Implicit Biases from Someone Raised in the South
This was not my first encounter with Harvard’s Implicit Association Tests (IAT). Back in undergrad, I was able to take the race IAT for one of my classes. This time, I decided to take a few different tests. One of the tests I chose was the Weapons-Harmless Objects test which had those two categories as well as white and black people. I kept finding myself frustrated when the left side represented black people and weapons and the right side represented white people and harmless objects. During this test and others I took, I picked up on a pattern. It would often be “white people, harmless, black people, weapon, white, weapon, black harmless, black weapon” and so forth. In this test, my results were essentially inconclusive, meaning I showed no signs of favoring one over the other, given my response time (among other things).
Another test I took was the Fat-Thin test and I chose to do this one due to my own insecurities about my body image. This test made me feel really sad. When fat was grouped with “bad words” such as nasty, gross, etc., I felt really negatively affected. Oddly enough it brought ouf my own insecurities.
To be honest, in these two tests as well as the others I took (Religions, gender-career, and presidential popularity, and race) my results yielded that I generally I showed little to no preference for one group over the other. That made me feel assured because being from the South, I grew up in communities where the biases were rarely implicit and almost exclusively explicit. Despite the fact that I work everyday to be a fair and respectful human to all people, I was scared that these tests would reveal biases that contradicted my actions. The fact that it did not was very reassuring.
In North Carolina, I worked each day to combat the racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more that so many people face each day. In that part of the country, we are the minority and as such, we had to fight even harder to prove the things we cared about were worth everyone caring about. I wish everyone I grew up around could take these tests, and appreciate them.
