Blink.

Have you ever wondered if you were racist? Do you have a preference to the skin color you surround yourself with? Most of you will say "no, skin color doesn't matter, and we are all equal." I know, that was my response! Before I read the book, Blink, I believed that there is no room in this world for racism and discrimination, but we don't realize what is going on in our subconscious. As much as we like to think, we are not racist, our subconscious outlines what we "truly" feel. 

Every human being own a subconscious. It is a part of your mind that stores certain memories and judgments, that you are not able to access. They are expressed subconsciously and unknown, but they do define who you are. The novel, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell explores the ideas of that gut feeling that we all have at a certain point, and that we must listen to that feeling because it is from our subconscious. Through out personal, and factual stories, he outlines the importance of our subconscious. 

What does this have to do with racism? In a chapter, Gladwell explains that we don't realize that we all have preferences in skin color due to what our mind has been programmed to prefer. By the people that we come in contact every day and the people we rarely see shape the way our subconscious feels about skin color. At first, I tried to figure who I “prefer” the most, and I would guess white people. I say this because, I am white and the people that I come in contact with are mostly white. 

But “what you think”, is not what it actually is. Gladwell footnotes a website to visit in order to take a test of your subconscious and log your results. As I ventured over to the quiz, I became curious on if I am racist! Through a series of test conducted by a Harvard student, your mind associates a certain skin type with pleasant or unpleasant words. 

I was amazed by what the results hindered. It told me that towards the more “positive side” I associated positive words with White people and Asian People. And on the “negative side” I associated negative words with Black people and Hispanic People. The results showed that, I am more negative minded when it comes Black or Hispanic people. In a way, I felt a little guilty but it wasn’t my conscious that made these decisions, rather than an unknown reasoning buried deep in my mind. Some factors that play into these results are the types of people you see on a daily basis. Most of the people I come in contact with in a day, are caucasian. And where I work has a large customer demographic of Asians. 

Here is a link to the test if you are interested on seeing if you are a racist, old, conservative:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1 

Now, lets look at the side of why I chose to indulge in Gladwell’s reading. Not only has he hooked my attention with books like, The Tipping Point and Outliers, but he has a tone of writing that allows you to wonder why. Gladwell uses diction that is easily understandable by the average reader, and syntax that organizes a story into a whirlwind of wonder and curiosity. Some readers criticize Gladwell’s writing as childish an unimaginative, but I believe that he envelopes the reader by pointing out stories that we have all heard (and might not have heard), and pointing out the astounding connections to you and these wild stories. 

I am not quite sure how you would incorporate not being racist in your to-do list, but make sure to write:

-Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell