I'm a Racist? Huh?

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I'm a 39-year-old Black man and I'm a racist …against other Blacks no less.

Say what?

Well, that's what a University Of Chicago online psychological test tells me.

Click here to take the test yourself and tell us how you score.

Profiled recently in The New York Times, the online pop psych test presents you with images of 100 Black and white men. Some are armed, while others are carrying nothing more dangerous than a wallet or a cell phone. Unfortunately, if you're a Black man in New York, you're fully aware of the danger of carrying seemingly harmless objects.. From Amadou Diallo, who died after being shot at 41 times by police as he reached for his wallet, to the case of Sean Bell who, though unarmed, was gunned down by NYPD officers in a confrontation after a bachelor party, New York is ripe with examples of how deadly being a Black man in the wrong place at the wrong time can be.

With that in mind, I took the online exam. I was presented with these images and prompted to either shoot or holster my weapon depending on my split-second determination of whether the target was carrying a weapon or not. You lose points for being too slow and deliberate. The point of the exam is to gauge your instinctive belief of whether the target will be armed based on skin color.

My results were … disappointing.  First, my overall score was 435. The score is determined by getting points for a "good" shot -- shooting a target that is armed -- and losing points for either getting shot or shooting an unarmed target. Compared to an unscientific tally of other co-workers who took the test, Black and white, my score was about average.

But what concerns me is that, armed or not, I "shot" Black targets faster than I shot white targets.  I shot Black armed targets at an average of 0.631 seconds versus white armed targets at 0.662.  Even more disturbing - I shot Black unarmed targets at an average of 0.783 seconds versus white unarmed targets at 0.792.

Fractions of seconds? Yes, but still unsettling when you consider the real life implications of armed police officers who make these life and death decisions in real life situations as they encounter Black men on the street.

Do I accept the results on face value? I haven't decided yet. Ultimately, how much weight you want to put into an online test like this is for you to decide. As The New York Times article pointed out, Harvard University has a series of similar exams that are supposed to test unconscious levels of prejudice on everything from race and gender to age. 

I have a friend with a passion for debunking studies who calls attention to a number of contributing factors that could have played into my score, including how many Black versus white targets are frontloaded into the exam  Nevertheless, my friend, a white woman, felt compelled to take the test twice after scoring a low 45 the first time around.  She also shot Black targets, armed and unarmed, faster than whites her first time.

If I were to accept the results on face value, should they really shock me? Just because I'm a Black man doesn't mean I'm immune to the barrage of images of Black men in handcuffs that parade across my television screen every night. If anything, perhaps I'm more sensitive to it. How many times have I watched coverage of a horrific crime on the evening news? Before the alleged assailant appears on TV in handcuffs, how many times has the same thought run through my head - "Please don't be Black." It shames me that there's actually a split-second sigh of relief when the suspect isn't Black. Sadly, no, it wouldn't completely shock me if the test is right. On some deeply subconscious level, I somehow feel more "threatened" by men who look like my father - who look like me - than I feel by white men. It wouldn't completely shock me, but it would disappoint me greatly.

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