May 16, 2013 | 3:52 pm

REMINDER—-TOMORROW NIGHT AN ACCLAIMED PANEL AND AN IMPORTANT TOPIC—-SPACE IS LIMITED

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

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It's a critical time for immigration reform in this country. Washington is getting set to make major changes, the likes of which haven't been seen since the 1980's under President Ronald Reagan. The issues affect families every day, alter economies for years and touch every aspect of American life. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants.

Who has the power to shape this new legislation? How will problems of border security, visas, cultural differences, family unification and more be solved? Why are lawmakers keen to enact change now? Has there been a paradigm shift? Who are the likely winners and losers?

Hear from a truly distinguished panel of experts who will discuss:

Immigration at the Crossroads---Where Do We Go Now?

Prof. Gabriel J. Chin--Professor Chin is a professor of law at the University of California, Davis Law School. He is a scholar of immigration law, criminal procedure and race and the law. He has been widely published in law journals and in lay publications on the issue of immigration.

Jessica Vaughan--Jessica Vaughan serves as Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, DC-based research institute that examines the impact of immigration on American society. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Economist, In the National Interest, Providence Journal, Hartford Courant, Arizona Republic and other publications.

Prof. Dowell Myers--Dowell Myers is professor of policy, planning, and demography at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the USC PopDynamics Research Group. Professor Myers is an interdisciplinary scholar well known for his research on the interaction between demographics and many aspects of public policy. He also is the author of the award-winning book Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America.

Mickey Kaus--Mickey Kaus writes the Kausfiles, a blog at the Daily Caller. In 1999 he was among the first American political bloggers on the internet. He was a candidate for the California Democratic nomination for the US Senate in 2010. Kaus is the author of The End of Equality and has worked as a journalist for Newsweek, The New Republic and Washington Monthly, among others.

Wednesday May 22, 2013
6:30 PM-8:00 PM
The Crawford Family Forum at KPCC
474 South Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, 91105

RSVP or call (626) 583-5232.

May 8, 2013 | 2:45 pm

Political Correctness and Honesty—Time for a Change

Posted David A. Lehrer and Joe R. Hicks

Boston Bombing carnage

The bombing of the Boston Marathon last month has called into question some notions that have been close to sacrosanct in the civil rights/human relations communities for decades.

That act of terror has raised profound questions about the nature of our democracy, the rights of individuals and groups, the tolerance level of the public towards minorities and the balance between individual rights and the public good.

The Boston Marathon bombing has, by virtue of the alleged perpetrators, raised the question as to how far law enforcement has gone and ought to go to prevent the recurrence of similar “lone wolf” acts of terror by Islamist jihadists.

The facile and oft repeated response is that no group should be “profiled.” Lacking “probable cause” that a crime is being planned, no group should be watched nor individual members of a group monitored more closely than others. The traditional notion is that unless a crime is imminent individuals and groups are to be viewed and treated equally and at a distance.

But the Boston Marathon bombing (committed not by foreign nationals sneaking their way onto our shores) callously and murderously executed by seemingly normal neighbors validates the position taken by the New York Police Department (for which it has been widely vilified) that certain groups warrant closer scrutiny and, yes, profiling.

Last year, the NYPD’s Demographics Unit was found to have been gathering information on Muslims not only in New York but in other parts of the northeast United States. They were vigorously criticized in some quarters (the Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about the NYPD’s practices). The ACLU ridiculed the NYPD’s concept of terrorist “radicalization”---however, the Department’s analysis of likely terrorists reads like a primer on the brothers Tsarnaev. Some believe that had the Tsarnaevs been in New York they would have been on the NYPD’s surveillance list and closely watched.

A recent Wall Street Journal column pointed out that the NYPD has thwarted 16 terrorist attacks in the city since 9/11. A fact that it is easy to be blasé about, but the countless lives that weren’t snuffed out or destroyed in the absence of terror is a significant accomplishment.

In response to his critics, Mayor Bloomberg has been refreshingly honest,

the police department goes where there are allegations, and they look to see whether those allegations are true. That’s what you’d expect them to do. That’s what you’d want them to do. Remind yourself when you turn off the light tonight.

The NYPD was equally clear in response to the critics of its monitoring of Muslim student activities and Muslim Student Associations (“MSA”) on college campuses. The NYPD spokesman, in a rather prescient observation last year noted that “Some of the most dangerous Western al Qaeda-linked/inspired terrorists since 9/11 were radicalized and/or recruited at universities in MSAs.”

To acknowledge the obvious is not to stereotype Muslim Americans or Arab Americans; it is simply to state what most Americans can glean from reading their newspapers and watching the news over the past decade--- there is a problem that Islam must deal with.

As The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman recently wrote:

But we must ask a question only Muslims can answer: What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every American military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a violent response, and everything Muslim extremists do to other Muslims is ignorable and calls for mostly silence?

The tendency of opinion molders and other leaders to skirt the obvious and pretend that Muslims and Quakers should be viewed similarly is partially grounded in a belief that breaching political correctness could degenerate into dangerous bigotry and stereotyping of Muslim and Arab Americans (the internment of Japanese Americans haunts our memories).

That fear seems not to be warranted, even if it should always give us pause and temper our actions and words.

Americans have absorbed the message of the civil rights era well---we have learned not to extrapolate from the individual to the group. A problem with some youthful Muslim males does not extend to the colleague at work or the worshippers at the mosque.  We have learned to parse bad guys and potential bad guys from normal folk.

In the light of the series of incidents that have occurred over the past decade---Ft. Hood, the Christmas Day bomber, Times Square, etc. ---there would be ample grounds for suspicion, hostility and nastiness against Muslim Americans were that our tendency.  Yet, an August, 2011 Pew Study found that:

At a personal level, most [Muslims] think that ordinary Americans are friendly (48%) or neutral (32%) toward Muslim Americans; relatively few (16%) believe the general public is unfriendly toward Muslim Americans. About two-thirds (66%) say that the quality of life for Muslims in the U.S. is better than in most Muslim countries.
Strikingly, Muslim Americans are far more satisfied with the way things are going in the country (56%) than is the general public (23%). Four years ago, Muslim Americans and the public rendered fairly similar judgments about the state of the nation (38% of Muslims vs. 32% of the general public were satisfied).

We ought to give ourselves the credit that we have earned and receive honest and frank assessments on matters that can and have impacted life and death (even if some profiling, warranted by data, occurs).

Most of us have learned to resist Islamophobia and the facile resort to stereotyping and bigotry. Religious leaders and civil rights activists have successfully imparted that message to several generations of Americans, and it seems to be sticking.

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April 23, 2013 | 2:52 pm

The Islamophobia Myth

Posted David A. Lehrer and Joe R. Hicks

Photo by Wikipedia.

This past week, three of Robin Abcarian's Perspective columns in the Los Angeles Times concerned the "new worries" of some American Muslims that the "torrent of post-9/11 harassment and hysteria will be repeated." Abcarian started writing about these "worries" even before the suspected Boston Marathon bombers were identified as, in fact, Muslim Americans.

The not-too-subtle subtext of Abcarian's pieces is that Americans harbor hostility toward Muslims that will well to the surface again in the wake of the Boston bombings. After all, as she pointed out, hate crimes against Muslim Americans spiked 1,600% in the months after 9/11 (from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001). In her piece on Friday, Abcarian basically hinges her analysis on an isolated anecdote in Ohio that suggests that some Americans are so mean-spirited and vengeful toward Muslims that they took out their "hysteria" on a 10-year-old kid.

It is a dangerous strategy to extrapolate from an anomalous incident to reach grandiose conclusions, especially in an era of polling and focus groups. There are far more reliable sources -- namely, survey data -- than a mother describing her kid in rural Ohio.

In fact, the evidence shows that American attitudes toward Muslims are the polar opposite of what Abcarian would have you believe. Between 100 and 200 anti-Muslim hate crimes have been committed against Muslims per year since 2002, according to the FBI -- this, in a nation of about 315 million people and thousands upon thousands of crimes. Those crimes occurred over a period in which there was the Times Square bomber, the attempted "underwear bombing" of a passenger place, the Ft. Hood massacre and numerous other dreadful acts and planned acts linked in some way to radical Islam. Just this week Canadian authorities announced they had stopped a planned terrorist attack on a busy passenger train.

This isn't to minimize violence committed against Muslims, but as a point of reference, FBI statistics show that anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2011 numbered 771; that same year, hate crimes against Muslims totaled 157 incidents. (There are between 5 million and 6 million Muslims in the U.S., according to various estimates, and there are about 6.5 million Jews.) Anti-Jewish crimes outnumbered those committed against Muslims by nearly a 5-to-1 margin, yet no rational person would imply that there is a wave of anti-Semitic harassment and hysteria in America. There were more than 2,000 incidents directed at blacks in 2011 (there are about 39 million African Americans in the U.S.). There would have to be nearly seven times as many incidents against Muslim Americans for the hate crimes to equal, on a per-capita basis, the rate of hate crimes against African Americans. So much for our anti-Muslim hysteria.

In August 2011, the Pew Center published a study that belies the notion that Muslims in America are, as Abcarian quoted one person, "treated like crap." The study revealed:

At a personal level, most [Muslims] think that ordinary Americans are friendly (48%) or neutral (32%) toward Muslim Americans; relatively few (16%) believe the general public is unfriendly toward Muslim Americans. About two-thirds (66%) say that the quality of life for Muslims in the U.S. is better than in most Muslim countries.

Strikingly, Muslim Americans are far more satisfied with the way things are going in the country (56%) than is the general public (23%). Four years ago, Muslim Americans and the public rendered fairly similar judgments about the state of the nation (38% of Muslims vs. 32% of the general public were satisfied).

To be absolutely clear, a majority of Muslim Americans evidence greater satisfaction at the way things are going in the United States than the general public by more than a 2-to-1 margin -- hardly an attitude that would survive pervasive harassment.

Americans should be applauded for their continuing resistance to stereotyping and Islamophobia. We get that it is wrong to generalize from an individual to the group. Religious leaders and civil rights activists have successfully imparted that message to several generations of Americans, and it seems to have stuck.

Our broadcast and print media over the last week have made discernible efforts (even in the now-infamous CNN gaffe about an arrest of a "dark-skinned" man) to avoid inflammatory rhetoric or generalizing from individuals to a broader group. Most mainstream reporters seem to be aware of the sensitive work they are involved in and that emotions can run high. Commentators appear to balance the transparently obvious fact of repeated incidents carried out by adherents of militant Islam with not indicting an entire religious group for the sins of the few.

Rather than citing "bad memories and new worries," we should recognize and praise the tolerance that Americans have continued to demonstrate in the face of repeated outrages.*

* A version of this article appeared on the Los Angeles Times Blowback page.

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April 12, 2013 | 3:16 pm

A Great Day

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

General Michael Hayden

As residents of Los Angeles many of us are inundated with invitations for events with all sorts of intriguing topics, alluring speakers, and entertaining extravaganzas. On any given evening we can hear a United States Senator or see a Cirque du Soleil performance in a private home or be awed by a 3-D spectacular about our favorite non-profit organization.

It’s fairly unusual though, for an event to offer substance and interesting speakers across a wide array of provocative and timely topics. That’s why an upcoming conference warrants your attention and attendance, the Annual Leadership Education Forum ("ALEF") sponsored by the American Friends of the Hebrew University (“AFHU”). Full disclosure, I happen to be chairing the day-long conference.

At 9:00 on Sunday, April 28th at the Skirball Cultural Center ALEF will have an array of panelists and keynote speakers that are dazzling.

The aim is to pair local experts with those coming from the Hebrew University to discuss and explore important current topics. The speakers include the former head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, in dialogue with the former head of the Israeli Shin Bet, Ambassador Carmi Gillon, and their moderator will be Nicholas Goldberg the Editor of the Editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times. Another panel will have Jewish Journal editor, Rob Eshman, in a colloquy with Professor Reuven Hazan, chair of the political science department at the Hebrew University and Professor Steven Spiegel, Professor of Political Science at UCLA and director of its Center for Middle East Development. A third panel will explore advances in neuroscience (“Cracking the Brain’s Code”) with a panel moderated by USC’s Executive Vice-Provost, Professor Michael Quick, in dialogue with two Hebrew University professors, Eilon Vaadia and Ehud Zohary, both prominent neuroscientists.

To top off the afternoon, the luncheon speaker will be Patrick Soon-Shiong, one of the pre-eminent scientific and medical minds in the world today. His cutting edge discoveries and patents have altered the approach to both diabetes and cancer. He also happens to be among Los Angeles' most generous philanthropists.

For a program of this heft, the price tag is a relatively modest $125 (including lunch). Space is available and reservations can be made by clicking here.

I hope you will join us.

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April 10, 2013 | 11:15 am

Turning Back the Clock

Posted David A. Lehrer and Joe R. Hicks

Rep. Hahn, Sen. Boxer and Wendy Greuel

The Los Angeles mayoralty race seems to have devolved into a contest to see which of the candidates can rack up more endorsements.

Specifically, endorsements aimed at relevant constituencies that might be swayed by the endorser’s identity, reputation, or cache. From Magic Johnson to Richard Riordan from Jan Perry to Kevin James-- every day brings a new revelation.

But over the past few days there was an endorsement by a group of politicos that was a bit troubling and seemed like a time warp.

On Thursday, several female politicians---including Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Janice Hahn and Senator Barbara Boxer---held a press conference with Controller Wendy Greuel to endorse her for mayor. They staged the conference in front of a display of suffragettes and other historic figures in the women’s movement.

In their remarks (at least as reported in the press) both former Speaker Pelosi and Senator Boxer urged voters to support Greuel, essentially, because she is a woman.

Pelosi noted that Greuel’s election will “lift up people across the country.” The LA Times reported that Boxer urged support for Greuel because if she isn’t elected “we could see a government without one female in leadership…that is totally unacceptable….I've never claimed women are better than men, some women are, some aren't [but without adequate numbers of women and minorities holding elective office] you're not a representative democracy, and democracy is threatened."

Senator Boxer’s take seems to be that in an era when increasing numbers of Americans have evidenced a willingness to elect individuals independent of considerations of race or ethnicity or gender---we ought to turn back the clock—or else.

The reality is that we have an African American president (in a country that is still majority white), that the numbers of women in the Congress of the United States have reached record levels (a 600% increase over the past 34 years) and that this state in particular has had two female senators (both Jewish, to boot) for over twenty years. It is hard to imagine that “democracy is threatened” if a particular female candidate isn’t elected. Across the country, over 17% of the mayors of cities with populations over 100,000 are women---the results in Los Angeles aren’t going to alter that trend.

The Senator then proceeded to offer some crude stereotypes to justify her assessment of why Angelenos have to elect a woman as mayor, “women tend to be more collaborative…women tend to be less interested in being something more interested in doing something.”

Twenty years ago this kind of vulgar appeal to identity politics might have been more understandable---at least to those who saw race/ethnicity/gender as relevant criteria for electoral decisions---they arguably had a point to make that touched upon reality. But today urging that race/ethnicity/gender criteria should be determinative is insulting, inaccurate and dangerous.

Candidates need to be evaluated because of their positions on vital issues, because of their track records as elected officials and because of their plans for the future---- not because their gender tends to be “more collaborative” or because there aren’t more of “their kind” in office.

If the words of Boxer, Pelosi et al. were offered by a white candidate or a male candidate their offensive nature would be transparently clear---that is hardly a reason to vote for someone. Blatant appeals to “tribal” voting of any sort are, hopefully, an anachronism that we have begun to transcend. Issues, character, platforms, plans----not happenstances of birth---- ought to dominate our political dialogues.

Earlier this decade in an LA Times' op/ed, State Senator Gloria Romero (both a female and a Latina who might have benefited from “tribal” voting) sagely perceived a trend that she hoped would continue:

But ultimately, we trust the voters. Most citizens cast their votes the American way -- they vote for the most qualified candidate, regardless of race or gender. All we have to do is compete for votes the old fashioned way: by earning them.

Hopefully, the “American way” of assessing candidates will prevail and appeals to other, irrelevant, criteria won’t.

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March 12, 2013 | 1:21 pm

Bullying and Reason

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

Today’s New York Times has a thoughtful op/ed by Slate’s Emily Bazelon, the author of “Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.” Bazelon writes about the problem of bullying and some of the myths that surround the issue.

Bullying is a particular form of harmful aggression, linked to real psychological damage, both short and long term. There are concrete strategies that can succeed in addressing it — and they all begin with shifting the social norm so that bullying moves from being shrugged off to being treated as unacceptable. But we can’t do that if we believe, and tell our children, that it’s everywhere.

The definition of bullying adopted by psychologists is physical or verbal abuse, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance. In other words, it’s about one person with more social status lording it over another person, over and over again, to make him miserable.

But when every bad thing that happens to children gets called bullying, we end up with misleading narratives that obscure other distinct forms of harm.

Although she has authored a book on the subject and would stand to benefit from the increased attention and concern about bullying, she admonishes her readers to be careful. The media hysteria that sees an epidemic of bullying virtually everywhere and sees the normal slights and tiffs of childhood as evidence of a culture gone bad has prompted her caveat that kids haven’t suddenly turned rotten.

In fact, our concerns about this recently discovered ill has resulted, as Bazelon points out, in adults in some ways contributing to the incidence of bullying by adopting laws that “straightjacket their response to a bullying accusation, rather than allowing them to use their judgment and take account of context.”

I had first-hand experience of this many years ago when one of my sons and one of my nephews (now both in their thirties) attended an LA Unified middle school and were involved in a physical altercation with a would-be bully. They responded to the bully’s assault in kind and ended his obnoxious behavior.

My son, nephew and I were called into the vice principal’s office and told that the LA Unified’s rule was that a kid who responded in any way other than to call a teacher (or other adult) to help was viewed as equally culpable as the bully and that both (bully and victim[s]) would be equally punished.

I distinctly remember telling the v-p that those weren’t my rules and that I have told all of my kids (my nephews and nieces had been similarly admonished) that if they are intimidated or pushed around by anyone they have my ok to respond in kind, “you don’t have to take s**t from anyone” were my exact words to them. I told the v-p that if the District wanted to assign detention to my kid and nephew that’s their decision, but it will have no effect on how my kids act in the future. Our rules differ than LAUSD’s.

If that rule still obtains in the LAUSD there is little doubt that it helps foster more victims and bullies. The failure to take into account context and kids’ needs to respond to intimidation has helped create an asymmetry that Bazelon recognizes, “Bullying victims need sympathy; they also need help learning to be resilient” (emphasis added). Treating victim and aggressor alike encourages passivity and victimhood, not resilience.

Ultimately, though, for all the bullying hysteria, the “epidemic” may be a manageable problem that can be dealt with by reasoned responses,

by many measures, teenagers today are faring better than they were a generation ago. The rates of teenage pregnancy, binge drinking and drunken driving are down. So is violent juvenile crime and even fighting on school property.

Those heartening developments help explain why bullying is holding our national attention: as a society, we have the wherewithal now to attend to a psychological harm that has long deeply affected kids, but which adults used to mostly ignore. Bullying is a problem we can and should address. But not if we’re wrongly led to believe that it’s everything and everywhere.

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March 11, 2013 | 4:10 pm

History and Its Course

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

Kids, young adults and ideologues of different stripes often see the world as a straight line progression---the world gradually, but inevitably, becomes more enlightened. Martin Luther King, Jr. summarized the view, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Many of us, as we get older and witness the recycling of issues and debates, are less sanguine about the course of history.

I am by nature an optimist and generally subscribe to the notion that as times change, as the benefits of tolerance and equality and liberty become obvious, more and more folks will become advocates and adherents of policies that promote those virtues.

That was what made reading a Wall Street Journal review last week so fascinating. In a museum review, Richard Holledge, describes a bit of antiquity that went on display at the Smithsonian last Saturday, the Cyrus Cylinder---a 2,600 year old football-sized barrel of clay with cuneiform writing on it. The writing proclaimed the King of Persia, Cyrus’, intention to allow freedom to the diverse peoples he ruled over after conquering Babylon. His realm stretched from Turkey to India.

The cylinder proclaims:

I collected together all of their people and returned them to their settlements, and the gods of the land of Sumer and Akkad which Nabonidus---to the fury of the lord of the gods---had brought into Shuanna, at the command of Marduk the great lord… I returned them unharmed to their cells, in the sanctuaries that make them happy. May all the gods that I returned to their sanctuaries…. every day before Bel and Nabu, ask for a long life for me, and mention my good deeds…I have enabled all the lands to live in peace.

Given the vastness of Cyrus’ empire, it is instructive that he decided that allowing each group to worship their own gods and to return to the lands from which they came were the best policies.

His actions inspired Jews, whom he allowed to return to Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon, to describe him in the Book of Isaiah as “the Lord’s anointed.” Thomas Jefferson, by virtue of an ancient history of King Cyrus (Xenophon’s Cyropedia), viewed him an inspiration for the Declaration of Independence.

The Cylinder was only re-discovered in 1879, yet for over two millennia its author inspired those who sought to follow in his path.

Clearly the “arc of history” is exceptionally long---especially for the very region ruled by Cyrus which today rejects most of the notions that prevailed over two millennia ago. When it will bend towards justice again is anyone’s guess.

The Cylinder is a reminder that history and its course are fickle, unpredictable and don’t inevitably follow a straight line upwards. Progress isn’t assured, but rather is the result of leadership, determination and the willingness to protect and defend its fruits.

The Cyrus Cylinder will be coming to Los Angeles, at the Getty Villa, later this year (October 2- December 2).

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February 14, 2013 | 5:33 pm

Window into our minds?

Posted David A. Lehrer and Joe R. Hicks

Having been in the civil rights field for several decades, we have read and been offered numerous explanations for the inequality that exists in America. From it being the product of overt racist beliefs on the part of bigots, to socio-economic explanations to historic discussions of the remnants of slavery--some analyses last, others prove ephemeral and faddy.

In recent years, a novel theory has taken hold that suggests that people harbor biases and prejudices of which even they are unaware ("implicit bias") and that those biases manifest themselves in the real world as discrimination and inequality.

The rise in popularity and acceptance of the Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) has offered what seemed like “evidence” that despite protestations of innocence, most of us harbor bias and that, as one advocate (Eva Patterson of the Equal Justice Society) has written—it is “social science research” that needs to be used “to prove that discrimination exists even when it is not tied to an overt act.” Patterson argues that the IAT is proof positive of just how pervasive and dangerous bigotry is---it has a hold on us of which we are unaware and it pervades how we act in the world. Patterson, and others, urge that the realtively new "science" needs to be drummed into the heads of judges and legislators to help them understand the world.

The IAT has become an exceptionally useful arrow in the quiver of those who argue that not much in America has changed, that we are a racist and discriminatory society that simply has a veneer of acceptance and tolerance. There are too many “civil rights” organizations who are wedded to the notion that the apparent increasing tolerance in America is a charade and that the disparities among racial and ethnic groups in terms of unemployment, income, health outcomes, etc. remain because of racism, mostly of the covert, subliminal kind. It’s a theme that gets hammered away at within academia, at conferences and in articles galore. America remains profoundly racist, it just doesn’t know it; so the message goes.

We have long been uneasy about questioning the data that the IATs offer, we are neither academics nor statisticians, but something seemed amiss. Virtually every poll that has come out over the past decade dealing with attitudes on race (many from the highly respected Pew Center) have evidenced greater tolerance and acceptance of differences based on race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation among virtually all cohorts of Americans. The data isn’t even close. We have written often about these studies over the past decade.

Additionally, and not incidentally, Americans elected an African American president of the United States and did so in no uncertain terms. His being black was not an obstacle to a majority of Americans (not just a plurality in 2012) electing him our commander-in-chief.

And yet the IATs were this nagging data set that seemed to indicate that the optimism of all the polls and the other indicia of progress might be illusory—that we were unconsciously bigots and none of us really knew when or where or how that hate it will manifest itself in what we do.

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article by Professor Daniel J. Levitin reviewing a book about IATs---Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. The article is worth a read.

What it elegantly does is point out the errant assumptions that underlie the notion that a test can reveal our subconscious and know how we think about others,

Ms. Banaji and Mr. Greenwald, like other IAT proponents, claim that the test detects biases better than simply asking people. The IAT has received a great deal of attention since it first came out 15 years ago. Here, it was said, was a test that relied not on subjective judgments but on objective measures, a simple test that could tell us once and for all who is racist or sexist or ageist, even when observable behavior revealed nothing of the sort. The IAT, the authors write, "enabled us to reveal to ourselves the contents of hidden-bias blindspots."

Levitin points out some of the IATs mistaken assumptions. The “test assumes that your attitude towards whites is complementary to your attitude towards blacks---in statistical terms, that they are negatively correlated. If you hold high opinions of whites, in other words, you cannot simultaneously hold high opinions of blacks….(in fact) the two attitudes are distinct and statistically separate.”

The test also assumes, as Levitin points out, that a test taker’s word associations are a window into to what he or she really thinks. Levitin clarifies why assuming that a word quickly associated with whites or blacks doesn’t mean much beyond that two words may go together in someone’s mind,

Another confounding factor is that the brain is designed to detect patterns of co-occurrence and responds to learned associations based on a lifetime of hearing word pairings. If I hear the word "bread," the first word that comes to mind might be "butter," even if I never eat butter, never buy it and for that matter don't even eat bread. But associations aren't the same as biases. My quickness in conjuring one word when hearing another says nothing about an "implicit bias." It says even less about how I would treat another individual. Common sense would tell you this.

As Levitin sets forth an even more profound concern, “its results don’t predict real world behavior very well.”

A reasonable criterion for the IAT would be the ways in which people act in real-world situations. As it turns out, a team of respected social scientists (including Hart Blanton, James Jaccard, Greg Mitchell and Phil Tetlock) have analyzed data on how individuals who had previously taken the IAT acted and reacted toward white and black people during a real conversation. Did they laugh? How much eye contact did they make? How much did they fidget? All told, a cluster of 16 behaviors were tracked. Those who received the highest scores for "anti-black bias" on the IAT showed no bias toward blacks at all. Other researchers have shown that high "anti-black" scores on the IAT actually predict that a person is more likely to respond compassionately toward blacks.   

It appears, then, that the IAT is claiming to find racism, ageism, sexism and all sorts of interpersonal biases in people who probably don't possess them. When author Malcolm Gladwell took the IAT, it showed that he, the son of a black woman, is racist against blacks. Mr. Gladwell was suitably shocked and distressed. But if a test gives results that are so far-fetched, it's time to start questioning the validity of the test.

Next time someone cites the Implicit Association Test to you as evidence of how truly “racist” America is, send him the link to the Levitin article and common sense might win out.

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