Posted on Wed, Jul. 9, 2008
GOP club accused of racism for Obama web banner
A banner slogan on the Pemberton Republican Club's Web site that said, "Obama loves America like O.J. loved Nicole," disappeared yesterday after local Democrats alleged racist campaign tactics.The Web master, Ed Kuck, a recently elected Republican County committeeman, said he had seen the slogan on an Internet site and copied it onto the club's Web page about a month ago as "a joke."
He removed it yesterday from the site, http://homewebs.net/pem, after a community person told him it would offend people, he said.
"I found out it was inappropriate, and I took it down," Kuck said, adding: "I just want to apologize to anybody who was offended, because that wasn't our intention at all."
Pemberton Councilwoman Diane Stinney said a Republican friend had called to tell her about the ad, saying: "I just want you to know I'm very disappointed with our Republican page."
Stinney then reported it to fellow Democrats.
She said the slogan had offended her, adding that Pemberton is a very diverse community.
"We've come a very long way, and we people of different colors still have a lot of growing up to do, but there are other issues that the two [presidential] candidates have to and should be addressing," she said.
Rick Perr, chairman of the Burlington County Democratic Committee, said that, although the phrase was taken down, he preserved a copy of it.
Comparing U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee for president, "to O.J. Simpson, an accused murderer who was found civilly liable for his ex-wife's death, is reprehensible," Perr said in a statement. "Moreover, it is a veiled attempt at inserting race into the political arena, for which the Republicans should be ashamed."
Bill Layton, who heads the Burlington County GOP, immediately denounced the slogan as "despicable" and "the worst kind of tactics."
Layton said, "There's no place in Burlington County Republican politics for this."
He said his organization has successfully backed African Americans and women for county and state legislative offices.
The slogan referenced NFL Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson's acquittal in the 1994 murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman.
The phrase has been making the rounds on Web sites, posters and campaign buttons.
Kuck said he had put it up when he went to add pictures of a rally at Burlington County College for U.S. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential candidate.
Kuck said the Pemberton Republican Club mostly concerned itself with local issues and candidates and probably wouldn't get too involved with the presidential race.
GOP fears charges of racism, sexismIn other words, Republicans should expect a severe backlash if they say or do anything that smacks of politicizing race or gender. They didn’t need an expensive poll to learn that lesson, however.
They could simply have asked Joe Biden, John Edwards, Bill Clinton or any number of Democratic politicians who stung over their choice of words in this campaign already.
GOP officials are certain their words will be scrutinized ever more aggressively. They anticipate a regular media barrage of accusations of intolerance – or much worse.
They seem most concerned about Obama right now.
“You can’t run against Barack Obama the way you could run against Bill Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry,” said Jack Kemp, the 1996 GOP vice presidential nominee, who expressed concern that the party could be reduced to an “all white country club party” if it does not tread cautiously.
“Being an African American at the top of the ticket, if he makes it, is such a great statement about the country,” he added, “Obviously you have to be sensitive to issues that affect urban America. …You have to be careful.”
GOP operatives have already coined a term for clumsy rhetoric: “undisciplined messaging.” It appears as a bullet point in a Power Point presentation making the rounds among major donors, party leaders and surrogates. The presentation outlines five main strategic attacks against an Obama candidacy, with one of them stating how “undisciplined messaging carries great risk.”
“Republicans will need to exercise less deafness and more deftness in dealing with a different looking candidate, whether it is a woman or a black man,” Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway said. “But at the same time, really charge back at any insinuation or accusation of sexism or racism.
“You can’t allow the party to be Macaca-ed,” she continued, referring to a much-publicized remark made by former GOP Sen. George Allen that played a significant role in his 2006 defeat. “I think the standards are higher and the bar is lower for the Republican Party.”
Republicans interviewed for this story uniformly believe they will have to be especially careful. Many expect to be held to a higher rhetorical standard than is customary in campaigns, in part because of perceptions of intolerance that still dog the party.
“Fair or unfair, but that’s going to be a reality,” said GOP strategist John Weaver, a longtime confidant of John McCain. “The P.C. [politically correct] police will be out and the standards will be very narrow.”
The McCain camp is only beginning to explore this dilemma, aides said.
McCain’s strategic team still lacks survey research on either of their likely opponents in the general election, inhibiting their capacity “to discuss it intelligently,” a top adviser said. The campaign is currently occupied with “getting our act together structurally.”
“But my basic thought on it is that McCain is not much of a negative campaigner anyhow,” the advisor said. “When he does get into debates with people it’s on issues, substance. So I don’t think we are going to have to train our candidate not to insult people.”
The potential for mischief reaches well beyond any “undisciplined messaging” that the Republican nominee might engage in. In the case of the Clinton campaign, it has been the surrogates – like former President Clinton – who have been the source of much of the blowback for imprudent language.
“What I would not do is do what Bill Clinton has done,” said Ed Rollins, Mike Huckabee’s
But some on the right are equally wary of unnecessary timidity. According to their thinking, the Democratic candidate begins as the frontrunner in the general election – and that will compel the Republican Party and its nominee to run a fiercely aggressive campaign.
“If we approach this campaign from the standpoint that we need to take political sensitivity training because one candidate is a woman or one candidate is black, I think we are approaching it from the wrong standpoint because that already handcuffs us,” said Republican strategist Tony Fabrizio. “If McCain is afraid, or shies away from taking on Obama because that’s what they worry about, then they’ve lost the battle to begin with.” campaign chairman. “I would not in any way, shape, or form trivialize the strength of an Obama or compare him to another candidate.”
Alex Koppelman
Feb. 25, 2008 | As we've seen today, attacks -- even perceived attacks -- against Barack Obama that seem to touch on his ethnicity can backfire against the attacker. So, too, can attacks on Hillary Clinton's gender. This, the Republican Party seems to be realizing, might pose a problem for the GOP this year: It's almost certain that the Republican candidate will be a white man, while the Democrats will run either a woman or an African-American. And, of course, the Republican Party doesn't exactly have a reputation as the party of tolerance or diversity to begin with.
So the Republicans are already beginning to turn to voters to test what they can and can't say during the general election campaign, the Politico's David Paul Kuhn reports.
The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. ... Republicans will be told to "be sensitive to tone and stick to the substance of the discussion" and that "the key is that you have to be sensitive to the fact that you are running against historic firsts," [a Republican strategist] explained ...GOP officials are certain their words will be scrutinized ever more aggressively. They anticipate a regular media barrage of accusations of intolerance -- or much worse ...
GOP operatives have already coined a term for clumsy rhetoric: "undisciplined messaging." It appears as a bullet point in a PowerPoint presentation making the rounds among major donors, party leaders and surrogates. The presentation outlines five main strategic attacks against an Obama candidacy, with one of them stating how "undisciplined messaging carries great risk."
The strategists quoted were largely successful in portraying their efforts at testing and informing candidates about messaging as an earnest effort to avoid being taken out of context. But perhaps it's not so simple, so much a case of innocents trying to ensure no one misunderstands their totally color- and gender-blind appeals. Maybe they're more interested in seeing how far they can go. It's not as though the Republican Party or its candidates have been saints who've totally avoided racial attacks in recent years; just look back at 2006, and the Republican National Committee's "call me" ad, run against former Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., who is African-American.
-- Alex Koppelman
Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause
By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; A01
Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana's primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.
Here's the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.
"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."
For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"
Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."
Obama campaign officials say such incidents are isolated, that the experience of most volunteers and staffers has been overwhelmingly positive.
The campaign released this statement in response to questions about encounters with racism: "After campaigning for 15 months in nearly all 50 states, Barack Obama and our entire campaign have been nothing but impressed and encouraged by the core decency, kindness, and generosity of Americans from all walks of life. The last year has only reinforced Senator Obama's view that this country is not as divided as our politics suggest."
Campaign field work can be an exercise in confronting the fears, anxieties and prejudices of voters. Veterans of the civil rights movement know what this feels like, as do those who have been involved in battles over busing, immigration or abortion. But through the Obama campaign, some young people are having their first experience joining a cause and meeting cruel reaction.
On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.
Frederick Murrell, a black Kokomo High School senior, was not there but heard what happened. He was more disappointed than surprised. During his own canvassing for Obama, Murrell said, he had "a lot of doors slammed" in his face. But taunting teenagers on a busy commercial strip in broad daylight? "I was very shocked at first," Murrell said. "Then again, I wasn't, because we have a lot of racism here."
The bigotry has gone beyond words. In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: "Hamas votes BHO" and "We don't cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright."
Ray McCormick was notified of the incident at about 2:45 a.m. A farmer and conservationist, McCormick had erected a giant billboard on a major highway on behalf of Farmers for Obama. He also was housing the Obama campaign worker manning the office. When McCormick arrived at the office, about two hours before he was due out of bed to plant corn, he grabbed his camera and wanted to alert the media. "I thought, this is a big deal." But he was told Obama campaign officials didn't want to make a big deal of the incident. McCormick took photos anyway and distributed some.
"The pictures represent what we are breaking through and overcoming," he said. As McCormick, who is white, sees it, Obama is succeeding despite these incidents. Later, there would be bomb threats to three Obama campaign offices in Indiana, including the one in Vincennes, according to campaign sources.
Obama has not spoken much about racism during this campaign. He has sought to emphasize connections among Americans rather than divisions. He shrugged off safety concerns that led to early Secret Service protection and has told black senior citizens who worry that racists will do him harm: Don't fret. Earlier in the campaign, a 68-year-old woman in Carson City, Nev., voiced concern that the country was not ready to elect an African American president.
"Will there be some folks who probably won't vote for me because I am black? Of course," Obama said, "just like there may be somebody who won't vote for Hillary because she's a woman or wouldn't vote for John Edwards because they don't like his accent. But the question is, 'Can we get a majority of the American people to give us a fair hearing?' "
Obama has won 30 of 50 Democratic contests so far, the kind of nationwide electoral triumph no black candidate has ever realized. That he is on the brink of capturing the Democratic nomination, some say, is a testament to how far the country has progressed in overcoming racism and evidence of Obama's skill at bridging divides.
Obama has won five of 12 primaries in which black voters made up less than 10 percent of the electorate, and caucuses in states such as Idaho and Wyoming that are overwhelmingly white. But exit polls show he has struggled to attract white voters who didn't attend college and earn less than $50,000 a year. Today, he and Hillary Clinton square off in West Virginia, a state where she is favored and where the votes of working-class whites will again be closely watched.
For the most part, Obama campaign workers say, the 2008 election cycle has been exhilarating. On the ground, the Obama campaign is being driven by youngsters, many of whom are imbued with an optimism undeterred by racial intolerance. "We've grown up in a different world," says Danielle Ross. Field offices are staffed by 20-somethings who hold positions -- state director, regional field director, field organizer -- that are typically off limits to newcomers to presidential politics.
Gillian Bergeron, 23, was in charge of a five-county regional operation in northeastern Pennsylvania. The oldest member of her team was 27. At Scranton's annual Saint Patrick's Day parade, some of the green Obama signs distributed by staffers were burned along the parade route. That was the first signal that this wasn't exactly Obama country. There would be others.
In a letter to the editor published in a local paper, Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball explained his support of Hillary Clinton this way: "Barack Hussein Obama and all of his talk will do nothing for our country. There is so much that people don't know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can't convince me that some of that didn't rub off on him.
"No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office."
Obama's campaign workers have grown wearily accustomed to the lies about the candidate's supposed radical Muslim ties and lack of patriotism. But they are sometimes astonished when public officials such as Ball or others representing the campaign of their opponent traffic in these falsehoods.
Karen Seifert, a volunteer from New York, was outside of the largest polling location in Lackawanna County, Pa., on primary day when she was pressed by a Clinton volunteer to explain her backing of Obama. "I trust him," Seifert replied. According to Seifert, the woman pointed to Obama's face on Seifert's T-shirt and said: "He's a half-breed and he's a Muslim. How can you trust that?"
* * *
Pollsters have found it difficult to accurately measure racial attitudes, as some voters are unwilling to acknowledge the role that race plays in their thinking. But some are not. Susan Dzimian, a Clinton supporter who owns residential properties, said outside a polling location in Kokomo that race was a factor in how she viewed Obama. "I think if it was somebody other than him, I'd accept it," she said of a black candidate. "If Colin Powell had run, I would be willing to accept him."
The previous evening, Dondra Ewing was driving the neighborhoods of Kokomo, looking to turn around voters like Dzimian. Ewing, 47, is a chain-smoking middle school guidance counselor, a black single mother of two and one of the most fiercely vigilant Obama volunteers in Kokomo, which was once a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. On July 4, 1923, Kokomo hosted the largest Klan gathering in history -- an estimated 200,000 followers flocked to a local park. But these are not the 1920s, and Ewing believes she can persuade anybody to back Obama. Her mother, after all, was the first African American elected at-large to the school board in a community that is 10 percent black.
Kokomo, population 46,000, is another hard-hit Midwestern industrial town stung by layoffs. Longtimers wistfully remember the glory years of Continental Steel and speak mournfully about the jobs shipped overseas. Kokomo Sanitary Pottery, which made bathroom sinks and toilets, shut down a couple of months ago and took with it 150 jobs.
Aaron Roe, 23, was mowing lawns at a local cemetery recently, lamenting his $8-an-hour job with no benefits. He had earned a community college degree as an industrial electrician, but learned there was no electrical work to be found for someone with his experience, which is to say none. Politics wasn't on his mind; frustration was. If he were to vote, it would not be for Obama, he said. "I just got a funny feeling about him," Roe said, a feeling he couldn't specify, except to say race wasn't a part of it. "Race ain't nothing," said Roe, who is white. "It's how they're going to help the country."
The Aaron Roes are exactly who Dondra Ewing was after: people with funny feelings.
At the Bradford Run Apartments, she found Robert Cox, a retiree who spent 30 years working for an electronics manufacturer making computer chips. He was in his suspenders, grilling shish kebab, which he had never eaten. "Something new," Cox said, recommended by his son who was visiting from Colorado.
Ewing was selling him hard on Obama. "There are more than two families that can run the United States of America," she said, "and their names aren't Bush and Clinton."
"Yeah, I know, I know," Cox said, remaining noncommittal.
He opened the grill and peeked at the kebabs. "It's not his race, because I got real good friends and all that," Cox continued. "If anything would keep him from getting elected, it would be his name. It might turn off some older people."
Like him?
"No, older than me," said Cox, 66.
Ewing kept talking, until finally Cox said, "Probably Obama," when asked directly how he would vote.
As she walked away, Ewing said: "I think we got him."
But truthfully, she wasn't feeling so sure.
Staff writer Peter Slevin and polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
See No Bias Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are.
By Shankar Vedantam
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page W12
AT 4 O'CLOCK ON A RECENT WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, a 34-year-old white woman sat down in her Washington office to take a psychological test. Her office decor attested to her passion for civil rights -- as a senior activist at a national gay rights organization, and as a lesbian herself, fighting bias and discrimination is what gets her out of bed every morning. A rainbow flag rested in a mug on her desk.
The woman brought up a test on her computer from a Harvard University Web site. It was really very simple: All it asked her to do was distinguish between a series of black and white faces. When she saw a black face she was to hit a key on the left, when she saw a white face she was to hit a key on the right. Next, she was asked to distinguish between a series of positive and negative words. Words such as "glorious" and "wonderful" required a left key, words such as "nasty" and "awful" required a right key. The test remained simple when two categories were combined: The activist hit the left key if she saw either a white face or a positive word, and hit the right key if she saw either a black face or a negative word.
Then the groupings were reversed. The woman's index fingers hovered over her keyboard. The test now required her to group black faces with positive words, and white faces with negative words. She leaned forward intently. She made no mistakes, but it took her longer to correctly sort the words and images.
Her result appeared on the screen, and the activist became very silent. The test found she had a bias for whites over blacks.
"It surprises me I have any preferences at all," she said. "By the work I do, by my education, my background. I'm progressive, and I think I have no bias. Being a minority myself, I don't feel I should or would have biases."
Although the activist had initially agreed to be identified, she and a male colleague who volunteered to take the tests requested anonymity after seeing their results. The man, who also is gay, did not show a race bias. But a second test found that both activists held biases against homosexuals -- they more quickly associated words such as "humiliate" and "painful" with gays and words such as "beautiful" and "glorious" with heterosexuals.
If anything, both activists reasoned, they ought to have shown a bias in favor of gay people. The man's social life, his professional circle and his work revolve around gay culture. His home, he said, is in Washington's "gayborhood."
"I'm surprised," the woman said. She bit her lip. "And disappointed."
MAHZARIN BANAJI WILL NEVER FORGET HER OWN RESULTS THE FIRST TIME SHE TOOK A BIAS TEST, now widely known as the Implicit Association Test. But whom could she blame? After all, she'd finally found what she was looking for.
Growing up in India, Banaji had studied psychophysics, the psychological representation of physical objects: A 20-watt bulb may be twice as bright as a 10-watt bulb, for example, but if the two bulbs are next to each another, a person may guess the difference is only 5 watts. Banaji enjoyed the precision of the field, but she realized that she found people and their behavior toward one another much more interesting. The problem was that there was no accurate way to gauge people's attitudes. You had to trust what they told you, and when it came to things such as prejudice -- say, against blacks or poor people -- people usually gave politically correct answers. It wasn't just that people lied to psychologists -- when it came to certain sensitive topics, they often lied to themselves. Banaji began to wonder: Was it possible to create something that could divine what people really felt -- even if they weren't aware of it themselves?
The results of one of Banaji's experiments as a young scholar at Yale University encouraged her. She and her colleagues replicated a well-known experiment devised by psychologist Larry Jacoby. Volunteers were first shown a list of unfamiliar names such as Sebastian Weisdorf. The volunteers later picked out that name when asked to identify famous people from a list of famous and unknown names. Because they had become familiar with the name, people mistakenly assumed Sebastian Weisdorf was a famous man. The experiment showed how subtle cues can cause errors without people's awareness.
Banaji and her colleagues came up with a twist. Instead of Sebastian Weisdorf, they asked, what if the name was Sally Weisdorf? It turned out that female names were less likely to elicit the false-fame error; volunteers did not say Sally Weisdorf was a famous woman. Women, it appeared, had to be more than familiar to be considered famous. Banaji had stumbled on an indirect measure of gender bias.
She began scouting for other techniques. In 1994, Anthony Greenwald, Banaji's PhD adviser and later her collaborator, came up with a breakthrough. Working out of the University of Washington, Greenwald drew up a list of 25 insect names such as wasp, cricket and cockroach, 25 flower names such as rose, tulip and daffodil, and a list of pleasant and unpleasant words. Given a random list of these words and told to sort them into the four groups, it was very easy to put each word in the right category. It was just as easy when insects were grouped with unpleasant words and flowers were grouped with pleasant words.
But when insects were grouped with pleasant words, and flowers with unpleasant words, the task became unexpectedly difficult. It was harder to hold a mental association of insects with words such as "dream," "candy" and "heaven," and flowers with words such as "evil," "poison" and "devil." It took longer to complete the task.
Psychologists have long used time differences to measure the relative difficulty of tasks. The new test produced astonishing results. Greenwald took the next step: Instead of insects and flowers, he used stereotypically white-sounding names such as Adam and Chip and black-sounding names such as Alonzo and Jamel and grouped them with the pleasant and unpleasant words. He ran the test on himself.
"I don't know whether to tell you I was elated or depressed," he says. "It was as if African American names were insect names and European American names were flower names. I had as much trouble pairing African American names with pleasant words as I did insect names with pleasant words."
Greenwald sent Banaji the computer test. She quickly discovered that her results were similar to his. Incredulous, she reversed the order of the names in the test. She switched the left and right keys. The answer wouldn't budge.
"I was deeply embarrassed," she recalls. "I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me."
The Implicit Association Test is designed to examine which words and concepts are strongly paired in people's minds. For example, "lightning" is associated with "thunder," rather than with "horses," just as "salt" is associated with "pepper," "day" with "night." The reason Banaji and Greenwald still find it difficult to associate black faces with pleasant words, they believe, is the same reason it is harder to associate lightning with horses than with thunder. Connecting concepts that the mind perceives as incompatible simply takes extra time. The time difference can be quantified and, the creators of the test argue, is an objective measure of people's implicit attitudes.
For years, Banaji had told students that ugly prejudices were not just in other people but inside themselves. As Banaji stared at her results, the cliche felt viscerally true.
IN TIME, OTHER EXPERIMENTS WOULD SUPPORT THE IDEA THAT THESE TESTS WERE MORE THAN JUST AN INTERESTING EXERCISE: The tests were better predictors of many behaviors than people's explicit opinions were. They predicted preferences on matters of public policy -- even ideological affiliations. Banaji and others soon developed tests for bias against gays, women and foreigners. The bias tests, which have now been taken by more than 2 million people, 90 percent of them American, and used in hundreds of research studies, have arguably revolutionized the study of prejudice. In their simplicity, the tests have raised provocative questions about this nation's ideal of a meritocracy and the nature of America's red state/blue state political divide. Civil rights activists say the tests have the potential to address some of the most corrosive problems of American society; critics, meanwhile, have simultaneously challenged the results and warned they could usher in an Orwellian world of thought crimes. Banaji has received death threats from supremacist groups; sensing that the tests can detect secrets, officials from the Central Intelligence Agency have made discreet inquiries.
The results of the millions of tests that have been taken anonymously on the Harvard Web site and other sites hint at the potential impact of the research. Analyses of tens of thousands of tests found 88 percent of white people had a pro-white or anti-black implicit bias; nearly 83 percent of heterosexuals showed implicit biases for straight people over gays and lesbians; and more than two-thirds of non-Arab, non-Muslim volunteers displayed implicit biases against Arab Muslims.
Overall, according to the researchers, large majorities showed biases for Christians over Jews, the rich over the poor, and men's careers over women's careers. The results contrasted sharply with what most people said about themselves -- that they had no biases. The tests also revealed another unsettling truth: Minorities internalized the same biases as majority groups. Some 48 percent of blacks showed a pro-white or anti-black bias; 36 percent of Arab Muslims showed an anti-Muslim bias; and 38 percent of gays and lesbians showed a bias for straight people over homosexuals.
"The Implicit Association Test measures the thumbprint of the culture on our minds," says Banaji, one of three researchers who developed the test and its most ardent proponent. "If Europeans had been carted to Africa as slaves, blacks would have the same beliefs about whites that whites now have about blacks."
As the tests have been refined, replicated and reinterpreted over the past decade, they have challenged many popular notions -- beginning with the increasingly common assertion that discrimination is a thing of the past.
The research has also upset notions of how prejudice can best be addressed. Through much of the 20th century, activists believed that biases were merely errors of conscious thought that could be corrected through education. This hopeful idea is behind the popularity of diversity training. But Banaji suggests such training relies on the wrong idea of how people form biases.
There is likely a biological reason people so quickly make assumptions -- good or bad -- about others, Banaji says. The implicit system is likely a part of the "primitive" brain, designed to be reactive rather than reasoned. It specializes in quick generalizations, not subtle distinctions. Such mental shortcuts probably helped our ancestors survive. It was more important when they encountered a snake in the jungle to leap back swiftly than to deduce whether the snake belonged to a poisonous species. The same mental shortcuts in the urban jungles of the 21st century are what cause people to form unwelcome stereotypes about other people, Banaji says. People revert to the shortcuts simply because they require less effort. But powerful as such assumptions are, they are far from permanent, she says. The latest research, in fact, suggests these attitudes are highly malleable.
Such reassurance has not assuaged test takers, who are frequently shocked by their results. The tests are stupid, and the results are wrong, some say. People have argued that the tests are measures of only hand-eye coordination or manual dexterity. Some have complained about which groups are assigned to the left- and right-hand keys, and about how the computer switches those categories. None of these factors has any real impact on the results, but Banaji believes the complaints are a sign of embarrassment. Americans find evidence of implicit bias particularly galling, Banaji theorizes, because more than any other nation, America is obsessed with the ideal of fairness. Most of the people approached for this article declined to participate. Several prominent politicians, Republican and Democrat, declined to take the tests for this article. The aide to one senator bristled, "You think he is a racist!"
But the tests do not measure actions. The race test, for example, does not measure racism as much as a race bias. Banaji is the first to say people ought to be judged by how they behave, not how they think. She tells incredulous volunteers who show biases that it does not mean they will always act in biased ways -- people can consciously override their biases. But she also acknowledges a sad finding of the research: Although people may wish to act in egalitarian ways, implicit biases are a powerful predictor of how they actually behave.
PEOPLE WHO FIND THEIR WAY TO THE HARVARD WEB SITE THAT HOSTS THE IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST are asked a few questions about themselves. The tests are anonymous, but volunteers are asked about their sex, race and whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative.
The voluntary questionnaires have allowed Banaji and her colleagues to arrive at one of the most provocative conclusions of the research: Conservatives, on average, show higher levels of bias against gays, blacks and Arabs than liberals, says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and a principal IAT researcher with Greenwald and Banaji. In turn, bias against blacks and Arabs predicts policy preferences on affirmative action and racial profiling. This suggests that implicit attitudes affect more than snap judgments -- they play a role in positions arrived at after careful consideration.
Brian Jones, a Republican National Committee spokesman, says the findings are interesting in an academic context but questions whether they have much relevance in the real world. "It's interesting to ponder how people implicitly make decisions, but ultimately we live in a world where explicit thoughts and actions are the bottom line," he says. Volunteers drawn to the tests were not a random sample of Americans, Jones adds, cautioning against reading too much into the conclusions.
Though it's true that about two-thirds of test takers lean liberal, Banaji says, the sample sizes are so large that randomness is not a serious concern. And Andy Poehlman, a graduate student at Yale, has tracked 61 academic studies using the IAT to explore how implicit attitudes predict people's actions.
When volunteers who took the race bias test were given the option to work with a white or black partner, one study found, those with the strongest implicit bias scores on the test tended to choose a white partner. Another study found that volunteers with lower bias scores against gays were more willing to interact with a stranger holding a book with an obviously gay theme. A third experiment found that when volunteers were told that another person was gay, those whose scores indicated more bias against gays were more likely to avoid eye contact and show other signs of unfriendliness. A study in Germany by psychologist Arnd Florack found that volunteers whose results suggested more bias against Turks -- an immigrant group -- were more likely to find a Turkish suspect guilty when asked to make a judgment about criminality in an ambiguous situation.
In another study by psychologist Robert W. Livingston at the University of Wisconsin, Poehlman says, volunteers were given details of a crime in which a Milwaukee woman had been assaulted, suffered a concussion and required several stitches. In this case, Poehlman says, some volunteers were told the perpetrator had been proven to be David Edmonds from Canada. Others were told the guilty perpetrator was Juan Luis Martinez from Mexico. Volunteers were asked what length of sentence was appropriate for the crime: Bias scores against Hispanics on the implicit tests tended to predict a longer sentence for the Mexican.
An implicit attitude "doesn't control our behavior in a be-all and end-all kind of way, but it flavors our behavior in a pretty consistent way," says Poehlman.
In perhaps the most dramatic real-world correlate of the bias tests, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago recently sent out 5,000 résumés to 1,250 employers who had help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston. The résumés were culled from Internet Web sites and mailed out with one crucial change: Some applicants were given stereotypically white-sounding names such as Greg; others were given black-sounding names such as Tyrone.
Interviews beforehand with human resources managers at many companies in Boston and Chicago had led the economists to believe that black applicants would be more likely to get interview calls: Employers said they were hungry for qualified minorities and were aggressively seeking diversity. Every employer got four résumés: an average white applicant, an average black applicant, a highly skilled white applicant and a highly skilled black applicant.
The economists measured only one outcome: Which résumés triggered callbacks?
To the economists' surprise, the résumés with white-sounding names triggered 50 percent more callbacks than résumés with black-sounding names. Furthermore, the researchers found that the high-quality black résumés drew no more calls than the average black résumés. Highly skilled candidates with white names got more calls than average white candidates, but lower-skilled candidates with white names got many more callbacks than even highly skilled black applicants.
"Fifty percent? That's huge," says Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist who led the study and who recently moved to Harvard to work with Banaji. Human resources managers were stunned by the results, he says. Explicit bias, says Mullainathan, can occur not only without the intent to discriminate, but despite explicit desires to recruit minorities. Implicit attitudes need only sway a few decisions to have large impact, he says. For example, if implicit bias caused a recruiter to set one résumé aside, it could be just one of 100 decisions the recruiter made that day. Collectively, however, such decisions can have dramatically large consequences.
SAJ-NICOLE JONI WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO BE HIRED AS AN APPLIED MATHEMATICS PROFESSOR AT MIT. It was 1977, and there were no women's bathrooms in her building. Joni was not particularly surprised. She had battled obstacles all her life. When she first declared -- at age 12 -- that she was going to be a mathematician, her announcement evoked gales of laughter at a family gathering. But opposition only made her more determined. After a successful stint at MIT, Joni worked for Microsoft and then launched a successful business consulting firm called the Cambridge International Group Ltd. Her recent book, The Third Opinion, stresses the importance of seeking diverse points of view.
Joni was recently introduced to Banaji and expressed interest in taking the Implicit Association Test. Like most volunteers, she did not think she had biases and believed strongly in "meeting people as they are, without looking at the color of their skin."
Given Joni's background, Banaji thought it would be interesting for her to take a bias test that examined whether Joni associated men or women with careers in science. Most people find it easier to associate men with the sciences -- but Joni was clearly not most people.
The test came up on the screen. Joni's fingers, trained for many years on the piano, flew as she classified a number of words such as "husband," "father," "mother" and "wife" between "male" and "female" groups. She then grouped words such as "chemistry," "history," "astronomy" and "music" under "science" or "liberal arts." The computer then asked her to group "male" with "science" and "female" with "liberal arts."
When the groupings were reversed, Joni had to group "male" words with "liberal arts," and "female" words with various disciplines in science. She made a mistake in classifying "uncle." She hesitated over "astronomy" and made a second mistake in classifying "physics."
The results popped up: "Your data show a strong association between science and Male relative to Female."
Joni's fingers tapped the table in frustration. "I fought for women to be scientists all my life," she said, incredulous. Banaji nodded sympathetically. Her own results on this test were similar.
While Banaji says such results show the pervasive power that cultural biases have even on those who are themselves the victims of such biases, critics of the Implicit Association Test have asked whether it might be merely measuring people's awareness of bias. In other words, might Joni and Banaji associate men with careers in science precisely because, as women who chose to be scientists, they were intimately familiar with the obstacles? Alternatively, could the tests be picking up something about the larger culture, rather than about the individual herself?
Banaji says that researchers have shown the implicit tests are measuring more than mere awareness of bias, through studies that cancel out the effects of familiarity.
"Is the IAT picking up something about the culture?" Banaji asks. "Yes, but it is picking up that aspect of the culture that has gotten into your brain and mind."
On the race test, for example, a sophisticated brain-imaging study showed that implicit bias tests can predict fear responses among volunteers. Banaji and New York University neural scientist Elizabeth Phelps had white volunteers take the implicit race bias test and then undergo sophisticated brain scans called fMRIs, which measure instantaneous changes in brain activity. Those with the most bias on the implicit tests showed the most activity in the brain area called the amygdala, when photos of black faces, obtained from college yearbooks, were flashed before their eyes. The amygdala is part of the primitive brain involved with fear responses.
But the critics persist. Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior in the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ohio State University psychology professor Hal Arkes argue that Jesse Jackson might score poorly on the test. They cite the civil rights leader's statement a decade ago that there was nothing more painful at that stage of his life "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
If a prominent black civil rights leader could hold such a bias, Tetlock and Arkes ask, what do bias scores really mean? Whatever the IAT is measuring, Tetlock and Arkes argue, it is not what people would call discrimination -- no one would dream of accusing Jesse Jackson of harboring feelings of hostility toward African Americans.
Banaji says Tetlock and Arkes are relying on an outmoded notion of discrimination. The IAT research shows that hostility is not needed for discrimination to occur. Women and minorities can just as easily harbor biases, absorbed from the larger culture, that can lead them to discriminate against people like themselves.
Tetlock says he thinks the IAT research project is drawing conclusions much more sweeping than are justified.
"One of the key points in contention is not a psychological point, it is a political point," says Tetlock. "It is where we are going to set our threshold of proof for saying something represents prejudice. My view is the implicit prejudice program sets the threshold at a historical low."
By the standards of slavery and segregation, the critics argue, delays in mental associations are trivial. "We've come a long way from Selma, Alabama, if we have to calibrate prejudice in milliseconds," says Tetlock.
But the biases that the tests uncover are not trivial, Banaji counters. Their consequences, while subtler, could be devastating. In settings such as the criminal justice system, she argues, lives may hang in the balance.
In their most controversial argument, Tetlock and Arkes asked whether some implicit biases might simply be politically incorrect truths. By comparing national statistics of violent crime against census figures of different ethnic groups, the researchers argued it was more likely for a violent crime to be perpetrated by an African American man than a white man. Would it not therefore be rational, they asked, for people to hold biases against blacks?
Even here, however, rationality did not appear to be the prime mover, Banaji argues. Even if whites and blacks committed crimes at exactly the same rate, Banaji says, people would assign greater weight to the black crimes. This phenomenon is known as an illusory correlation: Aberrational behavior by a member of a minority group is not only given greater prominence in the mind but is also more easily associated with the entire group, rather than just the individual. "When in-groups do bad things, we think it is individual behavior or circumstance," says Jerry Kang, a UCLA law professor who is interested in policy applications of the research. "I screw up because it is a bad day; others screw up because they are incompetent."
THE APPARENT ABILITY OF THE IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST TO DETECT HIDDEN ATTITUDES AND PREDICT BEHAVIOR has raised questions about its potential uses. Might it predict, for example, which police officers are likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man? Should such tests be used to cull juries of people with high bias scores? Might employers use such tests to weed out potential racists? Might employees trying to prove discrimination demand that their bosses take bias tests?
The problem, Banaji says, is that all those uses assume that someone who shows bias on the test will always act in a biased manner. Because this isn't true, Banaji and her colleagues argue against the use of the IAT as a selection tool or a means to prove discrimination. Banaji says she and her colleagues will testify in court against any attempt to use the test to identify biased individuals.
Another reason to limit the IAT's use: Research has shown that individuals who are highly motivated can successfully fool the tests by temporarily holding counter-stereotypes in their minds. (Other attempts to fool the tests -- such as consciously attempting to respond faster or slower -- tend to change results only slightly, if at all, Banaji says.) Banaji hesitates to perform real-world studies that examine, for instance, whether police officers with the most bias are the most likely to shoot an unarmed suspect in an ambiguous situation, because the results of such studies could be subpoenaed and used in lawsuits against police departments. The researchers say they want to keep the focus of the tests on public education and research. They are wary of having the tests used in lawsuits, because if people feared their results might one day be used against them, they would be hesitant to use the tests for personal education.
Banaji says she is keenly aware that psychology has a long history of tests -- starting with the "lie-detector" polygraph -- that have been hyped and misused. Personality tests that lack the rigor of the Implicit Association Test have been widely used by companies in employee training and even hiring. Atop Banaji's desk at work is a bust of a human skull marked with different brain areas once thought to be responsible for different emotions: a representation of the discredited science of phrenology. The bust is a daily warning about the many failed ways science has promised to unlock people's minds and personalities.
But even as Banaji hears from critics who say the Implicit Association Test, which is not patented, will get misused, some proponents tell her it would be unethical not to use the test to screen officials who make life-and-death decisions about others. One test in a British jail showed that, compared with other criminals, pedophiles had implicit associations linking children and sexual attraction. Should such tests be used to determine which pedophiles have been rehabilitated and should be eligible for parole or, more controversially, as a law enforcement tool to evaluate which individuals are at risk of harming children?
"People ask me, 'How do you sleep at night knowing this can be misused?'" Banaji says. "Others ask me, 'How do you sleep at night knowing this won't be used fully?'"
IN SEPTEMBER, 50 TOP LEHMAN BROTHERS EXECUTIVES GATHERED IN A CONFERENCE ROOM ON THE FIFTH FLOOR OF THE PALACE HOTEL on Madison Avenue, across from New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. They were a self-assured, competitive bunch, the type of crowd that usually views academics with skepticism. The executives had assembled for one of the leadership training programs that the firm mandates, and the mood in the room was very much "uh-huh, uh-huh," and "here we go again," says Barbara Byrne, a senior executive at the company who was present.
Banaji told the executives she was going to test their skills of observation. She played a video of a basketball game. Shot in black-and-white, the video showed a swift series of basketball passes between players with rapidly changing positions. Banaji asked the executives to count the number of passes. The group loved competitive exercises. As soon as the short clip was over, answers came flying from all sides: Five! Seven! Eleven!
Banaji asked whether anyone had seen anything unusual? No one had noticed anything out of place. Banaji played the video again, this time instructing her audience not to pay any attention to the basketball passes. Halfway through the video clip, a woman with an open umbrella slowly walked through the frame from one end to the other. Stunned at what they had missed, the executives collapsed in helpless laughter.
"I sat there and said, God, it wasn't subtle," says Byrne. "It was a woman with an open umbrella. It was right in front of your eyes. But you were so focused on counting the basketballs, that part of your brain was not functioning."
Banaji's point was that human beings filter what they see through the lenses of their own expectations. People believe they are acting rationally, but numerous psychological tests prove that subtle cues influence people all the time without their knowledge.
"You thought to yourself, Maybe [hidden biases] could influence me in other ways," Byrne says.
No one knows exactly why people develop implicit biases. Living in a diverse neighborhood does not in itself seem to reduce bias, but having close friendships with people from other ethnic groups does appear to lower bias, the IAT researchers have found. Saj-nicole Joni, who is white, for example, did not have test results showing a race bias and said she has long been close friends with an African American woman. Morgan Walls, an African American woman who works at the Peace Corps in the District, used to work in Thailand and has retained her connections with Asia. Her test suggested no bias toward European Americans or Asian Americans. Jeff Chenoweth, the director of national operations at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network in Washington, appeared tohave no bias against Arab Muslims compared with people from other parts of the world. As he took the tests, Chenoweth, a white man and a devout evangelical, said he was planning to have two Iraqi Shiite Muslims over to his home for Christmas dinner. "I've lived as a minority in an Arab country and have 10 close friends who are Arab," he said.
Banaji herself shows no implicit biases against gays or Jews -- a result, she believes, of an upbringing where explicit biases against those groups were largely nonexistent.
There is growing evidence that implicit attitudes can be changed through exposure to counter-stereotypes. When the race test is administered by a black man, test takers' implicit bias toward blacks is reduced, says Irene Blair, a University of Colorado psychologist who recently conducted a review of studies that looked at how attitudes could be changed. Volunteers who mentally visualized a strong woman for a few seconds -- some thought of athletes, some thought of professionals, some thought of the strength it takes to be a homemaker -- had lower bias scores on gender tests. Having people think of black exemplars such as Bill Cosby or Michael Jordan lowered race bias scores. One experiment found that stereotypes about women became weaker after test takers watched a Chinese woman use chopsticks and became stronger after they watched the woman put on makeup. Interventions as brief as a few seconds had effects that lasted at least as long as 24 hours. But the volunteers were not aware of their attitudes having been changed.
Having counter-stereotypical experiences, in other words, might be much like going on a new diet with healthier food. Just as healthy eating can have a subtle impact on how people look and feel, counter-stereotypical experiences sustained throughout one's life seem to subtly change how one thinks. But, Banaji says, such experiences may not eliminate bias altogether.
Banaji believes that conscious efforts are needed to fight what she calls ordinary prejudice, the primitive brain filtering the world through its biased lenses without the conscious part of the brain being aware of it. Tests have shown, for example, that when people are given a sense of power, they show greater biases than they did before. As a result, workplaces that are explicitly more egalitarian might be implicitly less biased, she says. Since Mullainathan found startling differences in his résumé study, he says, he has come to believe that personal identifiers should be removed from résumés to make evaluations more fair. Another area highly prone to implicit biases is job interviews, says Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School. "What you need to do is look at objective measures separate from the interview."
Banaji and Kang believe the IAT can be used as one measure to determine when affirmative action policies ought to be ended. Rather than pick an arbitrary amount of time -- Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently suggested 25 years -- the researchers asked whether such policies should expire when implicit tests show that people are really evaluating others without bias. Banaji and Kang are less interested in using affirmative action to redress historical wrongs -- they argue it is essential to fight discrimination still taking place today.
Lani Guinier, President Bill Clinton's unsuccessful nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights and now a professor at Harvard, is a fan of Banaji's work. But she says she worries the IAT will usher in superficial changes. The decor on the walls might be important, she says, but it isn't the real problem. "I worry people will think you can depress [implicit bias] scores through sporadic interventions," she says. "That will channel our efforts toward reform in potentially modest ways that don't fundamentally change the cultural swamp in which we are living."
Banaji disagrees. Decades of research in social psychology, she says, have demonstrated that small cues can have powerful impact on the way people think and behave. Finding evidence of implicit bias, she says, is like driving a car and discovering that, although the steering wheel is being held straight, the vehicle is drifting to one side. Banaji's solution: However strange it may feel, the driver should consciously hold the steering wheel against the known bias.
"The implicit system is dumb," Banaji says. "It reacts to what it sees. That is its drawback. But if we change the environment, we can change our attitudes."
ALMOST FROM THE MOMENT BANAJI TOOK THAT FIRST RACE TEST, she says, she has applied her research to her own life. Her office at Harvard is testimony. At eye level on a bookshelf are postcards of famous women and African Americans: George Washington Carver, Emma Goldman, Miles Davis, Marie Curie, Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes. During one interview, she wore a brooch on her jacket depicting Africa. What might seem like political correctness to some is an evidence-based intervention to combat her own biases, Banaji says.
People's minds do not function with the detachment of machines, she says. For example, when she was recently asked to help select a psychologist for an award, Banaji says, she and two other panelists drew up a list of potential winners. But then they realized that their implicit biases might have eliminated many worthy candidates. So they came up with a new approach. They alphabetically went down a list of all the psychologists who were in the pool and evaluated each in turn.
"Mind bugs operate without us being conscious of them," Banaji says. "They are not special things that happen in our heart because we are evil."
But assumptions lead to attitudes, and attitudes lead to choices with moral and political consequences. So, whether she is in a classroom or a grocery store, Banaji says, she forces herself to engage with people she might otherwise have avoided.
Just before Halloween, Banaji says, she was in a Crate & Barrel store when she spied a young woman in a Goth outfit. The woman had spiky hair that stuck out in all directions. Her body was pierced with studs. Her skull was tattooed. Banaji's instant reaction was distaste. But then she remembered her resolution. She turned to make eye contact with the woman and opened a conversation.
Shankar Vedantam covers science and human behavior for The Post's National desk. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
How the Web Version Of the Implicit Association Test WorksBy linking together words and images, the race bias test measures what associations come most easily to mind. People who take the Web version are asked to classify a series of faces into two categories, black American and white American. They are then asked to mentally associate the white and black faces with words such as "joy" and "failure." Under time pressure, many Americans find it easier to group words such as "failure" with black faces, and words such as "joy" with white faces. The test "measures the thumbprint of the culture on our minds," says Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji.
To take the Implicit Association Test, go to https: //implicit.harvard.edu.
To better understand how the test works and your results, go to https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/faqs.html
The Paper Version Of the Implicit Association TestThis test was designed by University of Washington psychologist Anthony Greenwald. It is intended to measure how easily people associate home- and career-related words with either men or women. If you can, time yourself as you do Part 1 and compare the result with how long it takes to do Part 2. Many people find grouping men with home words takes longer than grouping women with home words -- evidence of a possible gender bias. Do you think your results occurred because you took the tests in a particular order? You can repeat the tests again, this time pairing men with career words in Part 1 and women with career words in Part 2. Whichever part took longer the first time should be shorter this time, and vice versa. Results from the Web version are considered more reliable than those from the paper version.
Part 1
The words in this first list are in four categories. MALE NAMES and FEMALE NAMES are in CAPITAL letters. Home-related and career-related words are in lowercase. Go through the list from left to right, line by line, putting a line through only each MALE NAME and each home-related word. Do this as fast as you can.
executive LISA housework SARAH entrepreneur DEREK silverware MATT cleaning TAMMY career BILL corporation VICKY office STEVE administrator PAUL home AMY employment PEGGY dishwasher MARK babies BOB marriage MIKE professional MARY merchant JEFF garden KEVIN family HOLLY salary SCOTT shopping DIANA business DONNA manager EMILY laundry JOHN promotion KATE commerce JILL kitchen GREG children JASON briefcase JOAN living room ANN house ADAM
Part 2
The following list is the same as the one above. This time, go through the list putting a line through only each FEMALE NAME and each home-related word. Again do this as fast as you can.
executive LISA housework SARAH entrepreneur DEREK silverware MATT cleaning TAMMY career BILL corporation VICKY office STEVE administrator PAUL home AMY
employment PEGGY dishwasher MARK babies BOB marriage MIKE professional MARY merchant JEFF garden KEVIN family HOLLY salary SCOTT shopping DIANA
business DONNA manager EMILY laundry JOHN promotion KATE commerce JILL kitchen GREG children JASON briefcase JOAN living room ANN house ADAM
The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Test (Part 1)Much as we like to believe that our perceptions and memories are always accurate, a number of experiments show people routinely make errors in how they see and remember things, without their being aware of it. Read the list of words in this box. Then refer to Part 2.
small
feelers
ugly
slimy
creepy
tiny
crawl
spider
fly
fright
bite
poison
ants
bug
web
The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Test (Part 2)Go through the words in this list, without referring back to the other list. Check all of the words that you recall as being in the previous list. The explanation of the test is below.
bite
feelers
bed
fly
pillow
poison
sleep
bug
dream
insect
ants
web
slimy
night
blanket
Explanation: Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji offers this test in lectures to show how easily a false memory can be created. Most people remember seeing the word "insect" in the first list. The mistake happens because the words in the first box were associated with insects: Unlike a machine, human memory is prone to error, because of reasonable-but incorrect-assumptions. "Mind bugs operate without us being concious of them," Banaji says.
Barack Obama – Muslim apostate?
For Al Qaeda, the answer – and the implication – is clear.
By Shireen K. Burkifrom the May 19, 2008 edition
Stafford, Va. - Osama bin Laden must be chuckling in his safe house. After all, the 2008 campaign could very well give Al Qaeda the ultimate propaganda tool: President Barack Hussein Obama, Muslim apostate.
The fact that Senator Obama – the son of a Muslim father – insists he was never a Muslim before becoming Christian is irrelevant to bin Laden. In bin Laden's eyes, Obama is a murtad fitri, the worst type of apostate, because he was blessed by Allah to be born into the true faith of Islam.
There are two types of apostates according to sharia (Islamic law) and the Hadith (sayings of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him).
The first type is murtad milli, one who converted to Islam and later renounced the faith. The second, and most egregious, type is murtad fitri. It refers to a person born of a Muslim father who renounces his birthright. Two recent examples of the latter are Magdi Allam (a male Egyptian who converted to Catholicism in Italy) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somali-born woman who's now an atheist). Both now face death threats.
According to Islamic jurisprudence, children of a Muslim father – even an apparently nonpracticing one, such as Obama's father, and irrespective of the mother's faith – are automatically Muslims. Most Muslims around the world agree: A child of a Muslim father is a Muslim. Period.
Should Obama become US commander in chief, there is a strong likelihood that Al Qaeda's media arm, As-Sahab, will exploit his background to argue that an apostate is leading the global war on terror (read: attacks against fellow Muslims). This perception would be leveraged to galvanize sympathizers into action.
Remember: Al Qaeda's ultimate goal is to restore the caliphate (the Islamic form of government that would preside over the community of believers) and expand Dar al Islam ("Abode of Islam"). Reaching it requires a long war against all – Muslim and non-Muslim – who don't share its extremist Wahhabi worldview.
Al Qaeda, though, has struggled recently to recruit volunteers for this jihad. While bin Laden retains significant support as someone willing to stand up for Muslim concerns, most Muslims abhor Al Qaeda's terrorist methods whose primary targets are innocent noncombatants.
But an apostate as head of the United States could change this equation. It would be a propaganda boost for Al Qaeda's mission. All one has to do is read Al Qaeda's public statements to recognize how frequently it makes baseless apostasy accusations against fellow Muslims who challenge its message or actions.
That's why Obama is bin Laden's dream candidate.
Once branded as an apostate, President Obama would face enormous difficulties in the foreign policy realm, especially in the fight against terrorism.
He's caught between a rock and a hard place. If he softens the US strategy against Al Qaeda and its ideologues, his apostasy might be an afterthought for Al Qaeda. But if he acts firmly in America's national interest to defeat the terrorist threat, he'd be vilified in an Al Qaeda propaganda campaign for reneging on his "true identity."
Furthermore, his administration would struggle to positively engage the Muslim world, where Islam isn't just a religion, it's the way of life. Conservative Muslim populations that are riddled with poverty and low literacy rates can be more readily swayed to join the cause against the "Great Satan" (the US) if their imams and mullahs shout that it is led by an apostate.
Diplomacy is highly personal. The leaders of America's Middle Eastern allies – such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar – already feel besieged by jihadists and disgruntled citizens who see their governments as toadies of the West. The murtad card could intensify that pressure, so leaders of these countries might be compelled to distance themselves from Washington.
In short, an Obama presidency – which might be fine domestically – could have serious repercussions for US foreign interests at a time when it is especially vulnerable in a tight global oil market.
So far, Al Qaeda has been conspicuously quiet on Obama's candidacy. But that should not come as a surprise. Hoping Obama gets elected, they're probably waiting until he's taken the oath of office to begin branding him a traitor to the faith of his fathers.
Islamic terrorists know that the long road to success lies in stoking the "clash of civilizations." To reach their goal of restoring the Caliphate in a form that fits their worldview, they need massive numbers of Muslims to join their global jihad.
Bin Laden and his followers have already shown their willingness to exploit real or imagined religious schisms to expand their support base. So it's not hard to imagine bin Laden praying that Obama wins this November.
Shireen K. Burki is an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Va. The daughter of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, she spent her childhood in Islamabad, Pakistan, where she studied Islam at school.
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