Who suggested throwing Moses into the Nile as a baby?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: June 7, 2008 at 1:57 am by Eve Tushnet

2008-06-07T01:57:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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THE SUBTEXT IS RAPIDLY BECOMING TEXT: Here I am taking those Implicit Associations tests. This post ends on a rough note….

[and eta: I’m not sure how much all this “tells you,” but it struck me as interesting and worth posting about, especially given that I’m–say it with me!–self-obsessed.]

The first one told me I somewhat preferred, in this order, Clinton-Obama-McCain. My answer to the initial “about whom do you feel most fluffy?” question was (I think) McCain (come on, he’s a war hero)-Clinton (I felt sorry for her)-Obama (messiah), although in terms of politics… nothing neither way, you know? I guess McCain if you don’t think his waterboarding vote is indicative of future results; then Obama because he’s Obama; then Clinton ditto. In reality, I can’t justify a vote for any of them, and answered “Ron Paul” to all the “how would you vote?” questions out of sheer perversity. ANYWAY, what I’m trying to say is that I think this implicit association test accurately reported my subconscious fluffy feelings as vs. my conscious fluffy feelings, but didn’t accurately guess how I might vote, which gets at both the strengths and weaknesses of the method. Your raw self isn’t necessarily your real self–the self who acts in the world is conditioned by, but not limited to, your instinctive emotional reactions. But see below.

Anyway, then I took a gay/straight association test, and hilariously became one of the 3% of people who “strongly” prefers gay to straight. LOL OBVS.

In all seriousness–on the one hand, this totally shores up my self-image! On the other: In the previous test, I screwed up a lot at the beginning, because I didn’t really understand how the site worked, but eventually I settled down. In this test, I knew how it worked, and still noticed a genuine stuttering in my typing fingers when I was asked to associate heterosexuality with positive words and homosexuality with negative–like, I could kind of tell that the test was going the way it was, even though I’m surprised it was pronounced enough to be dubbed “strong” rather than “slight” or “moderate,” which are the other two possibilities.

Also, it’s hilarious to me that many of the “negative” words in this test (and not the previous one, which tended toward words like “friend” and “enemy”) are words with which I have an ambiguous association at worst–“humiliation,” “painful,” and “tragic” are not words I use exclusively in negative contexts! I don’t know how much that would have affected the results.

In a shocking twist–seriously, I expected this to come out differently and a lot more humiliatingly (there’s that word again)–I apparently show no preference between black and white, like 17% of test-takers. …But see below.

Again seriously, I suggest this is anecdotal evidence in favor of Afrocentric elementary education for white children. The negative words in this test seemed to overlap a bit with the gay one, but with more emphasis on disgust and maybe self-conscious cruelty rather than self-righteous pity, i.e. “horrible” and “agony” rather than “humiliation” and “tragedy.”

And for the fourth test, I chose Jews vs. the World… and ended up “strongly” preferring Jews, like 14% of test-takers. That’s another one I wasn’t expecting at the beginning of the test… but by the end, I realized I was operating almost on autopilot in associating pleasant words (“celebration,” lol this is a test about Purim isn’t it?) with Judaism and negative words (“brutal,” which… yeah, I can see where you’re getting that) with “other religions.” This turned out to feel very similar to taking the gay-straight test, in that I could kind of tell while it was happening that I was moving quickly to associate one side with good stuff and the other with bad. I don’t know what that means. I do remember a wry grin when I’d “mistakenly” (the site notifies you when you screw up in this way) assigned the New Testament to the Jewish side…. By the way, this is a test where “no preference” gets the highest percentage (24%), and “so nice and Jewy!” seems more predominant than “Springtime for Hitler.” I expect that’s in large part an artifact of who takes these tests.

In a genuinely bizarre result, my subconscious “slightly” prefers Arab Muslims to others, apparently. I mean–I’ve known enough Ay-rabs to, I hope, not be a little bitch, but on the other hand, I just don’t think this result accurately reflects my real degree of free-floating negativity toward Arab Muslim culture. (And yeah, I know that both prejudice and reason play a role in that, and whether you think it’s mostly the former or mostly the latter I’m kind of ok with either, as long as you think we can talk.) As far as the experience of taking the test goes, I was not nearly on autopilot the way I was with the gay/straight and Jew/Gentile ones–I had to focus on this one. And I wonder if this result is actually an artifact of my having taken several of these tests already now. Do you get used to producing neutral responses? I suspect you do, which is why I’ve preserved the order in which I took the tests, so you can take the later ones with even more grains of salt than you would otherwise. I’m guessing the makers have discussed this somewhere on the site, but… I am as lazy as a white man. 😉

Or, whoa! Is this actually about black people?? The “Arab” associations are all just names, like the white ones–and lots of the “Arab” names are names I’ve really only personally encountered with your basic average black guys. (Why no women? Why Yousef, but not Fatima? Am I misremembering that?) I mean, I’ve personally known zero Arabs named Yousef, but at least one black kid; “Karim” is the hero of Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia, but also Kareem Abdul-Jabbar… you know? I have no idea what role this plays in my results.

I had “little or no” association between Native Americans and American-ness vs. foreignness… but on a more subjective level, I could feel myself struggling with this one, taking longer with each click, not going on autopilot. I think there’s a level of confusion here which the test doesn’t quite capture, and which, again, is very much not in keeping with my actual beliefs, but which did make itself felt subjectively while I was taking the test. (So it’s useful even when the results aren’t super illuminating.)

On the other hand, of course, one could argue that pictures of landmarks I’ve never seen are a fairly awful way of indicating us vs. them; and there was one white lady I kept coding as Indian, which, you know, I bet she was a Cherokee princess in a former life, like every other white lady. So although I’m willing to accept that I’m prejudiced here (how could I not be?), I also don’t think this test is set up quite as well as the previous ones. If you show me a big rock, I’m not sure how I should know that it’s Wyoming rather than Nepal unless I read the caption–and by the time I read the caption, I’ve already gotten past the initial gut response which is supposed to be the thing these tests capture.

…Oh. Well, okay, here’s one that hurts. “Your data suggest a strong association of Black Americans with Weapons compared to White Americans.” That makes me more trigger-happy than the most common response, by the way… which is, uncomfortingly, only a “moderate” association between black folk and gunplay.

And again–I could feel this one as it was happening. Incredibly creepy… in large part because, out of all the “implicit associations” tests I took, this is by far the one most likely to produce hair-trigger responses in real life. I understand why people counsel women to “trust your gut”–it’s all too easy to convince yourself that the guy walking just too close behind you late at night isn’t really trying to scare you. But I see my “results” screen here and I think of all the black guys who were shot dead while reaching for their i.d. The other implicit-assocs tests can be to some extent corraled and corrected for by the conscious mind. Physical fear, on the other hand… I don’t know what to do with this. Except to post it, and say, look at this.

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