The following post is a comment to “Psychology Professors Argue Against Groupthink in Their Field”, George Leef, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2/7/2018,
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/…/psychology-professors-ar…/.
**************
“Back in 2000, a pair of psychologists [Banaji and Greenwald] announced that they had devised a test for implicit bias and stated that their results showed that more than 90 percent of Americans have a problem of unconscious prejudice.” (Leef from the above article) This questionable assertion is used to justify a host of crusades from Black Lives Matter to a campaign to address the paucity of female coders at Google.
***************
I say:
“Implicit bias” has a striking similarity to the “hidden structures of oppression” in much of the left’s revolution-mongering of the last couple of centuries. Marx relies on a vast set of social arrangements in market economies that work to oppress the “masses”. Generalities run rampant. The “men of commerce” are reduced to hated “capitalists” in order to more easily encapsulate the enemy, while labor is compressed into the “proletariat” as the sympathetic victim. Then, an all-encompassing revolution is necessary to upturn the very bases of life in the march to the better world.
Today, Marx’s general outline is replicated in regards to other broad classes of the “oppressed”. “Implicit bias” is the same old gambit dressed up to embrace our fashionable victims’ groups.
Same old, same old.
RogerG