Black On-Black Racism: The Black Lives Matter Movement

Continuous cases of the police shooting down unarmed African Americans have provoked the “Black Lives Matter” movement. This activist movement against police brutality has been rapidly catching the public’s attention. American people have been intensively disputing over the controversy of whether or not the police are biased against African Americans, but have not reached an agreement. Some insist that all American people discriminate against African Americans whereas the others believe that American people do not discriminate them. African Americans are the focus of discrimination issue. However, when public puts all of their attention on African Americans, they have not realized that not only African American are the victims of discrimination.

In the article “Black-on-Black Racism: The Hazards of Implicit Bias”, Johnson discusses the controversy of whether or not Americans have biases against minorities. Throughout the article, he takes the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a racial-bias assessment, as a reference (Johnson). It examines the level of the respondents’ implicit bias against African American by asking the respondents to sort a group of words as positive or negative and to quickly sort the images of faces as black or white people (Johnson). The result of this test reveals that, in general, the participants, including black people, have a higher tendency to pair black faces with negative words (Johnson). Johnson’s article argues that the implicit bias against African Americans exists observably today. Although Johnson is an African American, his result of the IAT exposes that he also has slight contempt for his own race. In his words, racism happens to black people and through black people simultaneously. The stereotypes that demean black people have also caused them to look down on their own race, and further lead the growth of implicit bias for every American person (Johnson). Furthermore, the implicit bias does not only apply to discrimination against African Americans. Different people may target and discriminate against different groups unconsciously. Johnson published his article on The Atlantic, an authoritative website that includes news and analysis on politics, business, culture, technology, etc. His intended audiences appear to be all the Americans, since he stated in his article that almost every American has an implicit bias against black people. With strong support of all the sources, Johnson addresses the social issue in the society: Public bias over black people has caused the black-on-black racism. When a person denies that he has racism against black people, he is racist against