The answer is “no”.
Can Googling be racist?
A Harvard study has found racial bias in Google searches. Yet it’s not the search engine but our own prejudice that’s to blame.
Another day, another junk science survey that is used to project the idiotic prejudices of the researchers onto the rest of us. No, Google searches do not indicate any form of latent racism in the rest of us. And, frankly, that’s a bloody big shark they just jumped there.
I’m not even going to waste effort fisking this rampant cockwaffle – it isn’t worth it.
I thought Harvard was supposed to be a place for intelligent people?
Well, Bucko… Greg Laden, a biological anthropologist and science communicator, went there. Does that help?
What a dreadfully dull and uninspiring article that was. Though I guess it’s probably racist of me to say so …
People on the Internet who use Google are, presumably, people who have (a) sufficient education to use the internet, (b) sufficient money to have *access* to it, and (c) are statistically most likely to live in a developed nation. As most developed nations have a majority of white people, the sample size is inherently skewed. I doubt there are many people using Google in China, for example.
(Also, it is quite possible to be both black *and* racist. Africa is a *continent*, not a single, homogenous nation. Many of them clearly hate each other, or there wouldn’t be quite so many wars there.)
But what do I know? I never even bothered with university, so I must be well fick.
S. Baggaley: Also, it is quite possible to be both black *and* racist.
Indeed – I have a dark (but not black)-skinned friend who, when asked why he dislikes black people, says that he knows he’s not white, but at least he isn’t a fuckin’ nigger.
There is all different kinds of racism between people who otherwise look very similar – English people and the Irish (and vice versa); Indians versus Pakistanis and so on and so forth.
We are a fundamentally tribal species, so why this kind of behaviour continues to strike some people as surprising escapes me. It also flies in the face of how our species has evolved into a myriad tribes, each with its own subtle, and less subtle, cultures and social mores.
Some of these tribes can work together with minimal social friction, but as we’ve seen with certain Abrahamic religions of late, other tribes *cannot* work together without some form of intermediary or buffer zone between them. (It’s amazing how often you’ll find applications of design theories in other fields: it’s all about *interaction* between complex systems, and humans are among the most complex systems we know.)
The trick isn’t to pretend we’re not tribal, but to work out how to get along with other tribes without going to war. It *is* possible. It’s how we’ve managed to go from hunter-gatherers to living in massive cities. But we won’t always succeed in getting two specific tribes to work together if they are socio-culturally incompatible: you need to plug in a third party to mediate between them. Yes, Middle East, I’m looking at you.
Trying to stamp out traits in our species that evolved over millions of years is an exercise in futility. What we call “racism” is just another word for “tribalism” and that lies at the heart of every major and minor conflict our species has had throughout its history.
“Betteridge’s law of headlines” strikes again?
I’d say a textbook example.