So, do you think you are racist?? Do you think you have any conscious or subconscious racial preferences or attitudes? I know what you are saying… “But Erin, I have adopted a child from (fill in the blank) and I am reading your transracial adoption blog… of course I am not racist.”

Today, CNN has the “racial bias quiz” available on their website. The “Implicit Association Test”, from Harvard University tests our conscious and subconscious thoughts regarding race.

Here is a description…

It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

There are 14 different tests, that look at everything from skin tone preferences to age and weight biases, etc. After you take a test, you can read see your results and the collective results of that test.

Here is the chart I got at the end of the dark skin/light skin bias test.

I am happy to say that I fell into the 17% with “little to no automatic preference between skin tones.” I am sad to say that 70% had some preference for light skin compared to dark skin. 70%! That is discouraging to me (but sadly, not surprising). I look at my kids...all of them, and it is so hard to think that some people would look at more than half of them as "less desirable", but that is the sad truth.

Along with the racial bias quiz, you can read this article, titled “Texas City Haunted by ‘No Black After Sundown’ Past”, courtesy of CNN.com.

When I read the article, I had two reactions…I had the “look how far things have come in such a short time” reaction, shortly followed by the “look how far things still have to come” reaction. As an adoptive parent to five black children that will grow up in the U.S., these stories are both difficult to read, and extremely important to read. As much as it hurts me to read about the prejudice that is still out there in our country, it would be impossible for me to help prepare my children for dealing with it if I didn’t know about it. It would be easier to stick my head in the proverbial sand and picture the whole world like our small, supportive town, but that would not be doing my kids any favors. One day they will be out in this world, and dealing with people who still see blacks and Asians as inferior (and worse).

Yes indeed…we have come along way here in the USA, but we have a long way to go.