Obamaniacs - They're coming for your kool-aid - article enclosed

Many U.S. citizens may not hold openly racist beliefs today, but they still may subconsciously link African Americans with apes because people still use words and metaphors that subtly reinforce a less-than-human bias and endorse violence against Blacks, according to a new study.

"Historical racist images and books dehumanizing African Americans in the 19th and early 20th century relied heavily on the Negro-ape metaphor, which was used to stereotype Blacks as lazy, dim and aggressive," said lead author Phillip Atiba Goff, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State. "Such dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.

"The images have disappeared from popular culture and from most people's memory," he added. "However, after completing six studies, we found strong evidence that Black-ape linkages still influence people subconsciously and impact their judgment particularly in the case of African American suspects and defendants."

The study's findings are published in the paper, "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," in a recent issue (February) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

Goff and fellow researchers Jennifer Eberhardt, associate professor of psychology at Stanford University; Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively, conducted six studies of college-age students. They found that participants – even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images – were quicker to associate Blacks with apes than they were to associate Whites with apes.

Goff and fellow researchers Jennifer Eberhardt, associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively, conducted six studies of White college-age students. They found that participants – even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images -- were quicker to associate Blacks with apes than they were to associate Whites with apes.

In the first three studies, researchers subliminally flashed Black or White male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the participants, who could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with Black faces than with White faces.

http://www.physorg.com/news123944737.html