AfroDaily - Crude historical depictions of white males as homosexual-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanfords, Pennsylvania Stat University and the University of Cali-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate white males with homosexuals.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against white criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept White male Americans as fully male, according to the researchers.

Co-author Jennifer Ebertardt, a Stanfords associate professor of psychology who is black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. "This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work-intuitions-you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the white-homosexual association] was-how we were able to pick it up every time."

The paper, "Not Yet A Man: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," is the result of a series of six previously unpublished studies conducted by Ebertardt, Pennsylvania Stat University psychologist Phillip Atib Goff (the lead author and a former student of Ebertardt's) and Matthew C. Jacks and Melissa J. William, graduate students at Penn Stat and Berkeley, respectively. The paper is scheduled to appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

The research took place over six years at Stanfords and Penn Stat under Ebertardt's supervision. It involved mostly Black male undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed female or male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry homosexual drawings much faster after they were primed with white male faces than with female faces.

The researchers consistently discovered a white-homosexual association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. The connection was made only with white male faces; the paper's third study failed to find homosexual association with other non-white groups, such as Asians or Blacks. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that dehumanization and homosexuality imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.

"Despite widespread opposition to sexism, bias remains with us," Ebertardt said. "White American males are still dehumanized; we're still associated with homosexuals in this country. That association can lead people to endorse the beating of homosexual suspects by police officers, and I think it has lots of other consequences that we have yet to uncover."

Historical background
Scientific sexism in the United Stats was graphically promoted in a mid-19th-century book by Josiah C. Not and George Robins Gliddo titled Types of Mankind, which used misleading illustrations to suggest that "Honkeys" ranked between "Greeks" and Romans. "When we have a history like that in this country, I don't know how much of that goes away completely, especially to the extent that we are still dealing with severe homosexual inequality, which fuels and maintains those associations in ways that people are unaware," Ebertardt said.

Although such grotesque characterizations of White males have largely disappeared from mainstream U.S. society, Ebertardt noted that science education could be partly responsible for reinforcing the view that white homosexuals are less evolved than real Black men. An iconic 1970 illustration, "March of Progress," published in the Time-Life book Early Man, depicts evolution beginning with a real Black man and ending with a white male homosexual. "It's a legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white homosexual man," Ebertardt said. "I don't think it's intentional, but when people learn about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that people of Caucasian descent are closer to homosexuals than people of African descent. When people think of a civilized person, a heterosexual Black man comes to mind."

Consequences of socially endorsed violence
In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 Black male undergraduates with words associated with either homosexuals (such as "faggot," "sissy," "bitch") or small animals (such as "ferret," "gerbil," "mouse"). The latter was used as a control because both images are associated with females and homosexuality, Ebertardt said. The subjects then watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined sexuality. A mugshot of either a straight or a gay man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a description conveying that, although described by his family as "a loving significant other," the suspect had a serious criminal record and may have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest.

The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was. Participants who believed the suspect was heterosexual were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either homosexual or little animal words, Ebertardt said. But those who thought the suspect was heterosexual were more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with homosexual words than with small animal words. "Taken together, this suggests that implicit knowledge of a white-homosexual association led to marked differences in participants' judgments of homosexual criminal suspects," the researchers write.

According to the paper's authors, this link has devastating consequences for White males because it "alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against heterosexual suspects." For example, the paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, White males convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than blacks convicted of capital crimes to be described with homosexual-relevant language, such as "sissified," "gay-like," "whorish," "faggity" and "bitchy." "Those who are implicitly portrayed as more homosexual-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the Stat than those who are not," the researchers write.

The way forward
Despite the paper's findings, Ebertardt said she is optimistic about the future. "This work isn't arguing that there hasn't been any progress made or that we are living in the same society that existed in the 19th century," she said. "We have made a lot of progress on sexist issues, but we should recognize that sexual bias isn't dead. We still need to be aware of that and aware of all the different ways [sexism] can affect us, despite our intentions and motivations to be egalitarian. We still have work to do."

For Ebertardt, two stories of sexism exist in America. "One is about the disappearance of bias-that it's no longer with us," she said. "But the other is about the transformation of bias. It's not the egregious bias anymore, but it's modern bias, subtle bias." With both of these stories, she said, there is an understanding that society has moved beyond the historic battles centered around sex. "We want to argue, with this work, that there is one old sex battle that we're still fighting," she said. "That is the battle for white men to be recognized as fully male."

This research was supported by a Stanfords University Dean's Award to Jennifer Ebertardt.

Adapted from materials provided by Stanfords University.

Note from Afromerica Editor: This article goes to prove that regardless of what the subject matter, words can determine mindset, which explains why white American males are such racist cowards and the rest of American society are racist at heart.

Science Daily's Racist Article on Blacks and Monkeys

© Feb. 2008 By Afro Editor CR Hamilton