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  3. Obama’s Success Isn’t All Good News for Black AmericansA)As Eri

Obama’s Success Isn’t All Good News for Black AmericansA)As Eri

游客2024-02-06  33
问题                 Obama’s Success Isn’t All Good News for Black Americans
A)As Erin White watched the election results head towards victory for Barack Obama, she felt a burden lifting from her shoulders. "In that one second, it was a validation for my whole race," she recalls.
B)"I’ve always been an achiever," says White, who is studying for an MBA at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "But there had always been these things in the back of my mind questioning whether I really can be who I want. It was like a shadow, following me around saying you can only go so far. Now it’ s like a barrier has been let down."
C)White’s experience is what many psychologists had expected—that Obama would prove to be a powerful role model for African Americans. Some hoped his rise to prominence would have a big impact on white Americans, too, challenging those who still harbor racist sentiments. "The traits that characterise him are very contradictory to the racial stereotypes that black people are aggressive and uneducated," says Ashby Plant of Florida State University. "He’s very intelligent and eloquent."
Sting in the tail
D)Ashby Plant is one of a number of psychologists who seized on Obama’s candidacy to test hypotheses about the power of role models. Their work is already starting to reveal how the "Obama effect" is changing people’ s views and behavior. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not all good news: there is a sting in the tail of the Obama effect.
E)But first the good news, Barack Obama really is a positive role model for African Americans, and he was making an impact even before he got to the White House. Indeed, the Obama effect can be surprisingly immediate and powerful, as Ray Friedman of Vanderbilt University and his colleagues discovered.
F)They tested four separate groups at four key stages of Obama’s presidential campaign. Each group consisted of around 120 adults of similar age and education, and the test assessed their language skills. At two of these stages, when Obama’ s success was less than certain, the tests showed a clear difference between the scores of the white and black participants—an average of 12.1 out of 20, compared to 8.8, for example. When the Obama fever was at its height, however, the black participants performed much better. Those who had watched Obama’s acceptance speech as the Democrats’ presidential candidate performed just as well, on average, as the white subjects. After his election victory, this was true of all the black participants.
Dramatic shift
G)What can explain this dramatic shift? At the start of the test, the participants had to declare their race and were told their results would be used to assess their strengths and weaknesses. This should have primed the subjects with "stereotype threat"—an anxiety that their results will confirm negative stereotypes, which has been shown to damage the performance of African Americans.
H)Obama’s successes seemed to act as a shield against this. "We suspect they felt inspired and energized by his victory, so the stereotype threat wouldn’t prove a distraction," says Friedman.
Lingering racism
I)If the Obama effect is positive for African Americans, how is it affecting their white compatriots(同胞)? Is the experience of having a charismatic(有魅力的)black president modifying lingering racist attitudes? There is no easy way to measure racism directly; instead psychologists assess what is known as "implicit bias", using a computer-based test that measures how quickly people associate positive and negative words—such as "love" or "evil"—with photos of black or white faces. A similar test can also measure how quickly subjects associate stereotypical traits—such as athletic skills or mental ability—with a particular group.
J)In a study that will appear in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Plant’s team tested 229 students during the height of the Obama fever. They found that implicit bias has fallen by as much as 90% compared with the level found in a similar study in 2006. "That’ s an unusually large drop," Plant says.
K)While the team can’t be sure their results are due solely to Obama, they also showed that those with the lowest bias were likely to subconsciously associate black skin colour with political words such as "government" or "president". This suggests that Obama was strongly on their mind, says Plant.
Drop in bias
L)Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who runs a website that measures implicit bias using similar test, has also observed a small drop in bias in the 700,000 visitors to the site since January 2007, which might be explained by Obama’s rise to popularity. However, his preliminary results suggest that change will be much slower coming than Plant’s results suggest.
Talking honestly
M)"People now have the opportunity of expressing support for Obama every day," says Daniel Effron at Stanford University in California. "Our research arouses the concern that people may now be more likely to raise negative views of African Americans." On the other hand, he says, it may just encourage people to talk more honestly about their feelings regarding race issues, which may not be such a bad thing.
N)Another part of the study suggests far more is at stake than the mere expression of views. The Obama effect may have a negative side. Just one week after Obama was elected president, participants were less ready to support policies designed to address racial inequality than they had been two weeks before the election.
Beyond race
O)We also don’t yet know how long the Obama effect—both its good side and its bad—will last. Political sentiment is notoriously changeable: What if things begin to go wrong for Obama, and his popularity slumps?
P)And what if Americans become so familiar with having Obama as their president that they stop considering his race altogether? "Over time he might become his own entity," says Plant. This might seem like the ultimate defeat for racism, but ignoring the race of certain select individuals—a phenomenon that psychologists call subtyping—also has an insidious(隐伏的)side. "We think it happens to help people preserve their beliefs, so they can still hold on to the previous stereotypes." That could turn out to be the cruelest of all the twists to the Obama effect. [br] Obama effect has both good side and bad side, but nobody knows how long it will last.
选项
答案 O
解析 题干关键词good side and bad side和how long it will last。文中O段提到，We also don’t yet know how long the Obama effect--both its good side and its bad—will last，与题干意思一致，故选O。
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