Surprise Surprise

Turns out, Racial Bias actually is a thing.  Which makes Race-based Privilege into a thing as well.

Not that anybody who needs to hear this will actually hear it - much less put any stock in it because of course it's just more academic mumbo jumbo from people who've spent the better part of their lives studying such things, and who gives a fuck about Australia anyway!?! - but anyhoo.

From Univ of Queensland via NYT: 

With more than 1,500 observations, the study uncovered substantial, statistically significant race discrimination. Bus drivers were twice as willing to let white testers ride free as black testers (72 percent versus 36 percent of the time). Bus drivers showed some relative favoritism toward testers who shared their own race, but even black drivers still favored white testers over black testers (allowing free rides 83 percent versus 68 percent of the time).

The study also found that racial disparities persisted when the testers wore business attire or dressed in army uniforms. For example, testers wearing army uniforms were allowed to ride free 97 percent of the time if they were white, but only 77 percent of the time if they were black.

This elegant experiment follows in a tradition of audit testing, in which social scientists have sent testers of different races to, for example, bargain over the price of new cars or old baseball cards. But the Australian study is the first, to my knowledge, to focus on discretionary accommodations. It’s less likely these days to find people in positions of authority, even at lower levels of decision making, consciously denying minorities rights. But it is easier to imagine decision makers, like the bus drivers, granting extra privileges and accommodations to nonminorities. Discriminatory gifts are more likely than discriminatory denials.

A police officer is an out-and-out bigot if she targets innocent blacks for speeding tickets. But an officer who is more likely to give a pass to white motorists who exceed the speed limit than to black ones is also discriminating, even if with little or no conscious awareness. This is one reason the Twitter hashtag #crimingwhilewhite is so powerful: It draws attention to the racially biased exercise of discretion by police officers, prosecutors and judges, which results in whites getting a pass for the kinds of offenses for which minorities are punished.

So the discrimination is there; the biogtry is there; it's just behind a slightly less thoroughly disgusting mask.  It's about the "positive" of granting a little favor for the White Folk so it looks and sounds a little better, but it's still the same old "negative" of denying that favor (ie: privilege) to Black Folk.  I'm willing to call it as having made some progress, but we're still pretty well stuck with a problem of unequal treatment, and having that inequality based on the color of somebody's skin.

It's just not enough.  We gotta do better.