{"id":58225,"date":"2013-12-13T08:00:33","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T13:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=58225"},"modified":"2014-06-09T20:44:04","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T01:44:04","slug":"if-you-refrain-from-talking-about-race-people-might-think-youre-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/12\/13\/if-you-refrain-from-talking-about-race-people-might-think-youre-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"If You Refrain from Talking about Race, People Might Think You’re Racist"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this 4 1\/2 minute video,\u00a0Harvard business professor Michael Norton describes a study testing people’s willingness to talk about race. \u00a0He made volunteers play a simple game. \u00a0One picked a face from a field of 12 and the other asked yes\/no questions in order to guess who they had in mind. \u00a0Among the field of faces, six were white and six were black.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot_4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Even though asking if a person was black or white would eliminate half of the contenders, 43% of people did not mention race. \u00a0If the other volunteer was African American, they were even less likely to mention it. \u00a0In that scenario, 79% didn’t ask if the face they had in mind was white or black.<\/p>\n

They reproduced the experiment with children and found that, while little kids would ask about race, by nine or ten, they’d stopped. \u00a0The little kids often beat the older kids at the game, given that race was a pretty good way to eliminate faces.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the people who didn’t mention race were probably trying to appear not racist, but their decision had the opposite effect. \u00a0The partners of people who didn’t mention race rated them as more racist than the partners of people who did. \u00a0Bringing up race was, in fact, a way to signal comfort with racial difference.<\/p>\n

For the whole story, here’s the video:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/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":"

In this 4 1\/2 minute video,\u00a0Harvard business professor Michael Norton describes a study testing people’s willingness to talk about race. \u00a0He made volunteers play a simple game. \u00a0One picked a face from a field of 12 and the other asked yes\/no questions in order to guess who they had in mind. \u00a0Among the field of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":58228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,283,285,1760,20063,1757,37],"class_list":["post-58225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/11\/Screenshot_5.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58225","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=58225"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62917,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58225\/revisions\/62917"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}