explicit or implicit?

In class, we did an activity at implicit.harvard.edu. It was a test designed to demonstrate if we have a preference towards certain racial groups. Disclaimer: While I don't believe all stereotypes and I know they are not applicable to everyone of whatever race/religion/color/ethnicity, I do believe they are mostly derived from fact. Sue me.

I took 3 tests: african-american/eastern europeans, light-skin/dark-skin, and muslim-arab/other people.

The first demo revealed "slight preference to eastern european." This did not surprise me that much, because while I don't think that's necessarily true about me, the pictures of blacks that they put on there all looked like big black scary men! Call me racist or whatever, but I think my test results would have yielded a different answer if they had used pictures of Taye Diggs or Tyrese instead of scary looking potential rapists that would make me wants to hide my kids and hide my wife.

The second one was slightly confusing to me, because the pictures were like cartoon/drawn instead of real faces. Some of the "dark skinned" people had straight hair that looked the same as the lighter skinned pictures, which slightly threw me off. Yes, I know white people can have curly hair, and dark skinned can have naturally straight, but still. It was weird.

The third one said I have little to no preference between Other and Arabs. That one really did surprise me. While I really don't care about that, I do know that I don't know much about Arabs, and from what I personally know, some of them can be kinda smelly. Not all of them, I know, and no, I am not stereotyping because I have literally been around them and some do smell. I can tell you the same about most Europeans because I have been to many countries over there and I found that stereotype to have come slightly from fact. I also know that my religion is completely different from theirs. While this doesn't change what interaction I would have with any, I have not experienced much of it, so I really couldn't say.

All in all, I thought it was a really good class assignment for Multi-Ethnic Reporting, and I do agree with Prof. Reisner that in order to be a reporter, especially in a multi-racial area like ours, we need to be equipped to handle all kinds of groups, even ones that we know nothing about.