@Audacitron said:
I think poor 'white trash' absolutely get the short end of the stick. They are constantly derided, and no one gives a damn about their plight. The idea that they're benefiting from some 'white privilege' is patronizing and insulting.
White middle and upper class, they have nothing to complain about and they shouldn't. The deepest 'injustice' they suffer is that they don't get to freely throw around the 'n-word' the way some blacks do.
Between July 2001 and May 2002, Marianne Bertrand sent out over 1300 job applications. She wasn’t looking for work—since earning a PhD from Harvard in 1998, she’d been employed full-time as an economics professor—but instead she wanted to see if the name on the resumé affected the number of callbacks from potential employers. Specifically, half of the resumés had white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Greg Baker) and half had black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones).
What she found was disheartening. White-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks. About one in ten resumés with a white-sounding name received a callback, compared to one in fifteen with a black-sounding name. The racial bias in responses cut across all industries, from fast food to accounting. Even companies that advertised themselves as equal opportunity employers discriminated at roughly the same rate.
To see if the amygdala was involved in racial bias, Phelps devised a simple experiment. She showed twelve white undergraduates pictures of faces of black and white male strangers while they were in an MRI scanner. She also measured racial bias using a test designed to root out implicit, unspoken opinions that someone may suppress for fear of appearing politically incorrect or may simply be unaware of. In the test, subjects categorize words as either good (joy, love, peace) or bad (cancer, death, war) at the same time that they categorize the faces they saw in the MRI machine as black or white. In half of the trials, they use the same response for good and white (left button for good/white, right for bad/black). In the other half, the pairing switches and the they use the same response for good and black (left for good/black, right for bad/white). Someone with greater racial bias finds the task harder when good is paired with black and it takes them longer to press the correct buttons during those trials. Bias is how much longer someone takes on good/black compared to good/white trials.
As expected, participants with stronger racial bias also had the most activation in their amygdala when viewing black faces compared to viewing white faces. The same people who were the slowest at responding when black was paired with good had the greatest amygdala activation when viewing black faces.\
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201208/the-neuroscience-racial-bias
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