{"id":57322,"date":"2013-09-26T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T17:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=57322"},"modified":"2013-12-04T22:38:32","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T03:38:32","slug":"who-is-an-american-racist-twits-and-the-rest-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/09\/26\/who-is-an-american-racist-twits-and-the-rest-of-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is an American? Racist Twits and the Rest of Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two recent events had a strikingly similar theme. \u00a0Kenichi Ebina won America’s Got Talent and\u00a0Nina Davuluri won Miss America. \u00a0In both instances, other Americans objected to their victories, claiming that they were not really American because Ebina and Davuluri are\u00a0of Japanese and Indian origin respectively. \u00a0 Still other Americans objected to this reaction. \u00a0And yet, as I’ll argue below, most of us share their bias.<\/p>\n

First, thanks to\u00a0Public Shaming<\/a>, we have examples of the reaction on Twitter. \u00a0Reactions to Ebina’s win<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a> \"2\"<\/a> \"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reactions to Davuluri’s win<\/a>:
\n<\/a> \"14\"<\/a> \"12\"<\/a> \"13\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These are stark examples of people who believe that only white people count as American. \u00a0It’s a bizarre position, of course, because people of European descent are immigrants to America, and an overtly racist one as well. \u00a0I don’t lose any sleep over publishing their identities on this blog.<\/p>\n

But, the truth is, the majority of us — even those of us who oppose racism and embrace the idea that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants — hold the belief that America = white. \u00a0We just believe this subconsciously.<\/p>\n

Project Implicit<\/a>\u00a0is an online psychological test that measures implicit beliefs, ones we hold that we’re not necessarily conscious of holding. \u00a0One test is of the association of Asian-ness with American-ness. \u00a0It works by measuring how long it takes us to sort Asian and European faces and American and Foreign famous sites into the proper categories.<\/p>\n

First they ask you to sort faces and places with Asian and Foreign together on the left and European and American together on the right. Like this:<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot_2\"<\/a>Then they switch the bottom designations so that Asian and American are on one side and European and Foreign are on the other. \u00a0For most people, the harms their ability to sort faces and places: it slows down and includes more errors, revealing that their brain implicitly sees Asian and foreign as one category and American and European as another.<\/p>\n

Here’s the aggregate data. \u00a0Almost a quarter of people make no association either way, 60% implicitly believe that Asians are less American than Europeans, and 17% think the opposite.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot_3\"<\/a>The take home message is: even though it’s easy to condemn the twits making overtly racist comments, this is a problem that is much more pervasive and pernicious. \u00a0Even those of us who are horrified by those tweets likely carry the bias behind them.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two recent events had a strikingly similar theme. \u00a0Kenichi Ebina won America’s Got Talent and\u00a0Nina Davuluri won Miss America. \u00a0In both instances, other Americans objected to their victories, claiming that they were not really American because Ebina and Davuluri are\u00a0of Japanese and Indian origin respectively. \u00a0 Still other Americans objected to this reaction. \u00a0And yet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":57389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2127,1784,1821,3920,283,285,1759,20063,37],"class_list":["post-57322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-nation-european-union","tag-nation-india","tag-nation-japan","tag-nation-united-states","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-asianspacific-islanders","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/09\/Screenshot_132.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57322"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59718,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57322\/revisions\/59718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}