Induced white guilt

[Hater Depot]

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/07/what-is-guilt-for.php

Experimentally, the first problem is making people feel guilty in the lab. Here's what the authors came up with. Participants are brought in, have an EEG cap put on their head to measure electrical activity in the brain, and then they are told to watch a series of faces appearing on the screen.

Some of the faces are White, some Black and some Asian. They don't have to do anything other than look at the faces. The participants have been specifically chosen because they are themselves White but have expressed positive views of Blacks. The researchers have to avoid recruiting racists otherwise the experimental results will be difficult to interpret.

Afterwards the participants are shown bar graphs supposedly interpreting measurements of the electrical activity in their brains. These indicate that while the participants reacted positively and neutrally to White and Asian faces, they reacted negatively to Black faces. The 'results' seem to show that our liberal participants are somewhat racist - whether consciously or unconsciously.

These graphs are, of course, just made up.

Read on, as they say.

[tkguy]

Guilt, maybe the feeling felt, but guilt for what? I think people are more worried about how they are perceived by others and most importantly themselves. Whether or not they are racist is probably very irrelevant.

But the study states that such "guilt" will change a person's behavior which is fascinating. But I think the change in behavior is more about the person trying hard to re-justify the preconceived notions in their heads that they are not racist. But any changes will probably be superficial at best. I would imagine that all that is important when it comes to racism is to adhere to society's acceptable standards of race relations, which is just the non-asians doing the absolute minimum to be perceived as not being racist to the people in their lives.