Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

The Mental Dangers of Racism

By Divine providence I was to see a link on my own very blog to a Healthnet which is so brief I'll just repost the entire thing here:

Racism Really Does Make You Stupid
Prejudice can diminish mental abilities, study finds

by Robert Preidt | May 08 '03

THURSDAY, May 8 (HealthDayNews) -- People who are racist may suffer a temporary lapse in mental capacity after interacting with people who are members of a racial minority.

Researchers from Princeton University and Dartmouth College found that white people with a high degree of racial basis experienced a decrease in "executive function" after spending time talking with black people. Their research appears in the May issue of Psychological Science.


Executive function is a key element of thought that involves the ability to fix attention on certain, high-level mental tasks.


The study included 59 white college students. They were given a test to assess the degree of racial bias in their thinking. The students then spent time talking with either a black or a white person and afterwards were given a test that measured their ability to concentrate on a challenging mental task.


The more racially biased the students were, the worse they did on the mental task after speaking with a black person. But racially biased students who spoke with a white person, even if they discussed racially sensitive issues, had no decline in mental function.


"When you have to control your behavior, it takes a lot of energy. And if you expend energy in a social interaction, then you don't have so much left over to do something else," researcher Nicole Shelton says in a news release

This is why I advise black people, who as a result of knowledge of the massive ugliness that have been visited upon Black people, to move to an emotionally detatched state on the issue ASAP. It took me a while to understand why Professor Fluker, of Tuskegee University was so adamant about people "Checking thier emotions at the door." When one emotively engages in the work of ending WS, one compromises ones ability to think clearly.