Look in the mirror

My oldest friend asked me to take an online quiz yesterday. It involved word association and a rather complicated exercise in hand-eye coordination. The result, in my case, was that I apparently slightly prefer European Americans to African Americans. Though I have some doubt as to the validity of the methodology, I suppose it makes some sense, given that I am white. My friend, who is African American, also took it and said the results showed a slight preference for African Americans.

My 13-year-old son offered a simple explanation: He said that it is natural for human beings to have an affinity for other humans that look similar to themselves. And his point is well taken, I suppose. A while ago, I read about a study that showed that men and women, when asked to pick the most attractive person of the opposite gender from a collection of photos, overwhelmingly chose a photo of themselves, morphed to be the opposite gender.

Yet, there must be more. My two oldest children, ages 13 and 10, also took the same quiz. They both showed no preference toward either race. My children are white. Using the aforementioned logic, they should have both scored as I did. But they didn’t.

That fact both gives me some hope and some pause about my own prejudices, even if they are not part of my conscious thought. My upbringing was not one surrounded by diversity. Until I was a sophomore in high school and moved to a larger community, I could count my African American classmates on one finger. And even in this larger community, the racial lines were bright. It wasn’t that relations felt acrimonious, at least they didn’t feel that way from my perspective; it was just that the white people didn’t mix with the black people. It was self-segregated or, perhaps more accurately, socially segregated. And I remember acutely the degree of whispering that accompanied anyone who stepped over the bright line: the girl who dated a black boy and vice-versa, the white kid who liked to hang out in that section of the hallway.

I told this story to my son, and he just shook his head. “That’s just messed up, Mom,” he said. Yet despite this and despite that I know he has friends of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, I also have heard him talk of what sounds to me like racial tension in his school. He isn’t sure what to make of it. I think it puzzles him greatly. I can’t help but worry that his neutral stance now, and that of his sister, is more a factor of the blank slate of childhood. Will the world ruin them?

I suppose that the best place to start is to recognize our own biases and to acknowledge that most of us have them, even if they are unconscious. It’s not a comfortable place to be, I suspect because, at some level, we all must know how factually absurd racial bias really is. War, injustice, oppression: all over something that boils down to pigment.

No saving the world tonight. Just the vague sense of unease brought on by the harsh light of a mirror to the subconscious.

It’s worth your time to give it a try. The link is here.

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