on the campus in the early 20th century, the emphasis arguably shifted from individualist aspiration to a worldview that linked success to the amelioration of oppressive conditions on the community at large. In the post-civil rights era, the Great Society, and the era of Reaganomics, middle class African-Americans have been able to infiltrate systems and institutions that were historically marked whites only. Their entrance into these institutions undoubtedly injured and continues to impede their ability and/or desire to create collective spaces for the larger majority of their brothers and sisters. In order to effectively address the issue of “the impact of business on our environment”, it is endemic that we as African-American intellectual community focus not only the ecosystem in which we live but our environment. It shaping the policy of corporations, African American institutions such as the Executive Leadership Council must include in its focus the conditions of the communities with which they are inherently linked. Therefore, this essay will not only focus on the corporate responsibility to the physical environment, it will discuss the societal impact on the African community at home and abroad. In addressing an institution that is both culturally and physically linked to welfare of this community it is imperative to include this analysis going forward, as it too will professionally and personally be my focus in this time and space. In reinstituting a focus towards our inherent communality and re-inscribing our heritage as African peoples, the African-American business leaders of the future will no doubt be able to work toward the reclamation of the humanity of Africans everywhere.
As we move forward, this essay will focus on two questions posed by the Executive Leadership Council:
o What do you consider the best ways for corporations to maximize their impact towards helping improve our environment?
o As a future business leader, how will you provide leadership on environmental issues in your professional and personal life?
In addressing these questions I will apply the necessary framework of taking the viewpoint of both the social and physical impact on the environment by corporate actors and its specific effects as it relates to larger questions in society. Let us examine the first question.
In examining the majority of global corporations we can easily conclude that their control is exacted by individuals of European descent. Encoded in their European background are certain ideals with which the majority of African-American leaders in the business world have too adopted. Of these cultural ideals let us examine the idea of profit. Profit is the essence of business, in fact it is the reason business and corporations exist, in this system. The ideology that has come to characterize the Western hegemonic stance is that business cannot and will not survive without profit. It is rooted in a socio-historical idea of scarcity, which gave rise to the capitalist economic system. As Europeans sought to expand their empire, they brought about a shift from cultural systems in the spaces they expanded to and instituted a hegemonic system that the world has yet to shake. The imperialist nature of European and later American governments and corporations are driven by nothing more than the pursuit of profit. This pursuit of profit historically and continues to have pre-eminence over any other ideal, namely the cultural systems and expressions of those who do not share this pursuit. So in looking at best ways for corporations to maximize their impact towards helping improve the environment, one can easily be perplexed. For corporations to care about the environment, they must employ methods that increase their variable and fixed costs. This, for the larger majority of corporations is not an option. Thus, corporations continue and will continue to create situations where the physical environment will continue to degenerate. As long as corporations practice a hegemonic, rogue, capitalist approach, the physical environment will continue to deteriorate. As the new age of leaders enter into the executive office it will become necessary, however difficult this may be, to shift the idealism from profit to the preservation of the space in which we live. In realizing the current positions of corporations one could conclude that these two positions are possibly diametrically opposed or mutually exclusive. However, corporate executives must realize that their corporation’s profits mean nothing juxtaposed to a world that can no longer sustain its population. This necessary shift will be seamlessly instituted the sooner the individuals in power inscribe social ideals that are not entrenched in the idea of profit. The Eurocentric view of “survival of the fittest” should not include the ecosystem, for we know that it will survive and its population will devolve first. “By any means necessary” is a ludicrous position if by pursuing them it will prove world incapable of sustaining these “means”. Adam Smith’s invisible hand concept is inherently flawed juxtaposed to the global environment. For corporations to address the problems in the physical environment it is not only important, it is absolutely imperative that they denounce these hegemonic Eurocentric worldviews and adopt an ideology that is consistent with the greater global population. As African-American leaders, we are obligated to remain in the forefront of these issues and we must continue to resist indoctrination into cultural and ideological systems that only represent one-tenth of the world.
In analyzing the aforementioned Eurocentric ideals that underpin the large majority of global corporations, again we must look at the societal impact and how African-American leaders can address a needed change. Many African-American business leaders are trained in sound business principles, but miseducated in a wide variety of social issues that affect the larger polity. For years the education of blacks in the US has been geared towards this end. As business leaders, the first step is the familiarity of the social landscape in which their community lives and achieving this viewpoint from a source that actually works toward that goal. Of dire importance for all African-American leaders is a socio-political analysis unfettered by power bases but directed by internal actors. For instance, in football it is a counter-intuitive practice to learn how to play offense by studying with the defense. As African business leaders, there must be a working knowledge of the effects of their corporations on their communities and secondly a desire to pressure the corporate power bases to needed change. The pre-occupation of making a profit (European ideals) necessarily creates a void in the mind of corporate people, of the need to transform their community spaces. As corporate executives create the pressure on corporate to change, they must work to create spaces in the community where the change can ferment. Already possessing the academic knowledge in whatever field, the focus on applying it to amelioration of conditions in the community (African ideals) is what I believe is the necessary role of every African-American individual in corporate America as well as in academic institutions. Turning a blind eye or attributing false causation to these problems only further elongate the situation. Unbeknownst, to many corporate people, who follow the line of thinking that African-Americans are responsible for their own conditions or other bootstrap theories, is the clear fact that their success is ultimately still linked to a realization of an equitable African-American community. Community service, while is helpful is not an end. For corporations to participate in community service projects on Saturday, and undermine the community Monday-Friday, it will still work to suppress solutions to the problem. Global corporations will not change their ideals or viewpoints without necessary intervention and pressure from both the African-American executives as well as its employees.
In answering the question of how corporations can best maximize their impact on the environment, the clear answer is through a non-rhetoric change instituted by individuals in the African-American community who have that power. The social and physical environments are doomed to failure if corporations continue to persist in these efforts.
Leadership on environmental issues is something everyone who is endowed with the knowledge and skills that are applicable are obliged to give. For African-American leaders, this obligation is more critical. The necessity lies in the fact that our environmental and social condition is linked to the ideals that are instituted by players who are intrinsically opposed to the ideals that we hold sacred. Therefore, it is our challenge to face this opposition and proffer needed changes based on our worldview. This is not to simply posit that African-American or African culture and worldview encode the changes that are needed in the global physical environment; however the distinction between this and what the world practices now is obvious.
As a future business leader, my job will be to implement reforms geared towards changing the ideology and values of a hegemonic, rogue, capitalist system. The question then becomes how do we, as a community, and how do I, as a leader work towards this end. There are necessary steps in the building of a community response to abject conditions. The first step is the raising of consciousness. It will be my goal as a professional to raise the consciousness of whoever I influence or even come in contact with. Without a true consciousness of a situation, a solution cannot be reached. We must build spaces of consciousness, formal or informal, in the places we occupy, professional or personal. A space of consciousness is simply a discussion group or a lunch outing where issues are raised that affect that we are as people. I am currently working towards that end here at Howard University. I am apart of both formal and informal spaces of consciousness and am seeing the usefulness of these spaces. Another necessary tool that is not being used by our African-American business leaders is the formation of collective institutions to combat these issues. These institutions must be funded by the internal community and the trajectory of these spaces must be towards communitarian goals as opposed to corporate goals. Collective institutions such as think tanks, community centers, schools, and businesses need to be formed within the African-American community on an African-centered basis. If the black corporate executives create these necessary collective institutions based on upon the determination of the African-American community we will not only see change in the environmental situation but the social situation of blacks will be uplifted towards a greater humanity. This greater humanity will foster global inclusion in the decisions and ideas of the true population of the world. Again, we are inextricably linked to the conditions of people who share our culture and physical appearance. My personal life will continue to be devoted to the creating of these spaces of consciousness and the building of these collective institutions. Professionally, pressure needs to be placed on corporations and the education of the viability of new approaches need to be instituted. It is the duty of intellectually proficient African-American individuals to explore these new approaches in these collective spaces of struggle. As a future business leader, it will be my duty to help build the consciousness of the not only the community but the business intellectuals in our community as we work towards the uplift our people. It is through these types of initiatives that I will exert my leadership potential. As a leader, it is also my duty to resist becoming subject to the pitfalls that have characterized other leaders. These pitfalls include assimilation instead of integration, apathy, as well as a commitment to abstract ideals such as time and money.
Global awareness of the impact of business entails looking at the environmental from a more critical standpoint. As we, African American business leaders, assess the physical environment; let us not overlook Firestone in Liberia, Anglo-American in South Africa, the factory conditions in the Americas, and the labor conditions in Brazil. This is our duty. The fight for a humane society for Africans and the Diaspora must be fought for by individuals with a voice at the table, the black business leaders. As we fight we must remember what Harold Cruse stated in his most famous work The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
“The farther Negro gets from his historical antecedents in time, the more tenuous become his conceptual ties, the emptier his social conceptions, the more superficial his visions.”1
A reconnection with the past will serve to create the courage and ideals to amend problems in the present.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The impact of business on our environment [KTS]
Hero One Campaign.
One of my classmate's friends is an advocate for HERO, a Baltimore-based group dedicated to providing various services to people living with HIV and AIDS. Donate what you can; a dollar really can make a difference if enough people contribute.
May 17: Red + Hot + Bembe, YFS of ADI [Philly]
It's party time!!! If you're in Philly this weekend, you NEED to be here. In fact, NOT being at this event would mean that you missed out... Join the Young Friends Society of African Diasporan Institutions for Soul Simpatico: Red + Hot + Bembe w/ good music and greaty folks!!! For more info, check here.
May 17: Live, From Planet Earth [Brooklyn 003]
Web Flyer: HTML code to re-post web flyer.
Printer Flyer: Click here to download printer-friendly PDF flyer.
http://www.divshare.com/download/4490361-769
Links:
liberatormagazine.com/live
fusicology.com
Going through my list of "masculine Arab names"
I couldn’t praise you enough
Beloved
You are the Arab man of might
Of war, of peace, and beauty
Your are Shango
You are joy
Beautiful Master of horses
Lord of the desert
Keeper of the oases
Husband of the fruit
Pretty boy
With long lashes
And black eyes
Beautiful one
With kohl naturally lining you
Dusky as the mother who bore you
Black as the sands of desire
Time was your father
And He loves you
Your names of
Servitude
Are strong shoulders
Upon which Believing
Women Hope
My Beloved
Man
Who has No End
[Image from: West Virgia University, Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry]
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Motion Picture Ming.
If you came to Live, From Planet Earth [Brooklyn 002], then you had a chance to experience Aaron Mingo up close and personal. If you frequent the D.C./MD hip-hop scene then you might remember him from The Serenghetti. Now, Aaron Mingo is putting forth his much anticipated solo effort and the release of The Motion Picture Ming. A compilation of hot tracks and dope lyrics. Get your own copy here for just $5.
Kiilu Nyasha: Birthday Message [Mumia]
Kiilu Nyasha: Birthday Message.
(transcript)
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.
topics: by achali, community, elders, journalism, kiilu nyasha, mumia abu-jamal, organization, prison radio
Thoughts on Africa [Mumia]
Note: The South African Border War refers to the conflict that took place from 1966 to 1989 in South-West Africa (now Namibia) and Angola between [the Apartheid government of] South Africa and its allied forces (mainly UNITA) on the one side and the Angolan government, South-West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO), and their allies – mainly the Soviet Union and Cuba – on the other.
Thoughts on Africa (for Elombe Brath).
(transcript)
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.
Philadelphia: City of Brotherly Thugs [Mumia]
Philadelphia: City of Brotherly Thugs.
(transcript)
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.
Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain
(Scientific American) "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.
Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.
Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. That is emphatically not to say that explicit prejudice and discrimination have evaporated nor that they are of lesser importance than implicit bias. According to a 2005 federal report, almost 200,000 hate crimes—84 percent of them violent—occur in the U.S. every year.
The persistence of explicit bias in contemporary culture has led some critics to maintain that implicit bias is of secondary concern. But hundreds of studies of implicit bias show that its effects can be equally insidious. Most social psychologists believe that certain scenarios can automatically activate implicit stereotypes and attitudes, which then can affect our perceptions, judgments and behavior. “The data on that are incontrovertible,” concludes psychologist Russell H. Fazio of Ohio State University.
Now researchers are probing deeper. They want to know: Where exactly do such biases come from? How much do they influence our outward behavior? And if stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes are burned into our psyches, can learning more about them help to tell each of us how to override them?
Sticking Together
Implicit biases grow out of normal and necessary features of human cognition, such as our tendency to categorize, to form cliques and to absorb social messages and cues. To make sense of the world around us, we put things into groups and remember relations between objects and actions or adjectives: for instance, people automatically note that cars move fast, cookies taste sweet and mosquitoes bite. Without such deductions, we would have a lot more trouble navigating our environment and surviving in it.
Such associations often reside outside conscious understanding; thus, to measure them, psychologists rely on indirect tests that do not depend on people’s ability or willingness to reflect on their feelings and thoughts. Several commonly used methods gauge the speed at which people associate words or pictures representing social groups—young and old, female and male, black and white, fat and thin, Democrat and Republican, and so on—with positive or negative words or with particular stereotypic traits.
Because closely associated concepts are essentially linked together in a person’s mind, a person will be faster to respond to a related pair of concepts—say, “hammer and nail”—than to an uncoupled pair, such as “hammer and cotton ball.” The timing of a person’s responses, therefore, can reveal hidden associations such as “black and danger” or “female and frail” that form the basis of implicit prejudice. “One of the questions that people often ask is, ‘Can we get rid of implicit associations?’ ” says psychologist Brian A. Nosek of the University of Virginia. “The answer is no, and we wouldn’t want to. If we got rid of them, we would lose a very useful tool that we need for our everyday lives.”
The problem arises when we form associations that contradict our intentions, beliefs and values. That is, many people unwittingly associate “female” with “weak,” “Arab” with “terrorist,” or “black” with “criminal,” even though such stereotypes undermine values such as fairness and equality that many of us hold dear.
Self-interest often shores up implicit biases. To bolster our own status, we are predisposed to ascribe superior characteristics to the groups to which we belong, or in-groups, and to exaggerate differences between our own group and outsiders [see “The New Psychology of Leadership,” by Stephen D. Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam and Michael J. Platow; Scientific American Mind, August/September 2007].
Even our basic visual perceptions are skewed toward our in-groups. Many studies have shown that people more readily remember faces of their own race than of other races. In recent years, scientists have begun to probe the neural basis for this phenomenon, known as the same-race memory advantage. In a 2001 study neurosurgeon Alexandra J. Golby, now at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to track people’s brain activity while they viewed a series of white and black faces. The researchers found that individuals exhibited greater activity in a brain area involved in face recognition known as the fusiform face area [see “A Face in the Crowd,” by Nina Bublitz] when they viewed faces of their own racial group than when they gazed at faces of a different race. The more strongly a person showed the same-race memory advantage, the greater this brain difference was.
This identification with a group occurs astoundingly quickly. In a 2002 study University of Washington psychologist Anthony G. Greenwald and his colleagues asked 156 people to read the names of four members of two hypothetical teams, Purple and Gold, then spend 45 seconds memorizing the names of the players on just one team. Next, the participants performed two tasks in which they quickly sorted the names of team members. In one task, they grouped members of one team under the concept “win” and those of the other team under “lose,” and in the other they linked each team with either “self” or “other.” The researchers found that the mere 45 seconds that a person spent thinking about a fictional team made them identify with that team (linking it with “self”) and implicitly view its members as “winners.”
Some implicit biases appear to be rooted in strong emotions. In a 2004 study Ohio State psychologist Wil A. Cunningham and his colleagues measured white people’s brain activity as they viewed a series of white and black faces. The team found that black faces—as compared with white faces—that they flashed for only 30 milliseconds (too quickly for participants to notice them) triggered greater activity in the amygdala, a brain area associated with vigilance and sometimes fear. The effect was most pronounced among people who demonstrated strong implicit racial bias. Provocatively, the same study revealed that when faces were shown for half a second—enough time for participants to consciously process them—black faces instead elicited heightened activity in prefrontal brain areas associated with detecting internal conflicts and controlling responses, hinting that individuals were consciously trying to suppress their implicit associations.
Why might black faces, in particular, provoke vigilance? Northwestern University psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes linking young black men with crime, violence and danger are so robust that our brains may automatically give preferential attention to blacks as a category, just as they do for threatening animals such as snakes. In a recent unpublished study Richeson and her colleagues found that white college students’ visual attention was drawn more quickly to photographs of black versus white men, even though the images were flashed so quickly that participants did not consciously notice them. This heightened vigilance did not appear, however, when the men in the pictures were looking away from the camera. (Averted eye gaze, a signal of submission in humans and other animals, extinguishes explicit perceptions of threat.)
Whatever the neural underpinnings of implicit bias, cultural factors—such as shopworn ethnic jokes, careless catchphrases and playground taunts dispensed by peers, parents or the media—often reinforce such prejudice. Subtle sociocultural signals may carry particularly insidious power. In a recent unpublished study psychologist Luigi Castelli of the University of Padova in Italy and his colleagues examined racial attitudes and behavior in 72 white Italian families. They found that young children’s racial preferences were unaffected by their parents’ explicit racial attitudes (perhaps because those attitudes were muted). Children whose mothers had more negative implicit attitudes toward blacks, however, tended to choose a white over a black playmate and ascribed more negative traits to a fictional black child than to a white child. Children whose mothers showed less implicit racial bias on an implicit bias test were less likely to exhibit such racial preferences.
Many of our implicit associations about social groups form before we are old enough to consider them rationally. In an unpublished experiment Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychologist at Harvard University, and Yarrow Dunham, now a psychologist at the University of California, Merced, found that white preschoolers tended to categorize racially ambiguous angry faces as black rather than white; they did not do so for happy faces. And a 2006 study by Banaji and Harvard graduate student Andrew S. Baron shows that full-fledged implicit racial bias emerges by age six—and never retreats. “These filters through which people see the world are present very early,” Baron concludes.
Dangerous Games
On February 4, 1999, four New York City police officers knocked on the apartment door of a 23-year-old West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo. They intended to question him because his physical description matched that of a suspected rapist. Moments later Diallo lay dead. The officers, believing that Diallo was reaching for a gun, had fired 41 shots at him, 19 of which struck their target. The item that Diallo had been pulling from his pocket was not a gun but his wallet. The officers were charged with second-degree murder but argued that at the time of the shooting they believed their lives were in danger. Their argument was successful, and they were acquitted.
In the Diallo case, the officers’ split-second decision to open fire had massive, and tragic, consequences, and the court proceedings and public outcry that followed the shooting raised a number of troubling questions. To what degree are our decisions swayed by implicit social biases? How do those implicit biases interact with our more deliberate choices?
A growing body of work indicates that implicit attitudes do, in fact, contaminate our behavior. Reflexive actions and snap judgments may be especially vulnerable to implicit associations. A number of studies have shown, for instance, that both blacks and whites tend to mistake a harmless object such as a cell phone or hand tool for a gun if a black face accompanies the object. This “weapon bias” is especially strong when people have to judge the situation very quickly.
In a 2002 study of racial attitudes and nonverbal behavior, psychologist John F. Dovidio, now at Yale University, and his colleagues measured explicit and implicit racial attitudes among 40 white college students. The researchers then asked the white participants to chat with one black and one white person while the researchers videotaped the interaction. Dovidio and his colleagues found that in these interracial interactions, the white participants’ explicit attitudes best predicted the kinds of behavior they could easily control, such as the friendliness of their spoken words. Participants’ nonverbal signals, however, such as the amount of eye contact they made, depended on their implicit attitudes.
As a result, Dovidio says, whites and blacks came away from the conversation with very different impressions of how it had gone. Whites typically thought the interactions had gone well, but blacks, attuned to whites’ nonverbal behavior, thought otherwise. Blacks also assumed that the whites were conscious of their nonverbal behavior and blamed white prejudice. “Our society is really characterized by this lack of perspective,” Dovidio says. “Understanding both implicit and explicit attitudes helps you understand how whites and blacks could look at the same thing and not understand how the other person saw it differently.”
Implicit biases can infect more deliberate decisions, too. In a 2007 study Rutgers University psychologists Laurie A. Rudman and Richard D. Ashmore found that white people who exhibited greater implicit bias toward black people also reported a stronger tendency to engage in a variety of discriminatory acts in their everyday lives. These included avoiding or excluding blacks socially, uttering racial slurs and jokes, and insulting, threatening or physically harming black people.
In a second study reported in the same paper, Rudman and Ashmore set up a laboratory scenario to further examine the link between implicit bias against Jews, Asians and blacks and discriminatory behavior toward each of those groups. They asked research participants to examine a budget proposal ostensibly under consideration at their university and to make recommendations for allocating funding to student organizations. Students who exhibited greater implicit bias toward a given minority group tended to suggest budgets that discriminated more against organizations devoted to that group’s interests.
Implicit bias may sway hiring decisions. In a recent unpublished field experiment economist Dan-Olof Rooth of the University of Kalmar in Sweden sent corporate employers identical job applications on behalf of fictional male candidates—under either Arab-Muslim or Swedish names. Next he tracked down the 193 human resources professionals who had evaluated the applications and measured their implicit biases concerning Arab-Muslim men. Rooth discovered that the greater the employer’s bias, the less likely he or she was to call an applicant with a name such as Mohammed or Reza for an interview. Employers’ explicit attitudes toward Muslims did not correspond to their decision to interview (or fail to consider) someone with a Muslim name, possibly because many recruiters were reluctant to reveal those attitudes.
Unconscious racial bias may also infect critical medical decisions. In a 2007 study Banaji and her Harvard colleagues presented 287 internal medicine and emergency care physicians with a photograph and brief clinical vignette describing a middle-aged patient—in some cases black and in others white—who came to the hospital complaining of chest pain. Most physicians did not acknowledge racial bias, but on average they showed (on an implicit bias test) a moderate to large implicit antiblack bias. And the greater a physician’s racial bias, the less likely he or she was to give a black patient clot-busting thrombolytic drugs.
Beating Back Prejudice
Researchers long believed that because implicit associations develop early in our lives, and because we are often unaware of their influence, they may be virtually impervious to change. But recent work suggests that we can reshape our implicit attitudes and beliefs—or at least curb their effects on our behavior.
Seeing targeted groups in more favorable social contexts can help thwart biased attitudes. In laboratory studies, seeing a black face with a church as a background, instead of a dilapidated street corner, considering familiar examples of admired blacks such as actor Denzel Washington and athlete Michael Jordan, and reading about Arab-Muslims’ positive contributions to society all weaken people’s implicit racial and ethnic biases. In real college classrooms, students taking a course on prejudice reduction who had a black professor showed greater reductions in both implicit and explicit prejudice at the end of the semester than did those who had a white professor. And in a recent unpublished study Nilanjana Dasgupta, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, found that female engineering students who had a male professor held negative implicit attitudes toward math and implicitly viewed math as masculine. Students with a female engineering professor did not.
More than half a century ago the eminent social psychologist Gordon Allport called group labels “nouns that cut slices,” pointing to the power of mere words to shape how we categorize and perceive others. New research underscores that words exert equal potency at an implicit level. In a 2003 study Harvard psychologist Jason Mitchell, along with Nosek and Banaji, instructed white female college students to sort a series of stereotypically black female and white male names according to either race or gender. The group found that categorizing the names according to their race prompted a prowhite bias, but categorizing the same set of names according to their gender prompted an implicit profemale (and hence problack) bias. “These attitudes can form quickly, and they can change quickly” if we restructure our environments to crowd out stereotypical associations and replace them with egalitarian ones, Dasgupta concludes.
In other words, changes in external stimuli, many of which lie outside our control, can trick our brains into making new associations. But an even more obvious tactic would be to confront such biases head-on with conscious effort. And some evidence suggests willpower can work. Among the doctors in the thrombolytic drug study who were aware of the study’s purpose, those who showed more implicit racial bias were more likely to prescribe thrombolytic treatment to black patients than were those with less bias, suggesting that recognizing the presence of implicit bias helped them offset it.
In addition, people who report a strong personal motivation to be nonprejudiced tend to harbor less implicit bias. And some studies indicate that people who are good at using logic and willpower to control their more primitive urges, such as trained meditators, exhibit less implicit bias. Brain research suggests that the people who are best at inhibiting implicit stereotypes are those who are especially skilled at detecting mismatches between their intentions and their actions.
But wresting control over automatic processes is tiring and can backfire. If people leave interracial interactions feeling mentally and emotionally drained, they may simply avoid contact with people of a different race or foreign culture. “If you boil it down, the solution sounds kind of easy: just maximize control,” says psychologist B. Keith Payne of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But how do you do that? As it plays out in the real world, it’s not so easy.”
Other research suggests that developing simple but concrete plans to supplant stereotypes in particular situations can also short-circuit implicit biases. In an unpublished study Payne and his colleague Brandon D. Stewart, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, found that those who simply resolved to think of the word “safe” whenever they saw a black face showed dramatic reductions in implicit racial bias. “You don’t necessarily have to beat people over the head with it,” Payne observes. “You can just have this little plan in your pocket [think ‘safe’] that you can pull out when you need it. Once you’ve gone to the work of making that specific plan, it becomes automatic.”
Taking Control
Despite such data, some psychologists still question the concept of implicit bias. In a 2004 article in the journal Psychological Inquiry, psychologists Hal R. Arkes of Ohio State and Philip E. Tetlock of the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that implicit associations between, for example, black people and negative words may not necessarily reflect implicit hostility toward blacks. They could as easily reflect other negative feelings, such as shame about black people’s historical treatment at the hands of whites. They also argue that any unfavorable associations about black people we do hold may simply echo shared knowledge of stereotypes in the culture. In that sense, Arkes and Tetlock maintain, implicit measures do not signify anything meaningful about people’s internal state, nor do they deserve to be labeled “prejudiced”—a term they feel should be reserved for attitudes a person deliberately endorses.
Others dispute the significance of such a distinction. “There is no clear boundary between the self and society—and this may be particularly true at the automatic level,” write Rudman and Ashmore in a 2007 article in the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. “Growing up in a culture where some people are valued more than others is likely to permeate our private orientations, no matter how discomfiting the fact.”
If we accept this tenet of the human condition, then we have a choice about how to respond. We can respond with sadness or, worse, with apathy. Or we can react with a determination to overcome bias. “The capacity for change is deep and great in us,” Banaji says. “But do we want the change? That’s the question for each of us as individuals—individual scientists, and teachers, and judges, and businesspeople, and the communities to which we belong.”(source)
Barack-Otrama: "Supadelegates/Tram-Unit"
Trama is making a lot of noise out of Minneapolis (myspace). This joint is a remake of Amil's 4 Da Fam, featuring Jay-Z Beenie Sigel and Memphis Bleek. I'm just not sure who is going to pay $10 for a mixtape these days, when so many are giving them away for free. But if you are interested, 15 tracks for $10 is definitely not the worst deal around. Most cats have 8 tracks and even less on their indie joints nowadays.
Bookworms Unite! 003
CURRENTLY reading any books that you think are worth sharing? Or, do you have a list of books that you want to read but haven't gotten around to reading yet? Leave the titles of books you are planning to read soon, or are currently reading in the comments and we compile and post new lists regularly.
Click this to follow the history of the Bookworms Unite series:
Thanks to those who suggested these titles in the comments of the last Bookworms Unite! (please post your titles in the format below -- author above title -- thanks.)
Bookworms Unite! 003
Julie Mehretu
the drawings
Angel Kyodo Williams
Being Black
Megan McCafferty
the Jessica Darling series
Joseph Needham
Science and Civilisation
John Henrik Clarke
Black American Short Stories
Arts and crafts for nerds!
NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program: Here's footage from the free 2008 spring show... Projects include: Luggage that plays music, wheelchair that paints, a bot that judges your circles, a projected pinball game, pulling music, motorized dish parts, pneumatic pants, body controlled video, speaker symphony, simon stabs, moving blocks, draw bot, marble magnet madness, water music, interactive dolls, art bots, light controlled art and music slippers. (via Make)
Muva EF My Job: Repeatedly.
Simply because FREEDOM is the ultimate goal! I shall not be moved from that, my friends!
Shout out to Dr. Clarke...this text is so FULL...
I mean I'm really mad at the curriculum developers who decided NOT to include this collection in every single English literature class! I LOVE LOVE LOVE it!
I mean I can't even say enough about this book. Its so powerful. I mean I never was a short-story kind of person, you know? But this thing right HERE is splendid!
And in the spirit of Muva-Ef my job (cuz them Effers always clocking me!) I decided to take a company-sponsored moment to pay homage to the great Dr. John Henrik Clarke and his vision which resulted in this illustrious compliation of absolutely brilliant writing. Shoot, he even has "Exodus" by James Baldwin--a powerful, gritty take on the depth of leaving where you are to get where you going!
I'm in love with this book. yup.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Bruce Lee wisdom.
1) "As you think, so shall you become."
2) "It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." "If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done."
3) "To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person."
4) "Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against."
5) "I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine." "Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory."
6) "To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities."
7) "Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it."
(via Positivity Blog)
600 students riot at L.A. high school.
(AP) Police in riot gear break up lunchtime brawl involving 600 students at Los Angeles high school: A fight that broke out at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campuswide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police in riot gear.
The melee, which students said started around noon Friday between rival black and Hispanic gangs, forced authorities to shut down Locke High School and keep students in their classrooms. After restoring order, they rounded up students who had not returned to class and separated them by race, holding Hispanics in the gym and black students in another room.
Four people were arrested, three students for fighting and one non-student on suspicion of possessing a knife, Los Angeles school district spokeswoman Susan Cox said.
Several students were injured and treated at the scene, but nobody was hospitalized, officials said.
Music teacher Reggie Smith described to the Los Angeles Times a chaotic scene where it was difficult to distinguish between trouble makers and those trying to avoid the mayhem.
"The kids were crazy, running from place to place jumping on other kids," Smith said. "Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped."
Victor Wong, an 18-year-old senior, told the Times the melee grew out of a fight two days earlier between two graffiti gangs. He said Hispanic students who are friends of his asked him to participate in a fight planned for Friday that was to pit 10 Hispanic students against 10 black students.
The two groups met as planned at the handball courts, but the fight quickly spread throughout the campus, Wong said.
"Security didn't know where to go," he said. "They'd concentrate in one spot and something would happen somewhere else."
School district police brought in about 60 officers to the scene, while the Los Angeles Police Department dispatched about 50 officers and more than a dozen patrol cars.
Ronald White, a 17-year-old senior, said that when police arrived some of the students began fighting the officers, who responded with their batons. Another student said he saw police use pepper spray.
Locke has been marred by almost daily fights during much of the academic year, but students and teachers said Friday's brawl was the worst in years.
About 65 percent of the 2,600 students enrolled at Locke are Hispanic, and 35 percent are black. (source)
NYOil: Sean Bell ain't a nigga + neither are you.
NYOil Speaks Part 1 [Breakdown FM]
NYOil Speaks Part 2 [Breakdown FM]
I know folks ain't feeling NYOil too tough lately. Case in point: In response to NYOil's video on the difference between Niggers and Blacks, Jon Jon said "to NYOil, Nigga please! Black & Strong, nigga what!" And in response to NYOil's critique of Nas' album entitled, Nigger, Tasha said "You need to be articulate if you're going to criticize someone for their inability to articulate. This man can barely speak, and he doesn't make sense."
I feel the same way. And while Davey D gets mad love from me for his body of interview work, I think sometimes he pushes ultra-conservative folks like NYOil in our faces, albeit with good intentions. Unfortunately, most people I know (save, maybe young impressionable teens, like I was when I first heard Dead Prez's album Let's Get Free) don't respond well to cats like NYOil, people tend to run the other direction, or look at these cats with a good dose of healthy skepticism (as my dad did, for example, when HE first heard my copy of Dead Prez's album Let's Get Free).
As I've said in the past, I think NYOil isn't too much different than 50 Cent in that 50 attacked everyone in the game in order to build up publicity for himself. NYOil's career thus far is built on reactionary, angry songs, seemingly speaking down on everybody and they mama for being sell-outs. While I actually agree that there are a whole lotta sellouts in the industry, if he wants to be a rapper and not a politician or journalist, I think he might need to diversify his bonds.
