Sick Transit

I never followed Calculated Risk. So while Tanta has my deep respect for her prescience in predicting the current financial crisis, and my condolences go to her family on her tragically young death from cancer, the most remarkable aspect to me of this moving obituary is finding out what bankers do when they’re bored. I give you… The Mortgage Pig.

Is the Drug Czar’s office really happy that their ads are this popular with stoners?

Via Mark Kleiman, John Tierney asks:

If, as some social scientists have been telling us, 88 percent of whites have an “implicit bias” against blacks and in favor of whites, and if, according to exit polls, whites made up 74 percent of the voters on Tuesday, why is Barack Obama going to be the next president?

Kleiman points out that Obama won because he was the superior candidate, ran a better campaign, and had a favorable political envronment. That doesn’t mean that racism didn’t potentially cut into his margin.

It’s also worth noting that, according to the exit polls, voters who listed race as an important factor voted for Obama at the same rate as those who weren’t as concerned with the topic. But given that some voters were probably influenced to vote for Obama by the desire to see an African-American in the White House, the balance of the numbers implies that an equal quantity of voters were influenced against Obama by his race.

That said, the key issue Tierney glosses over is that the best way to counter implicit bias is to make it explicit. Implicit prejudice affects our actions when we’re not thinking about it; but no one following this campaign could have failed to be conscious–not just visually aware, but consciously mindful–of Obama’s race. That’s the great power of the speech that Obama gave after the Jeremiah Wright fiasco: he didn’t make his campaign about race, but he didn’t run from the topic, either.

So Obama’s election doesn’t show that we’ve eliminated implicit prejudice in this country. Rather, it shows that we’ve nearly eliminated explicit prejudice–that whatever our socialized biases, few of us will act on them when the issues are clear. That is definitely cause for celebration; it also shows that we will conquer the remaining racial inequalities in our society, not by pretending that the battle is won, but by fully facing up to the barriers, and consciously working to overcome them.

Another one that is too good to pass up:

We don’t call it “consciousness raising” when we explain why you ought to be able to shoot up while selling your kidney to a sex worker, but that’s what it is.

Froma Kerry Howley, via Julian Sanchez.