It Makes a Difference, Really, It Does!

Over at Bloomabilities, children's book editor Alvina has been musing about subconscious racism, and wondering if we don't all suffer from just a little bit of it.

Today, she continues with a thoughtful post about Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, in which he devotes a section to the discussion of racism and snap judgements based on ethnicity. Gladwell cites a test devised by some Harvard psychologists to test people's implicit associations with images of different races. To make a long story short, it turns out that 80% of people taking the test had pro-white associations, even non-whites. But it also turned out that one of the students who took the test daily showed a sudden change in his score to be pro-black after watching a morning of Olympic coverage. Yes, simply seeing positive images of different races changes the way our subconscious minds work.

Bringing it back to books, Alvina concludes:

So, to have this confirmation that seeing positive, diverse images in children's books can make a psychological difference, a subconscious difference, to lessen the bias against people of color, well, this was so affirming for me. It is important. It does make a difference.