The Patriot Post® · NAACP: We Need Mandatory 'Implicit Bias' Testing for All Public Officials

On Wednesday, USA Today ran an opinion article by NAACP President Derrick Johnson in which he called for mandatory “implicit bias” testing for all public officials. Hello 1984. Johnson asserts that recent events, such as the arrest of two black men at Starbucks, indicate “that racism still remains a much more popular drink in America than coffee.” He then commends Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson for his decision to train all employees in “unconscious and implicit bias,” though Derrick Johnson questions why the entire nation waits and doesn’t proactively engage in implicit bias testing and training.

Johnson further writes, “The NAACP is calling for an expansion of the movement to demand mandatory testing for implicit bias, particularly for officials paid with public dollars. For major corporations, implicit bias training must become a part of corporate responsibility rather than always as a response to video-taped intolerance.” The test he recommends is the dubious Harvard University implicit association test (IAT). But the IAT breaks the cardinal rule of sound research: It doesn’t produce repeatable results. Thus, it’s anything but good science.

Putting aside the faux-scientific IAT, the root of this “implicit bias” testing for “hidden” racism is none other than an effort to force a politically correct worldview. Like testing for some dangerous contagion within the public’s drinking water, Johnson is demanding that public officials be tested to make sure their thinking conforms with leftist ideals on racism and identity politics in order to weed out any “dangerous” non-conformist ideas or beliefs. This is antithetical to the basic and foundational principles upon which our great nation was established. It is an outright attack on the First Amendment.

Johnson’s proposal is, of course, fascist and totalitarian. His recommendation that public officials and corporate employees should be forcibly subjected to testing designed to produce uniform thought control — even if his high-minded goal is “to awaken the soul of our nation” in order to “make us better people” and “society” — is quite simply sickening. Where is the concern over protecting individual liberty or even diversity of thought? It’s nonexistent. Instead, Johnson justifies his call to trample the rights of Americans by pointing to his brand of “higher morality” for the nation and declaring it good.