Tuesday, October 30, 2012

AP "Racism Survey" Cooked to Produce Racist Answers?

The WSJ has a James Taranto article that taunts AP for putting out such a silly unintelligent internally-biased survey/poll.
How does the AP read the minds of Americans and quantify this "prejudice" that nobody else can recognize? Here's the explanation:
The AP developed the surveys to measure sensitive racial views in several ways and repeated those studies several times between 2008 and 2012. The explicit racism measures asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about black and Hispanic people. In addition, the surveys asked how well respondents thought certain words, such as "friendly," ''hardworking," ''violent" and "lazy," described blacks, whites and Hispanics. The same respondents were also administered a survey designed to measure implicit racism, in which a photo of a black, Hispanic or white male flashed on the screen before a neutral image of a Chinese character. The respondents were then asked to rate their feelings toward the Chinese character. Previous research has shown that people transfer their feelings about the photo onto the character, allowing researchers to measure racist feelings even if a respondent does not acknowledge them.
The "explicit racism" part of the survey, which is available online, doesn't measure prejudice so much as it propagates stereotypes. If a guy at a dinner party blurts out, "Hey, do you think black people are lazy and violent?" your first thought probably won't be that the other guests must be racist. Yet the designers of this survey impute racism to others when it is they who are raising these stereotypes. The "series of statements" with which participants are asked to agree or disagree are ones that presuppose a left-multiculturalist worldview. Example: "Irish, Italians, Jewish, and other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors." That the researchers regard this as an antiblack sentiment tells you a lot about their political attitudes but nothing about the racial attitudes of survey participants. (Back in 2010, we dissected a survey that used the exact same language to impugn the Tea Party as racist.)

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