please take your hands off my brother, please take your laws off my lover

I am white.

I am heterosexual.

I am a woman.

Very rarely have I struggled with oppression or lack of social support because of prejudice or stereotypes. Sure, as a woman there have been times that I’ve fought the “Man” in the work or school environment, but for the most part I’ve had equal or greater opportunities than my peers. Luckily, the fact that I have these opportunities does not mean I am oblivious to the struggle of those around me.

Taking the IAT was relatively eye-opening to me, but for different reasons than I expected.  First, an explanation of the IAT: The Implicit Associations Test was developed by these sexy psychologists who had the incredible realization that people are either unwilling or unable to self-report their attitudes (Greenwald et al., 1998). They could be unwilling because of the social desirability bias, or unable because they have a misperception of what their actual beliefs are. These psychologists figured out if they showed cues representing, say, African American and White people, as well as words representing good and bad, participants would reveal implicit racism by associating “African American”—“bad” and “White”—“good” more quickly than “African American”—“good” and “White”—“bad” (Greenwald et al., 1998).

The last time I took an IAT was freshman year at SU, and I remember being pretty disgusted with myself. I grew up in a conservative home, but I’ve always been one of the more open-minded and accepting members of my family. As a freshman I probably would have told you, had you asked, that I was completely un-prejudiced and that I showed no preference for one race over another. Part of this, for sure, would have been influenced by the social desirability bias, but I think to some extent it was just my own naïveté and inability to acknowledge my deep-seated (albeit socially influenced) prejudice. Regardless of my idealistic views of my “colorblindness” as a freshman, my IAT revealed that I showed a pretty strong preference for white people over black people.

So, when I found out we had to take the IAT again, I kinda freaked out. I didn’t want to destroy my self-concept yet again by realizing that I am actually racist even though I try to pretend that I am not. This time around, I did the race-weapons IAT, and revealed a moderate association of Black Americans with weapons compared to White Americans. I guess this is what I expected, considering my results freshman year.  It was still pretty disappointing, though. I really value equality and I wish that I wasn’t so influenced by society’s racism.

The interesting results were on my second IAT: the Gay-Straight IAT. I was surprised to see that my data suggested little to no automatic preference between Straight People and Gay People. In fact, these results were extremely exciting to me! I know, without a doubt, if I had taken this test in high school, the results would have been very different. Considering the epidemic of homophobia in my neighborhood, my own religiosity, and the influence of my very conservative parents, it has been very difficult over the past several years to shake the negative homosexual stereotype from my mind. Although I have always been a peace-loving hippie at heart, social influences are very hard to overcome.

So why the change of implicit association?  Well, probably a variety of reasons. But the strongest of these is most likely the contact hypothesis. This hypothesis states that, if done in the correct way, direct contact with a group can reduce stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination (Allport, 1954). This explains why my implicit racism lives on and my implicit prejudice toward homosexual people has faded after two years of attending school at SU. Think about it: I very rarely have the opportunity to spend time with African American students at SU. This lack of contact forces me to rely on already-established cultural stereotypes rather than my own experiential knowledge. On the other hand, since I’ve been here I’ve had multiple homosexual professors and I’ve befriended multiple homosexual students. Merely being around people who have a different sexual orientation than myself has enabled me to ignore the influences of my suburban childhood and establish my own schema for homosexuality.

The fact that I was able to overcome society’s influence on my perception of homosexuality is really encouraging to me. It makes me feel like the implicit racism that I am so ashamed of is actually something that I can overcome. Very good news!

~Sarah Elizabeth

Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 197-216.

P.S. I found the video for the campaign that Dr. G was talking about--pretty cool.