Mediaite and What is racism?

Nicholas Kristof, a white columnist for the New York Times, has a confession: He’s “a little bit racist.” It’s a conclusion he came to after playing a first-person shooter video game wherein he found himself shooting unarmed black men more often than white men.

In the op-ed, titled “Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?,” Kristof ticks through some statistics demonstrating that white Americans are perceived by others in a more favorable way than black ones. One of those stats involves a University of Colorado study that had participants play the game and try to shoot different images of men either carrying a gun (“bad guys”) or something else, like a bottle (“good guys”). Most players, black or white, were more likely to shoot the unarmed black men than the unarmed white men.

From Kristof’s column: