Nicholas Kristof in todays' NYT writes in study after study, and from expert after expert:
We can make categorization by race go away, but we could never make gender categorization go away.
He goes on to explain that John Tooby, a scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara ran an experiment in which researchers put blacks and whites in sports jerseys as if they belonged to two basketball teams. People looking at the photos logged the players in their memories more by team than by race, recalling a player's jersey color but not necessarily his or her race.
But only very rarely did people forget whether a player was male or female.
Amazing information. And certainly pertinent to the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to be the Democratic party's nominee for President. But Kristof, an often shrill manipulator of public opinion, did not lead with that information,
Rather he declares he is a racist because by .013 degrees of a second, he shot armed blacks more quickly than armed whites in a University of chicago online psych test.
So even when sexism is shown to be more durable and more salient than race, it will not be reported accurately
The true lead of Kristoff's piece is this: racism may be easier to override than sexism. As an example he says:
One experiment found it was easy for whites to admire African-american doctors; they just mentally categorized them as 'doctors' rather than as 'blacks.'
Here are some of the experts Kristoff consulted and their findings:
Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northewestern University says,
In general, gender trumps race...Race may be easier to overcome.
And Kristoff writes:
The challenge for women competing in politics or business is less misogyny than unconscious sexism: Americans don't hate women, but they do frequently stereotype them as warm and friendly, creating a mismatch with the sterotype we hold of leaders as tough and strong. So the voters (women as well as men, though a bit less so) may feel that a female candidate is not the right person for the job because of biases they're not even aware of.
So here we have the first real data that all those people who characterize Clinton as cold and calculating are actually buying into sexist sterotypes. Some of us have been saying this for quite awhile. It is nice to hear Kristoff say it. He even says,
Women face a related challenge" those viewed as tough and strong are also typically perveived as cold and unfemininine. Many experiments have found that women have trouble being perceived as both nice and competent.
Joshua Correll, a psychologist at the University of Chicago declares:
Clinton runs the risk of being seen as particularly cold, particularly uncaring, because she doesn't fit the mold. It probably is something a man doesn't deal with.
Kristoff ends on a hopeful note.
When research subjects were asked to think of a strong woman they showed less implicit bias about men and women. And students exposed to a large number of female professors also experienced a reduction in gender stereotypes.
And yet Kristoff did not lead his story with gender, he led with race. And in this he mirrors the entire mainstram media storyline for the Presidential contest. Glenn Greenwald at Salon on Saturday had a wonderful expose of the media bias at Salon today. Go and see.
/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/05/media/index.html
None of this is news to Clinton supporters, but when Obama supporters say over and over that they 'don't get it about sexism.' Maybe Kristoff both by the content of this story and the way he chose to introduce it will bring the point home: sexism not racism is the biggest bully in this contest and it is distorting Clinton's image to a profund degree.
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