Eliminating Racism in America: Where To Start

AN INTERESTING CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT reveals the degree of racism in America, among conservatives. Racism, of course, is inherent in humans. Everything matters: skin color, height, weight, hair color, and so forth, and so on. Taller people make more money, about a thousand dollars per year per inch. Men get paid more than women. Pretty people do better, get more respect. In married couples, the ratio of the distance between the eyes and the nose is almost always the same. Symmetry matters in the formation of sexual attraction among animals, human and otherwise. Racism is the belief that humans can be neatly categorized by skin pigment into a few small categories, which in fact can only be done inaccurately. In reality, every person has a unique skin color. To prove this, hold your forearm against anyone else's forearm; you'll never find an exact match. All people have a different skin color, if only slightly. Now for our experiment. Two groups of people, white adults, were selected at random from the general American population. Age, gender; entirely randomly selected. Each person in each group was asked to do two things; first, state whether he or she identified as a liberal or conservative, on a scale of one to ten. Then, each group was shown a picture of president Obama. Both pictures were altered by Photoshop. One group was given a picture in which Obama's skin was made several shades lighter than it actually is, and the other group was given a picture in which the President's face was made to look several shades darker than it actually is. Both groups were then asked to rate Obama, again on a scale of one to ten. In both groups, the liberals gave the President a thumbs up, as might be expected, pretty much equally, without any differences between the groups the dark and light skinned photos. Among the conservatives, the president was found utterly lacking in merit, not surprisingly, but the group looking at the darker skinned Obama was much, much harsher in their assessment. The experiment was repeated, several times, and the same results eventuated, without exception or much deviation. The more conservative the participant, and the darker the President, the stronger the negative rating. The only possible explanation is that the more conservative the participant, the more likely that person was to negatively rate the President base on race. It would appear that we do indeed have much work to do in America, and that the need for the work is especially strong among extreme conservatives. At least we now know where to start.