Because A Face Isn't Just A Face: Don't Believe The Hype

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

In a lot of ways, after I was done reading the article Do Americans Expect Their Business Leaders to Be White? Study Says Yes - I just thought to myself "Tell me something I don't already know", and while it's just a small sample of people that they talked with in the interviews - if you just look at everything around us - you know that thought is prevalent in today's society - and I have to wonder if the time creating studies like this (which are apparent to anyone who's not white) would better be spent on asking people how to combat the problem versus saying what we already know:

In experiments where the leader’s race was identified, white leaders were held to be a "better match" with "traditional leader expectations" than were minorities, even when the levels of achievement was the same for both. As an indication that subconscious bias can cross racial lines, the participants who identified themselves as racial minorities over-guessed whiteness as often as the Caucasian participants.
Like the title of this post says - and this goes double for my brown peeps - don't believe the hype.