Some defense of the Michael Thai methodology, their Study 3 does look at non hard and fast rules (e.g. “Asians preferred”), and they still find penalties against perceived racism and dateability for those profiles even within the “preferences != racist” cohort.
To the essence of what you’re saying, I hear you and am sympathetic to the point you’re putting forth. I guess stepping back a bit, it just feels memetically unstable to live in a world where all implicit racial preferences are basically fine and unquestionable but it is a grave offense to actually articulate that preference to another person. Like let’s say Person A judged 100% of race [x] to be unattractive, but wasn’t even conscious about this and is careful not to humiliate people by expressing this preference in real life (but does act on it). Let’s say Person B makes similar judgments, but is aware about this and will tell people frankly that he has this preference. I think what’s weird (I don’t want to say ‘offensive’) about both of these situations is the 100% unattractiveness judgment, not that Person B has the self-access and confidence to articulate their tastes. Removing my own moral judgments from the scenario, functionally I think what’s going on is that we are socially punishing Person Bs (a minority) in order to exonerate Person As (the majority). To be clear, I’m not in favor of witch-hunting the Person As of the world, nor even concocting elaborate social schemes to prevent them from acting on their attractiveness judgments. Rather I think it’s fair game to point out “it is weird that you have such a strong implicit judgment, and it seems like there is some confusing socially-subjective mechanism that is putting those judgments into you”.
Some defense of the Michael Thai methodology, their Study 3 does look at non hard and fast rules (e.g. “Asians preferred”), and they still find penalties against perceived racism and dateability for those profiles even within the “preferences != racist” cohort.
To the essence of what you’re saying, I hear you and am sympathetic to the point you’re putting forth. I guess stepping back a bit, it just feels memetically unstable to live in a world where all implicit racial preferences are basically fine and unquestionable but it is a grave offense to actually articulate that preference to another person. Like let’s say Person A judged 100% of race [x] to be unattractive, but wasn’t even conscious about this and is careful not to humiliate people by expressing this preference in real life (but does act on it). Let’s say Person B makes similar judgments, but is aware about this and will tell people frankly that he has this preference. I think what’s weird (I don’t want to say ‘offensive’) about both of these situations is the 100% unattractiveness judgment, not that Person B has the self-access and confidence to articulate their tastes. Removing my own moral judgments from the scenario, functionally I think what’s going on is that we are socially punishing Person Bs (a minority) in order to exonerate Person As (the majority). To be clear, I’m not in favor of witch-hunting the Person As of the world, nor even concocting elaborate social schemes to prevent them from acting on their attractiveness judgments. Rather I think it’s fair game to point out “it is weird that you have such a strong implicit judgment, and it seems like there is some confusing socially-subjective mechanism that is putting those judgments into you”.