Not surprisingly, we tend to hear the most about bigotry and prejudice when it surfaces explicitly: see Oprah Winfrey's recent experience in a high-end Swiss boutique, for example, or the New York police department's stop-and-frisk policies, ruled racially discriminatory
by a judge this week. But the truth is that much prejudice – perhaps
most of it – flourishes below the level of conscious thought. Which
means, alarmingly, that it's entirely possible to hold strong beliefs
that point in one direction while demonstrating behaviour that points in
the other. The classic (if controversial) demonstration of this is
Harvard's Project Implicit, made famous in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. You can take the test here:
whatever your race, there's a strong chance you'll take a split second
longer to associate positive concepts with black faces than white ones.
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