Click here to make your own. I want to see them!

You have completed the African American - European American IAT.

Thank you for your participation. Just below is a breakdown of the scores generated by others. Most respondents find it easier to associate African American with Bad and European American with Good compared to the reverse.

Many of the questions that you answered on the previous page have been addressed in research over the last 10 years. For example, the order that you performed the response pairing is influential, but procedural corrections largely eliminate that influence (see FAQ #1). Each visitor to the site completes the task in a randomized order. If you would like to learn more about the IAT, please visit the FAQs and background information section.

You are welcome to try additional demonstration tasks, and we encourage you to register (easy) for the research site where you will gain access to studies about more than 100 topics about social groups, personality, pop culture, and more.

One thing that I find endlessly fascinating is how people perceive things compared to how they actually are (and I admit that I am taking a rather narrow view of what reality is). One field of psychosocial study involves implicit association tests, or IATs. These tests are designed to determine what people really think about certain things when they are either unwilling or unable to state their true feelings. For example, a person may have a strong bias against gay people, but is unwilling to say so for fear of being stigmatized socially (which I find rather ironic).

Project Implicit is a Harvard University-based research group that specializes in IATs and getting to the bottom of people's views and perceptions. One interesting IAT, for me at least, is the association between ideas of goodness/whiteness, and badness/blackness. I took the test, but I won't reveal my results until some of you have, because I would rather not influence your test-taking. (Although there are controls within the test that are designed to prevent this type of thing, I would rather not take any chances.)

Please take the test here to reveal information about your association of attributes to black and white people. (You may want to read this first, though.) There are many other tests available as well. I particularly encourage the ones about sexism and sexuality, but all of them are revealing. You don't have to, but I would appreciate it if you either left a brief summary of your results in the comments, or posted the full results in your blog, notifying me in the comments. I think it could be an interesting meme. As always, I am looking for similar information in a more local context. For example, is there a good/bad association to being perceived as English or French? I would LOVE to know, especially if the data were broken down by age and geography. I expect the same question for Native Canadians would be glaring.

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I read Racialicious every day. This is an American site that discusses "America's obsession with race". I really enjoy the discussions about the mass perceptions about large groups of people. I enjoy the fact that someone doesn't actually believe that we are past racism, and that they are not sick of talking about it because it still affects them. To sum up why race discussions are still relevant, I'll quote Lauren Williams of Stereohyped:

I don’t want people to be blind to the fact that I’m black. I just don’t want to be treated unfairly because of it.

I read about all of this stuff but I wonder: I don't live the lives of these black posters. Sometimes I don't think I even compare to the blacks in Montreal, or Toronto if you want to go with an English-to-English comparison. My race is, on the surface, unimportant to those that know and work with me. Sure, there are regular instances of "otherness", which I have been meaning to write about for some time, but by and large, it seems quite different from these Americans. I should correspond with them more directly about them and why I don't always feel qualified to compare myself to them.

Related to this, I think about my own privilege in society. Apparently I wield immeasurable social power because I am a man, even if I am black. I was quite happy to find the following meme that I got from the blogger Tami. Let's see just how privileged I am.