Three out of four Australians hold a racial bias against indigenous people: New survey reveals shocking invisible barrier faced by Aboriginal community

This is discredited science.  The IAT was presumably the instrument used.  All it does is detect response time.   Why the response time is fast or slow can only be conjectural. 

In the case of racial stimuli, the most probable reason for a slow response is caution when faced with something potentially controversial.  There is NO evidence that a slow response to a particular stimulus indicates ill-will towards that stimulus.

In fact there is evidence that the test does NOT detect racial bias.  Very anti-racist people often score high on it.  See here for background

No matter their age, gender, job, religion, education level or income - the majority of people on average held an unconscious negative view.

The findings from an Australian National University study released on Tuesday revealed an invisible barrier, author Siddharth Shirodkar says. 'It was certainly shocking ... but it also wasn't necessarily surprising,' he told AAP. 'It says something, not so much about indigenous people, it says something more about the rest of us.'

Men were more biased than women against First Australians.

Western Australians and Queenslanders showed higher levels of unconscious prejudice, while people in the Northern Territory and ACT showed less.

People who identified themselves as 'strongly left wing' still showed signs of negative views against Aboriginal people, while those who put themselves on the right-wing side displayed higher levels of bias.

Australians showed the same level of bias against Aboriginals as people held against African Americans in the United States.

The study tested 11,000 Australians over a decade since 2009.

It looked at the response time of online volunteers to an association test, which flashed images of white people and Aboriginal Australians as well positive or negative words.

It found the majority of Australians showed a preference for white faces.

Mr Shirodkar said while Australians might hold an unconscious bias, they still could choose whether or not to act on it.

'(If) we don't challenge that, then that can seep into our everyday decision making,' he said.

He said some demographics were over-represented in the survey, including capturing more women, left-leaning voters and university educated people.

This meant the level of implicit racial bias may be under-reported.

The report came as thousands of Australians protested against Aboriginal deaths in custody over the weekend.

Mr Shirodkar said the report's release was a coincidence, but the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide had given people a reason to pause and reflect.

'The study can maybe help us think more about internally how we treat one another but also how we think about one another,' he said.

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British, European tourists swapping lockdown for Sweden

Sweden has kept pubs, restaurants and shops open throughout the Covid 19 pandemic.

The more open approach is attracting growing numbers of British and European tourists, who’ve broken national guidelines advising against non-essential global travel in search of a beer or even a haircut.

The BBC spoke to Oana Marcu, 34, from London, who’s been in Stockholm since March, British actor Lewis Sycamore, 25, who’s just arrived to visit his Swedish girlfriend, and Peter Clark, 32, a British barber in the Swedish capital who’s found it uncomfortable serving tourists escaping lockdowns in their own countries.

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Collective Guilt Is a Catastrophic Mistake

During my lifetime, the national conversation about race has gradually moved from culpability for individual behavior to culpability for ideology to collective culpability without regard to behavior or ideology.

This transition is significant. It is deliberate. And it is dangerous.

Focusing on "discrimination," as our laws have done for decades, places the emphasis on conduct, which can be clearly identified and prohibited. Individuals (or groups) who engage in that prohibited conduct can be penalized.

Punishing an attitude of racism, however, is more problematic. It is one thing to condemn it. But how do you penalize or sanction it, apart from the conduct that reflects it?

Contemporary race theorists and activists have chosen to expand their definitions even further to encompass what they now call "systemic racism" and "white privilege." These newer, broader definitions of the reprehensible sweep much wider swaths of people into the "racism" net, no matter how beneficent and inclusive their personal attitudes and actions may be.

According to these theories, one is culpable simply for having "benefitted" from a system in which blacks and other minorities were -- and are -- discriminated against. "Race" is not only a "social construct"; it becomes a matter of economic identity, rather than ethnic identity. Even nonwhites who have succeeded in this system become "white" by virtue of that success. Conversely, whites who have endured poverty, discrimination, broken homes, substance abuse or countless other factors beyond their control that have impeded their own upward mobility are told that those struggles are irrelevant to their "privilege."

It is one thing to acknowledge that blacks have suffered grievous discrimination and that the consequences of that continue to this day. Those are the ugly facts. Similarly, when white Americans -- or anyone who has not personally endured bias and discrimination -- vow to do everything in their power to make their community and our country a better place, that is individual agency, not collective guilt.

But some of the current calls for "honest conversations" entail members of the "privileged" classes admitting to collective culpability. This is cast as a precursor to "healing," and many well-intentioned people are more than willing to do it. I have read tweets and emails, and watched videos in which white Americans kneel, bow their heads in supplication, beg for forgiveness for the wrongs committed by other people or refer to themselves as "recovering racists" simply because they are white.

This is insulting, offensive and dangerous.

First, it runs completely counter to one of the most fundamental tenets of the American legal tradition: we do not punish people for the crimes or wrongdoing of others.

Second, there is no natural place where one can logically stop with the collective culpability racket. If I as a "white" American of multi-European ethnicities have "benefitted" from the political and economic systems in the United States, one could just as plausibly argue that I benefitted from the Irish Potato Famine, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years' War, the bubonic plague, the sacking of the library at Alexandria and every other historical event that somehow made it possible for me to be who and what and where I am at this moment. I am no more responsible for the abhorrent acts committed during the era of slavery, or the Jim Crow laws, or the brutality of corrupt police officers than I am for those atrocities.

Third, there is plenty of modern precedents to show us what happens when a country incorporates a system of collective culpability purportedly to remediate oppression. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution sent tens of thousands of innocent people to the guillotine. Tens of millions were killed during Russia's and China's revolutionary upheavals of the 20th century, condemned as "bourgeois" or "running-dog capitalists." Even in tiny Cambodia, nearly 3 million people -- a fifth of the population -- were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge regime, which condemned anyone who was educated as an "enemy of the poor."

Fourth, a system that blames classes of people for things they have not individually done also exonerates classes of people for things they have individually done. We need look no further back than the events of the past few days, as mobs of violent individuals have used justifiable outrage and lawful protests as a cover for vandalism, arson, looting, theft, destruction, brutal assault and even murder. And yet there are voices in our "national conversations" that would excuse this behavior as an understandable response by the oppressed in a system that is rigged against them.

Such a system will not long endure; it will collapse on itself.

As we watch our cities burn, we cannot fool ourselves by thinking that what happened in France in the 1790s, in Russia in the 1930s, in China in the 1960s and in Cambodia in the 1970s cannot happen here. We owe it to ourselves and our children to make sure that it doesn't happen here.

We can punish police brutality without smearing all police officers. We can acknowledge destructive policies and practices of the past and present; work together to eliminate them; and improve conditions for those who have been most negatively affected. But a move from individual responsibility to collective culpability will destroy our nation.

History has proven -- amply -- that a political system founded upon class resentment, blame, hatred and violence destroys everything and helps no one.

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Police Chief Praised Armed Citizens Keeping Out Looters. Then He Was Forced to Resign

Lowell, Michigan Police Chief Steve Bukala was forced to resign after using the department's official Facebook page to praise four armed citizens who protected businesses from being looted.

“We at the Lowell Police Department support the legally armed citizen and the Second Amendment,” the chief said in the now-deleted Facebook post.

The city manager said Bukala overstepped his bounds by providing “unneeded personal commentary and inserted political and debatable issues into a department notice and caused unneeded concern by some city residents," MLive reported.

The chief was given until 5 p.m. on Thursday to resign. If he didn't do it, at 5:01 p.m. he would be fired.

“I’ve decided it’s time to start my life outside of the Lowell Police Department and my future looks very bright,” Bukala wrote in his resignation email.

Something like this shouldn't be controversial, especially when we have the Second Amendment in our Constitution. Sheriffs have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, which means protecting people's right to keep and bear arms. These young men should be commended for defending their communities. And Chief Bukala deserves to be applauded for not trampling on people's rights.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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