What this country needs is a good Inquisition!

There’s an emerging national inquisition over the issue of race:

Workers at the U.S. government’s Forest Service have been asked to use online tests to check whether they are secretly racist, or harboring other biases.

The federal employees were asked to use work time to take tests, lasting some 15 minutes each, to see whether they have unconscious biases based on sexuality, nationalist, race and whether somebody is disabled.

The practice was reported on by the Washington Times, which said the directive to take the Harvard quizzes came from Forest Management Director Bryan Rice.

He also reportedly asked bosses at other federal agencies to spread links to the Harvard tests, hosted at implicit.harvard.edu.

The tests are a kind of word association game, which flashes up emotions or qualities such as ‘happy’, ‘agony’ and ‘laughter’, which users must sort into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories.

These are then mixed with elements of the category being tested – for example the race test flashes up pictures of black and white faces.

Participants complete several rounds of testing, first being instructed to associate all the ‘good’ words with one race, then the other.

The more quickly and accurately they make each association – good or bad – the stronger their underlying bias is said to be.

Lovely. No doubt the idea will spread to (or be forced upon) employees everywhere. After all, if we test employees for drugs, shouldn’t we also test them for racism?

Anyone who doesn’t like the idea of being tested for racism is obviously guilty of racism, and is certainly committing microagressions.