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During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".

This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.

People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

[...]

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

Emphasis mine.

So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.

The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

Number of black soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima: 900.

Number of black soldiers in Clint Eastwood’s film version: 0.

(Guardian)

Number of racist murders in Britain, 1995-2004: 58.

Number where the victim was white: 24.

(Guardian)

Pay increase limit imposed on UK nurses: 1.5%.

This year’s pay rise for Cabinet Ministers: 2.8%.

(Guardian, UK parliament)

[For more cases of LiveJournal Abuse Team behaving abusively, check out http://ljabuse.blogspot.com/.]

For several years I was a paying user of LiveJournal. Now I pay for web hosting and run my own content management system. It’s not by choice; this is the story.

In a nutshell, following an altercation with a racist troll, LiveJournal suspended my account without warning, even though I had not breached their Terms Of Service. They didn’t suspend the troll’s account–instead, they announced that (contrary to their written terms of service) racist comments were in fact perfectly acceptable on LiveJournal.

Attempts at compromise to resolve the issue were ignored and rejected, even when I offered to delete offending comments. The money I had paid for the service they were refusing to provide was not refunded.

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Recent research reveals that if you have a “white-sounding” name like Emily or Brendan, you are 50% more likely to get invited to a job interview than if you have a “black-sounding” name like Latisha or Jamal.

Of course, it’s easy to criticize others—and fun, too—but less easy to evaluate one’s own implicit biases. That’s where implicit association tests come in.

Through the magic of Macromedia Flash and statistical science, you can now measure your own unconscious bigotry in the privacy of your own home! Find out if US propaganda has you automatically suspecting Muslims! Measure whether you have a secret bias against fat people, or whether you automatically hate skinny women! But remember, you might not like what you discover about yourself…