Prometheus 6

The Reality of Race: Is the Problem That White People Don't Know or Don't Care?
By Robert Jensen, AlterNet
Posted on July 14, 2007

"Study shows that white people are mean and uncaring"

That would have been my headline for a recent story from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, which was reprinted on AlterNet, and reported an Ohio State University study of white people's understanding of the black experience (AlterNet's headline was "Whites Just Don't Understand the Black Experience"). Curiously, the psychologists who conducted the research spun the data in exactly the opposite direction, and the conflicting interpretations tell us much about race relations in the United States.

The researchers found that whites more accurately assessed the burden of discrimination borne by a hypothetical minority group in a fictional country than they did in the specific case of black people's experience in the contemporary United States. In the hypothetical, whites estimated that the minority group members (described in the same terms as black Americans) deserved $1 million in compensation, but when presented with the question in the context of black Americans, the median estimate was $10,000.

That result was not surprising, but I was taken aback by the conclusion one of the researchers drew:

"Our data suggest that such resistance is not because White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt or ethically flawed. White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a Black American."

I think the data -- along with all my experience both as a white person and someone who writes about white supremacy -- suggests exactly the opposite: