Florida State University recently offered a perfect example of woke thought in action: Prove you’re not racially biased by taking a test that assumes you are inherently, racially biased.
According to The College Fix on Monday, FSU is mandating that its Resident Assistants, or RAs, take the Harvard Implicit Association Test in order to continue in that role.
The Fix noted screenshots of the test that were leaked by an RA at the Tallahassee campus to the website Florida’s Conservative Voice.
One question asks “How warm or cold do you feel towards Black people?” and invites respondents to grade themselves on a scale from 1 to 10.
Another question asks prospective RAs to rate themselves on whether they “strongly,” “moderately,” or “slightly” prefer being around blacks or whites.
An FSU spokeswoman denied that the test was required to be an RA, for employment or as “homework,” as the whistleblower described it.
It is instead to “help test-takers understand the concept of bias better and was not required as any sort of litmus test,” The Fix reported of FSU’s reaction.
“The test was used to facilitate dialogue that focused on bias as a general concept during a staff meeting for resident assistants. University Housing staff and resident assistants are not required to take the Harvard Implicit Association Test,” Amy Farnum-Patronis, director of FSU’s news and digital communications, told The Fix.
“Completing the test is not tied to employment, nor is it required or used for student housing assignments or any other purpose.”
The whistleblower, however, told Florida’s Conservative Voice, “Basically I had to take it to prove that I have unconscious bias.”
Neither Farnum-Patronis nor the faculty member who administered the test identified to either outlet why RAs had to take the test.
But even after taking it, there is little evidence it accomplishes anything – except as a mechanism for social control.
In a 2017 column posted by the liberal website Vox, a test-taker reported that taking the test once accomplishes nothing. It had to be taken perhaps “dozens” of times to say whether someone is a racist.
“According to a growing body of research and the researchers who created the test and maintain it at the Project Implicit website, the IAT is not good for predicting individual biases based on just one test. It requires a collection — an aggregate — of tests before it can really make any sort of conclusions.no researcher,” Vox’s columnist noted. No one, he added, “not even the test’s creators defend the one-off use.”
That same year, an article at the website Quartz.com noted that the test, first introduced in 1998, had failed to live up to its hype. The piece called it a “highly flawed” test resting on “shaky science.”
“This acclaimed and hugely influential test, though, has repeatedly fallen short of basic scientific standards. There are now thousands of workplace talks and police trainings and jury guidelines that focus on implicit bias, but we still have no strong scientific proof that these programs work,” Quartz noted.
In response to The Fix, Christina Pushaw, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary, noted FSU reveals a major problem in higher education.
“Unfortunately, racial Marxist ideologies like CRT [Critical Race Theory] have infected many institutions, from schools to corporations,” Pushaw told The Fix. “Regardless of how rare or common it is, even one instance of discriminatory indoctrination is too much.”
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