Recently in Memes, etc. Category

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.

I have to come up with ten more things? Fine.

1. It's right here.

2. I have an "enemy". I often fantasize about beating him up. This person actually exists, but there is no actual reason for me to dislike him the way I do.

3. Related to the last one, I have very recently discovered that occasionally I want to destroy certain powerful men. It's not a very nice characteristic; it's the type of thing that leads people to do horrific things to people just because they are better than they are. I can only truly think of two such people in recent memory. There was one from my childhood though. We later became pretty good friends for a time. He's a doctor in Toronto now.

Tagged. Red = done. Please ignore the bad formatting and special symbols.

01. Bought a round of drinks in a bar
02. Swam with dolphins in the ocean
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Drove a Ferrari
05. Visited the Great Pyramids
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a bath with someone in candlelight
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Played elastic (Apparently this is a children's game. I don't know it.)

Tagged. Fine.

1. Since seeing Saddam hang, I have a stronger-than-normal fear of being hanged, specifically of having my neck broken.
2. Every single woman I have had sex with has brought up the idea of using a strap-on. One even put it on, just to show me. I have to admit, she did look cute with that thing. Cute, in a silly way.
3. I used to have fantasies of blowing up my high school, even though I used to like it there this was before most of the school shootings and terrorist bombings. I didn't want to hurt anyone; I just wanted to destroy the building.
4. I would masturbate as a little kid without knowing why. I didn't understand where it was leading to. One night, in December 1987 I decided to pursue it "until something happens, damnit!". And this is the end result (NSFW).
5. When I was six, I played Santa Claus in the Christmas play, back when they were allowed. I thought I would be the next Sidney Poitier.

Which one is fake? Next up: D, Artemisia, MJ and Frank.

From zura and Frank. My results:
You are The Flash

The Flash 60% Green Lantern 50% Supergirl 45% Catwoman 45% Spider-Man 40% Iron Man 40% Robin 37% Wonder Woman 35% Hulk 35% Superman 30% Batman 25%

Fast, athletic and flirtatious.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

All right. I will jump on the bandwagon.

Have you ever...

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink? No, too cheap.
02. Swam with wild dolphins? No, but I saw them playing in the wake from the ferry I was in.
03. Climbed a mountain? Does Mont-Royal count?
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive? Fuck, no. Fuck that noise.
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid? Nope.
06. Held a tarantula? Yes, actually.
07. Taken a candle-lit bath with someone? Yessir. Well, she wasn't actually IN the bath with me, but she was in the bathroom. It was Rose.
08. Said "I Love You" and meant it? Of course.
09. Hugged a tree? Not because I am some eco-hippie male dryad type, but just for kicks.
10. Bungee jumped? No, but I once did a horizontal bungee-type thing. It was fun.
11. Visited Paris? Nope.
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea? No, but I was IN the recent massive lightning storm that hit Montreal a couple of weeks ago.
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise? Of course.
14. Seen the Northern Lights? Nope.
15. Gone to a huge sports game? Absolutely.
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa? Nah.
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables? Yup.
18. Touched an iceberg? Nope.
19. Slept under the stars? Yes, if passing out drunk outside counts.
20. Changed a baby's diaper? Several. Bet you didn't guess that, did you?

Originally from March 23, 2003

Knowing myself now, I'm going to make some guesses as to how I (just me, no one else) would turn out if I were female. If I were a woman I'd:

• have grown up very pissed off at the inequalities that prevail between the sexes;
  
• have called myself a feminist when I was a young teenager, recoiled from the term in the wake of a feminist backlash and especially when learning of the failures of the early and middle (and current) feminist leaders for women of colour;
  
• have reclaimed the term on a personal level sometime in university, and would currently be keeping feminist issues near the front of my mind;
  
• be about 5'8", maybe between 125 and 135 pounds; basically somewhere between my other two sisters;
  
• have very similar friend/romantic relationships in high school in that I wouldn't likely have had a boyfriend in high school, and I would have tried and succeeded to make inroads with the popular crowd, only to find out years later that the effort wasn't exactly worth it. I was too different from them. I should have stuck with the band crowd rather than the jocks (I was bi-groupal then);
  
• probably be heterosexual, but in university I would have been VERY affectionate with some of my female friends, possibly even developing a crush on a couple of them;
  
• probably test what I could and could not get away with when it comes to men. I'd see how far they might go to sleep with me. As soon as I got enough confidence and skill to manipulate men, I'd start seeing most of them as beings who want to fuck me (and therefore need to be managed) before I'd see them as people (in university and high school, I'm not sure how far off that is from the truth most of the time.);
  
• I'd be REALLY attracted to the ones that wouldn't let me get away with bullshit. That's similar (but not exactly) how it is now;
  
• have been far more arrogant, patronizing and condescending than I have ever been in this (male) life at that point (around age 20);
  
• later take advantage of being a woman as much as I could; I'd learn to work the system like crazy. I'd try to win respect through manipulation, but then realize that respect wasn't what I was getting at all, just a bad name. This would be either because I wasn't a good enough manipulator, because I didn't have enough of the goods, or because I had too much of the goods;
  
• by now have thrown away all the bullshit I was carrying around and just live;
  
• have gone through my 20s with some key friends of both genders; it'd be about half and half. At least one of those male friends would have been a former sex partner;
  
• have had a pregnancy scare, or possibly more than that, likely in university;
  
• speak out in favour of porn;
  
• be a member of Bust Magazine's Girl Wide Web and several other female-oriented sites/rings/etc.;
  
• call myself JanisParker;
  
• (no, I'd call myself something like Autumn Moonstar or something);
  
• have been pretty athletic, for a girl;
  
• have resented anyone actually saying that to me;
  
• have started out playing the clarinet or flute rather than the sax or trumpet, but I'd have been fairly good at all of the concert band instruments anyway;
  
• be in a long string of relationships starting in my mid-20s, but never get dumped until age 28. That would shock and confuse me for months at least;
  
• still hate fools.

  This is like a "101 things about me" list, just a little different.

  *UPDATE*: I could probably update this list, as it may have changed in three years. Why don't you do the same sort of thing on your blog? I think I might make an entry about what things would be like for me if I were white. That would be much more difficult, I think.