We have been teaching people about unconscious bias for years without these theatrics.
"there is no good evidence that people are unaware of their biases. While people do often express surprise at the score they get on the Implicit Association Test, that often reflects the labels that are used to express the degree of bias rather than the presence of some difference in attitudes toward different groups"
-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/ulterior-motives/201...
I have no problem with teaching accurate information wrt bias; but on the other hand, that metric doesn't impel people to label themselves racist, which seems to be a goal.
The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]
> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.
The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]
> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.
Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]
[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21/
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...
[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...
People in America really don’t understand what the alternative is like. Academic theater seems workable, or at least harmless at best so long as we’re standing on solid bedrock. But that’s a framework that exists so long as you maintain it. What society really looks like absent this framework is what happened in Iraq after in 2005. The first time people voted, they did so strictly along ethnic lines and then tried to annihilate each other. Or in my home country where we went to war to separate ourselves from people who had the same skin color and same religion, but spoke a different language.
The United States is the most successful multi-ethnic democracy in the world. For example, while Muslim immigrants to the US achieved economic parity within a generation or two, in countries like France they’re facing multi-generational poverty. We are not perfect. While we have successfully integrated (socially and economically) wave after wave of immigrants. We are doing it again right now—income mobility among Hispanic people is similar to white such that within a few generations incomes for these groups converge. Our persistent failure has been our inability to fix the legacy of our shameful history of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. But nobody else has figured out how to do that either. In countries like the UK, the Black-white income gap is just as large as in the US. The gap in maternal mortality rates is even larger. And in most of the rest of Europe, it’s not even legal to keep statistics about these disparities.
Maybe some professors have figured out a better replacement for our universal values that will work better—one that replaced a broad, shared commitment to equality with individual white people admitting complicity in perpetuating systemic racism. But they probably didn’t.
The United States is currently undergoing a massive upheaval in multiple major cities about its willingness to sweep racial discrimination under the rug and call it "success." It's an unstable equilibrium; it works until it doesn't.