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White People see "Black" Americans as Less Competent than "African-Americans"

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by rocketsjudoka, Jan 3, 2015.

  1. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    I know there's been a lot of back and forth on the terminology of "black" versus "African-Americans" so I thought this was interesting.

    http://www.vox.com/2015/1/2/7480843/study-african-american-black

    Study: White people see "black" Americans as less competent than "African Americans"

    Calling someone black instead of African American could cast the person in a more negative light, according to a new study.

    The research, to be published this month in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found white people characterize a "black" person as belonging to a lower socioeconomic status, being less competent, and having a less inviting personality than an "African-American" person. And this difference in perception could have an impact on African Americans in various settings, from the labor market to the criminal justice system.

    Researchers, led by Emory University's Erika Hall, came to these results by conducting multiple studies in which they asked different groups of white people to evaluate individuals and groups through hypothetical scenarios.

    The Atlantic's Joe Pinsker reported:

    In one of the study's experiments, subjects were given a brief description of a man from Chicago with the last name Williams. To one group, he was identified as "African-American," and another was told he was "Black." With little else to go on, they were asked to estimate Mr. Williams's salary, professional standing, and educational background.

    The "African-American" group estimated that he earned about $37,000 a year and had a two-year college degree. The "Black" group, on the other hand, put his salary at about $29,000, and guessed that he had only "some" college experience. Nearly three-quarters of the first group guessed that Mr. Williams worked at a managerial level, while 38.5 percent of the second group thought so.

    Previous research supports the results
    A 2001 study from City University of New York researcher Gina Philogène also found the term "black" is associated with more negativity than "African American."

    And previous research unrelated to race has suggested that differences in language can be fairly important. A 1988 study from researchers Irwin Levin and Gary Gaeth, for example, found consumers are more favorable to ground beef that's labeled as "75 percent lean" than beef described as "25 percent fat."

    Summarizing these findings for their recent study, Emory University's Hall and her colleagues wrote, "Contrary to Shakespeare's notion that 'a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet,' studies have shown that the labels individuals apply to objects, ideas, or other people often affect their perceptions of and reactions toward those entities."
    Language matters
    These differences in language can seem abstract, but researchers say they can have serious effects on public opinion and individuals.

    For one, it could impact a person's chances of gaining employment. If someone submits a résumé in which he describes himself as black instead of African American, the research suggests that it could raise bad connotations — potentially reducing the chances of getting hired.

    The difference in language could impact criminal justice system, where racial disparities are already a problem. Researchers pointed out that presenting a defendant as black instead of African American could, based on the studies' results, affect how a jury perceives the evidence presented to it and ultimately reaches a decision.
     
  2. dback816

    dback816 Member

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    This sounds like a really dumb research on something obvious. Black is simply the less formal term, it can even sound downright negative depending on the speaker's tone. Who doesn't know this?

    If you told these groups to estimate the education and salary of "a gentleman from Chicago" and "some guy from Chicago", they'd probably guess the former was more competent too.
     
    1 person likes this.
  3. bigtexxx

    bigtexxx Contributing Member

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    Yes! That's the solution! All racial problems solved!
     
  4. Felixthecat

    Felixthecat Contributing Member

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    Grand Wizard you're part of the problem.
     
  5. bigtexxx

    bigtexxx Contributing Member

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    As mentioned, I 100% reject everything about the KKK. I will ignore your slanderous comments. Remember, when you have to resort to insults, you've lost any argument among adults. I'll be the bigger man and not respond back with insults.

    Did you ever sell those Katrina bracelets, brah? Get back to work!
     
  6. Felixthecat

    Felixthecat Contributing Member

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    There is no argument to make Grand Wizard. Just making it known that I see you as part of the problem.

    So, Grand wizard...enlighten us on your vast knowledge of all things black.
     
  7. robbie380

    robbie380 ლ(▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿ლ)
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    I'm a weirdo but I try to say American whites and American blacks. African American is just such a strange term to me. It emphasizes African over American. American blacks are most certainly more American than African. Also, I don't like terms that paint Africa as a single homogeneous entity. Africa is a large non-homogeneous continent with amazing diversity. African-American seems to dismiss that diversity in my white devil eyes.

    And I don't see "black" as less accomplished than "African American". It has never even really been a thought in my mind. I guess it might be the other way around if I had to pick a side since I don't like the term African American. But if someone wants to be called African American then that's fine with me.

    Anyhow...interesting study. Semantics and stuff.
     
  8. mdrowe00

    mdrowe00 Member

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    Akema****e omedetou, rocketsjudoka!
    …or Happy New Year, whichever you prefer…:)!

    I highlighted the “Language matters” sub-title in your article because this is maybe the most important facet of the “black” American experience, to me…

    …and why I personally thought it would be cute to salute you in Japanese…

    …the correlation between “language” and “identity”. The “identity crisis” that “black” Americans currently wrestle with stems from this, in my opinion.

    robbie380 mentioned this study as merely an exercise in semantics…and to be perfectly honest, there are more indicators of that becoming a reality in the very-near future than not. And as ideals go, it is this premise toward which our nation (not matter how clumsily or haphazardly) has tried to move toward―an identity of character as opposed to appearance.

    That being said, I do feel it’s necessary to identify why there had to be any type of study like this, to either highlight or confirm what most of us (honestly or not) already know about our perceptions of “black” Americans.

    Your personal background, as I understand it, rocketsjudoka, is of Japanese ancestry. I’m pretty sure you can identify generations of your family through the shared identity that being from another nation offers. In Japan, there is history and language and culture and civility that augurs an identity separate from the American experience in very basic ways. Whatever prejudices you might have encountered here had very little effect on your own personal sense of self-worth and identity, I’d guess.

    Living up to an “American” standard, for you, was purely by choice…and even if you were never going to be accepted as an American, it did not mean that you were somehow not human…or unintelligent…or second-tier…or any of the other maladies associated with being “black” in America.

    Identity and language signify intelligence, to me. In the past, foreign languages would either be considered gibberish or “pagan”…usually by invading or conquering forces that had no compunction about marginalizing people if it meant that they got whatever it was they were seeking. That much has been true of humankind for all of recorded history, so it’s hardly a phenomenon exclusive to America. But the idea is that language is indicative of intelligence, and civilization is an outgrowth of shared regional and cultural experience through which language facilitated that growth.

    Dumb people don’t build the pyramids of ancient Egypt or the aqueducts of Sumer and Mesopotamia…or invent gunpowder in China…and there’s still an awful lot of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and writings that are still undecipherable…

    Unfortunately for “black” Americans today, whether the “back to Africa” call comes from segregationist/racists or black national radicals…the only thing most of us “black” Americans have in common with Africa is our skin color.
    Whatever we have in culture and language and identity comes from here in America. In an odd sort of way, we aren’t any different than 2nd or 3rd generation Polish or Irish or German or Easter European immigrants…except that assimilation into American society was always handcuffed to appearances...and national history that at once both “…liberated…” and isolated black Americans…seeking to preserve the American mythos of identity…

    At the end of the day…whether through providence, fate, or just dumb luck…”black” Americans are just that…Americans. And in many ways, we have had to fashion that American identity from the scraps of what our society once said and thought was inappropriate, inadequate or just beneath everyone else.

    And for whatever else it might be worth…those that inherit this America of “post-racialness” may be the ones that can finally start to put this whole thing about what it means to be “black” in America to rest…

    …because perhaps it finally won’t mean anything to them, and thereby mean everything to everyone else…

    …semantics, indeed…
     
  9. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    I wonder whether White people think differently when they see either.

    Maybe it's different than if White Americans think differently when they see either...
     
  10. Rocket River

    Rocket River Member

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    The Ability to lose the accent and change then name and 'pass' IMO has been incredibly useful to those group's ability to integrate fully into society
    The strong motherland ties/cultures/politcal/etc help alot too

    'Black' Americans do not have either of them

    Rocket River
     
  11. dback816

    dback816 Member

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    "Black" Americans are way more integrated and accepted into American culture than Asians (that includes middle eastern countries, btw) ever will be.
     
  12. Rocket River

    Rocket River Member

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    Maybe . .. but you cannot just cannot kill a slew of them without their home countries being a little pissed about it. . .and might ***** up commerce

    Killing Black Amercans does not carry those kind of international economic consequences.

    have a HOME COUNTRY that has your back helps an aweful lot

    Rocket River
     
  13. mdrowe00

    mdrowe00 Member

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    Happy New Year, brother.

    Of course. I've mentioned that, myself. Kind of hard to miss that in these parts.:)

    My version, I'd assume, is largely the argument people have tended to use in order to ignore some of the more ingrained segregationist policies and mindsets that have festered in this country in this great post-racial America that black folks aren't smart or decent enough to take advantage of.

    Part of the whole "...black people need to get over it..." movement.

    I mentioned to someone a while back about why I considered myself an American, and that I considered my "mother country" anagram would be my mother.

    My mother was born and raised in a segregated American south that, from everybody I've ever talked to who lived through it, was as de-humanizing and fatiguing as I might be able to imagine. You mentioned once about the wear on such a cancerous, stifling circumstance, experienced generation after generation after generation, eventually metastasizing into resentment, distrust and aimless anger that sometimes does more harm than any good would seem to be able to redeem.

    Perhaps the thing that my mother was somehow able to do for me (even without the seeming prerequisite of money or “whiteness”) was to reinforce the truth that I was always going to be whatever man I decided I wanted to be. There would be forces set against it, undoubtedly. But moreso for me than for herself and all she had known, those forces would not win if I didn't allow it, and if she didn’t allow it by bringing a painful past for her into a potential future of mine.

    We do focus, as black people in this country, often on what we cannot do or do not have or have had taken from us or denied to us, in relation to other cultures or races of people who have not had our experiences...not as "illegals" or "immigrants"...but as problems that had no easy solution or preferred treatise, because we had no real use or value in this country after being “emancipated”.

    It is a two-pronged dilemma, to be sure. It is a problem, socially, that black people, in general, did not create…but it is a problem that black people, in general, will have to correct.

    In essence, what much of the 13, 14 and 15th amendments did was to ensure that our appearance or “..distinct…” cultural identities as black people in America would not be used against our social progression. We were never going to physically assimilate with “white” Americans…there were never going to be enough of us to pass the brown paper bag test of legend…so a nation of laws had to honor its word, or lose its honor altogether.

    In a perfect world, perhaps you could sort the “good” n!gg3rs from the “bad” ones during the natural course…(coded in this instance as the difference between “black” and “African-American”)…but there’s really no need to do that if you intend to build the society in tiers anyway…and keep as many of the black persons at that lower tier as much as possible…

    …but the idea for me has always been, in terms of identity (whether through culture or geography or language), what would constitute the definitions of those abstracts we generally assign to human beings? Even ones we don’t necessarily always agree with or like?

    A lot of times, black people will bicker with white people about things that white people don’t believe or understand or accept, and actually seem to be surprised to find that out. That has always been pointless, and as evidenced, fruitless…both in practical terms and in semantic ones.

    No one has ever afforded a black person any excuse for his station or his responsibility in, and to, a society that erected hurdles for him that it would not or could not for any other group of people. And there has long since stopped being a reason for that acknowledgement to ever take place.

    I didn’t learn, in theory or in practice, Rocket River, anything about what’s right or what’s wrong…what’s good or what’s bad…what’s smart or what’s dumb…from anybody before I learned those things from my mother―an illiterate Negro woman who worked two menial housekeeping jobs, cleaning up after white people who wouldn’t have given her the time of day before they gave her the back of her hand―who had no reason to hope, and every reason to be angry and afraid…

    …the same types of things that other immigrant groups learned even with the easier visual road of appearances to trek…

    …because never at any point in time, I believe, did she ever think or act like anything other than a human being. She didn’t beg and plead for respect from contemptuous, cowardly and ignorant people. She didn’t check with people about what they thought she should or should not say or do, when their obvious answers and positions were as apparent as sunlight.

    She would say, as often as I decided to listen to her was “…Boy, a n!gg3r gon’ always be a n!gg3r…but not because that’s what God made him…”

    Way past time, I think, my friend, that a lot of us black folk stop digging around for respect from people who really don’t give a damn about you.
     

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