Burnwinter wrote:
RC8 wrote:
See, I don't think it does that at all, and I think one could only conclude that it does that coming from a postmodern inter-sectional approach.
Can you please elaborate on that, because I'm not seeing the relationship to a "postmodern intersectional approach" here.
It seems to me that there's nothing postmodern or intersectional about an experimental test that measures subject response to a range of images and words based on a hypothesis about conditioned responses. It's a typical psychological experiment.
It is a typical psychological experiment, and it is somewhat interesting on its own right and for a variety of purposes. I am not saying it is completely worthless, but it does very little (which is not nothing) to inform our understanding of actual racism.
Concluding that a test of this nature could be significantly informative about questions of racism requires you to work with specific definitions and conceptualisations of racism which appeared in post-modernity.
These are the traditional (not post-modern) definitions of racism that pop up through a google search:
"Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior."
or
"The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races".
But while traditional definitions of racism emphasise a belief system, post-modern definitions of racism are often keen to interpret any measurable difference in treatment between races as "racism". It is in this specific context that, using the latter definitions and operating under a series of specific assumptions, implicit bias experiments might be considered informative with regards to racism.
Take a look at the debriefing page in the linked experiment. It gives you a set of results but does not tell you the extent to which preferences are a bias towards in-groups or out-groups, for instance. This is not how one would approach data analysis unless one was working under the assumption that preference for one group or another must mean something other than just a bias towards in-groups.