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01/09/2009: "Double standards: only whites may be termed "racist"."

The study, by researchers at Yale University and Toronto's York University, involved 120 nonblack students who were told they were being recruited for an experiment on team-oriented problem-solving. They were broken into three groups. The members of the first group were individually placed in a room with a black actor and a white actor, both posing as fellow participants in the study, and watched as the black actor slightly bumped the white actor while leaving the room. After the black actor had left, the white actor played out one of three scenarios, saying, "I hate it when black people do that," "Clumsy n______" or nothing at all. None of the people in the two other study groups experienced the interactions directly; one group watched them on video and the other simply read about them. (See The Cure for Racism.)

After the incident, students were asked to choose one of the two actors - still posing as fellow participants - for the teamwork assignment. More than 80% of the students who watched a racist exchange on video said they would not work with the white student. Those who read about racist behavior showed a similar aversion, with 75% preferring the black actor as a teammate. Participants in both groups said they were deeply upset by the racist comments.
The same did not hold true for the participants who experienced the racist event firsthand.

[ No doubt there would be any number of excuses for why, reversing the races in this experiment, it would surely be found that no one black is disgusted if a fellow black racially disparages a white for bumping into him, and that they had no more inclination than before to choose the white as a team mate. ]

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1870408,00.html