We had the Tolerance Club kids do the "Harvard Bias Test" today. For those who are unfamiliar, it's an online exercise that measures your sub-conscious preference between two disparate types of people, for example Americans of African descent and Americans of European descent, old people-young people, abled-disabled, etc. Before you even take the test, you must agree to the disclaimer that you may receive an interpretation you disagree with.
The test is careful to tell you who you have a preference for, leaving unspoken the fact that by default, you also have one against the other group. In addition, the literature points out that most people have a bias toward the familiar, which of course means that the aggregate results are consistent with general demographics.
The kids were game; we allowed them to choose their bias test, and of course some were surprised by what the results revealed (Wrong! I do NOT have a preference for light-skinned people, one girl told us emphatically), while others were not (a sixth grade boy across the room announced his own results matter-of-factly: I have a slight preference for abled people... I have a preference for European people).
Yes, as heartbreaking as it is, there are times when people take the test and find that they are biased against themselves.
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