In America, it’s hard to imagine that having melanin can be a disadvantage. Thankfully, studies are conducted to confirm the silly claims of the melanin afflicted. Case in point, a new study from New York University that found that in tough economic times, lighter-skinned people perceive *us* as “blacker.” And as a result, this twisted sense of self-preservation in the not-so-new anti-hoodie era, opens up room for more discrimination; and, quite naturally the best hidden prejudices of folks like Mark Cuban; and of course, and apologists like Stephen A. Smith who find comfort in blaming black folks for being the victims of racism — yes, institutional and otherwise — continue to occupy space in media circles. Which is unfortunate because they do little to advance the racial equality.
Over at Breaking Brown, Yvette Carnell does a stellar job of breaking it all down as usual.
This from Breaking Brown:
An old adage says that when America catches a cold, blackAmerica catches the flu. A recent study has found that there may actually be a reason for how poorly blacks fair during tough economic times. It seems that blacks are perceived as “blacker” to whites during economic downturns and whites tend to become much more exclusionary.
A study from New York University found that whites become more prejudiced when times are hard and are less likely to prefer someone outside of their own group. Researchers Amy R. Krosch and David M. Amodio determined that the economic environment alters the perception of race.
“Although prior explanations for this phenomenon have focused on institutional causes, our research reveals that perceived scarcity influences people’s visual representations of race in a way that may promote discrimination,” wrote the researchers, according to CBS DC. “Across four studies, scarce conditions led perceivers to view Black people as ‘darker’ and ‘more stereotypically Black’ in appearance, relative to control conditions, and this shift in perception under scarcity was sufficient to elicit reduced resource allocations to African-American recipients.”
The worst the economic conditions become, the “blacker” African-Americans are perceived, which could explain elevated levels of racism and nativism during tough economic times.
Yvette goes on to establish the correlation between much of the racist micro-aggressions of late, and the economic downturn. Which is interesting because all this time I thought it was all the result of a black guy being in the White House. But, as usual,I was wrong.
You can read the study yourself to find out the methodology. Not that how they arrived at this conclusion is unimportant. If you really want to test whether this is real or not in the event that you’re one of those, “Correlation isn’t causation,” types. Or one of those members of the “We’re post-racial — racism is dead,” crowd. Do yourself a favor and ask yourself why did it take six years for black unemployment to reach an all-time low since the recession? Which, ironically happened at the time when all jobs lost under George W. Bush, have been regained by President Obama. And yet, even so, recent black college graduates are having a hard time finding jobs.
This from Al Jazeera:
Recent black college grads ages 22 to 27 have an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, more than double the 5.6 percent unemployed among all college grads in that demographic and almost a threefold increase from the 2007 level of 4.6 percent, before the Great Recession took its toll on the U.S. economy. More than half of black graduates, 55.9 percent, are underemployed.
Even for those who enter the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, areas where grads are the most needed and paid the highest, African-Americans still have a 10 percent unemployment rate and a 32 percent underemployment rate.
The study’s authors blame racism, a faltering economy and an unequal playing field.
“We live in a racist society,” John Schmitt, one of the authors, told Al Jazeera.
“We internalize a lot of views about the way people are that are deeply embedded in a lot of our economic and social policies. It’s extremely complicated, but the first step is that we need to acknowledge that we have a problem.”
Lemme guess: they all wear hoodies and sagging pants exposing their underwear to job interviews.
More on the New York University study from The Root:
“Our research reveals that perceived scarcity influences people’s visual representations of race in a way that may promote discrimination,” the authors said in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America journal, Time reports.
One of the studies went directly to the economic root, asking participants to divide $15 between people in two images. The images of the darker-skinned individuals were seen as “blacker” than they actually were, and they were also given less funds.
According to Time, the researchers pointed out that economic hardship affects how people treat others outside of their own social group.
And thus explains the simple definition of white supremacy, folks. That would be, the preservation or the saving of “whiteness” at the expense of everyone seen as the other — oh, and by “other” I’m referring to the melanin-challenged people of the world. Yep, see how that White Privilege thing works? Clearly it can’t be bad enough to be motivated to become a “freedom fighter: and start a “revolution,” by killing three innocent people like those fucking idiots in Las Vegas this past weekend.