So, I’m really curious to know what you guys think about this. In the wake of the Mike Brown debacle, NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof apparently discovered that he might be “a little bit racist” based on the results of a shooting game he played, which was set up to measure “implicit associations and the demographic variables” affecting them. The game calls for you, the self-defense shooter, to identify threats and make shoot/no-shoot decisions.
Besides learning that “speeded” is actually a word, I learned that adrenaline and nerves had as much to do with my performance as anything. Oh, and I learned that a wallet is more easily identifiable as non-threatening than a cell phone or a soft drink can. And although at first I was really curious about how I’d do, eventually fatigue (boredom?) affected my choices too. Honestly I ended up abandoning the game after I my brain started wandering and I lost interest. It only takes a few minutes according to the instructions, but my ADD kicked in I suppose. So I’m not sure what my ultimate “score” would have been.
Anyway, if you’re interested, here’s a link to the “game” or you can click the image below. Try it out, see how you do, and let me know what you think — about the game or about the Kristof article.
The terrible truth is that we are all, or very nearly all, “a little bit racist”. There is within us a deep seated distrust of those who are different from us. It is not necessarily a conscious bias, and if one grows up in a really racially diverse environment such that their formative experiences don’t suggest that someone is different (or at least not very different) because of the their hair, or skin color, or the shape of their eyes, it may not manifest itself as any sort of racism, but that person is nevertheless likely to be “prejudiced” towards those they see as being different from themselves. It’s an evolutionary thing, the author John D. MacDonald described it as (paraphrasing here) “the visceral recognition that one is a red monkey sitting in a green monkey tree”.
Were Kristoff a shooter, he’d likely be looking for clues other than the race of a potential assailant, but without having any training or experience, perceiving threats from those who are clearly in some way different from himself is hardly surprising.
Well said. I think the point that “we’re all a little bit racist” (using that term very loosely) was Kristof’s ultimate conclusion, though the journey might have been a bumpy one.
My score in the game never rose above zero. I frequently ran out of time to decide, and I often decided not to shoot the men with guns. I think it’s because I very much wanted not to shoot “good guys.” I shot one “good guy” without a gun during the practice session, but none during the real test.
For reasons that others have already stated, the game was absolutely unlike a real “shoot/no shoot” decision, and of course that’s because it wasn’t designed to simulate that. It was designed to encourage people to make snap judgements, so it could measure how race affects them.
You know, I wonder if the researcher is a shooter…
The whole thing seems silly to me. Both the game and the article.
First off, unlike video games, if a person is paying even a modicum of attention to what is going on around them, people do not just appear out of nowhere. The premise, of course, is that if you are surprised by a bad guy, and he has a gun drawn, you’d be dead if he wanted to kill you. And that is quite likely to be true, except that the bad guy with the gun, as far as we know, does not pop in and out of our plane of existence, so he must have come from somewhere. We just didn’t notice him, or were meandering around in condition white–generally considered a bad idea. But it isn’t at all realistic. This leads to the second point.
In real life, we have time–maybe not much, but we have time. We have time to see things developing, and time to make our decisions–and that may influence our decision far more than a generic bad guy suddenly popping up in front of us with a soda can or a gun.
I let the first time through pass with no interaction from me at all. I pressed no keys, and merely tried to decide, armed or unarmed. The game claims you have less than a second to see the person holding an item, either a gun or a cell phone or a wallet, etc. Even with no interaction from me, since I was trying to locate hands on a person who pops up out of thin air, I never noticed race, or at least not consciously until after the scene had shifted to the next one. While the next scene was loading, I was able to think, okay there was a white guy with phone, or there was a black guy with a wallet, etc. But the actual moment when the person popped into existence, my first goal was to find the hands. Race was irrelevant entirely in my mind.
As for the article, the writer makes the usual bad associations and numbers games, then blames racism as the problem. Doctors don’t give pain meds to blacks or Hispanics at the same rate as whites, according to the article. Going to the study source pdf, the entire study was set up in advance to blame racism as reason, when there are a multitude of possible reasons for this. I know lots of Hispanic men and women, some through work, some as neighbors, etc. Their cultural view of machismo and what it is to be tough gives me an obvious answer that is immediately apparent–Hispanic men, for example, don’t ask for the meds because they don’t want to appear weak or less than perfectly masculine. It’s the same mentality that leads a football player to take the field again despite not being able to tell you what his own name is because he just got his bell rung. He’s too tough to sit on the sidelines.
“Put me in coach.”
“How many fingers do I have up?”
“Thursday! Put me in coach.”
If they don’t ask for the meds, and therefore are not given the meds, is it racism that caused it? It must be…
The writer mentions the police department with new body cameras and a sudden reduction of complaints the police. That has nothing to do with racism. The complaints against police dropped because the police knew their actions were being recorded, and adjusted their actions accordingly. The article mentions nothing about how racial interactions were before or after the use of body cams. So, why tie them in? Because the officers know about the cameras, they’ll be less racist? What if they weren’t being racist before, but simply overbearing authority figures who get off on their personal power trips while on patrol?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the police having body cams. But claiming racism (closet or otherwise) as a reason to get them is as stupid as using school shootings (a statistically rare event) as a reason to pass new anti-gun legislation.
So sorry for the long reply.
Wait a second…. You mean bad guys don’t materialize out of thin air??? 🙂
…And long replies are welcome here! (Thoughtful ones, that is…)
Good Lord FATS Simulator reincarnated as an on line video game. Useful tool but I’m not certain of the “little bit raciest” kicker. Being street smart is an acquired realism that’s coldly practical and a bit gritty.
Honestly, when I played the game, I completely forgot about the whole race factor. I was too busy trying to tell the difference between a cell phone and a pistol!
On the street when things got really intense on a felony stop or “man with a gun” call you forgot all about what race the subject was and focused on “working the call”. Fear and adrenalin dumps narrow things down to staying alive and trying not to screw things up. Good training saves lives, its also one of the many reasons I’m a proponent of Accreditation in LEA. To achieve accreditation real “nationally recognized” policies, procedures, guidelines and training have to be implemented and followed. If your LEA isn’t accredited then insist it apply to do so.
So, SportPilot (or anyone who cares to comment), is there nothing to the Kristof article at all? The gist:
How ’bout it? Or his theory that just maybe people of all races “have a more impulsive trigger finger when confronted by black men and are more cautious with whites,” albeit only by a fraction of a second. Not buying it?
I couldn’t get to the end. I finally quit. Got to 300 though, then back a bit.
Nice! Sounds like you started tiring like I did…