Obama Stimulus Money for Video Games and Racial Studies

An important revelation from author Edward Klein is the name of the Obama ally who allegedly offered a $150,000 bribe to Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright to be quiet until after the 2008 election. Klein named him as Dr. Eric Whitaker, executive vice president and associate dean at the University of Chicago Medical Center. A close friend of Obama, and black himself, he leads the Urban Health Initiative (UHI) at the medical center.

Klein’s book, The Amateur, which has been ignored by the major media, will reportedly be number one on the forthcoming New York Times list of nonfiction bestsellers. One of his revelations is that Wright, in a tape-recorded conversation, admitted that he didn’t know if Obama, after 20 years at his church, had given up his devotion to Islam.

It was subsequently disclosed that Whitaker’s University of Chicago Urban Health Initiative received $5,862,027 in federal funds under Obamacare.

The rest of the story is that the medical center is part of the University of Chicago complex, which acknowledges receiving 217 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) awards (Obama stimulus money) totaling $105,856,751 from the Department of Education, Department of Energy, National Endowment for the Arts, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

One of the stimulus grants went to Joshua Correll, a University of Chicago professor who operates a “Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory“ that has been working since 2000 to develop and refine a first-person-shooter video game that was originally designed to ferret out allegedly racist cops in order to re-educate them.

However, Correll is white and his researchers include only one black person.

Correll specifically received $154,563 in stimulus grant money for what is called a collaborative project at the University of Chicago which “outlines a series of studies investigating the role of individual differences in executive functions (EFs) in expression of implicit racial bias.” This appears to be academic jargon for identifying and naming alleged racists.

Whether Correll’s stimulus money directly went for the further development of the video game or not, the game has been a major focus of his attention. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and now specializes in “Stereotypic associations between Black people and danger.”

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As with most things Obama-related, the $105 million received by the university has a racial component. It is supposed to address ”a variety of medical problems,” including “racial bias,” and “other important challenges of our time.”

It is apparently under this category of “racial bias” that Professor Correll got his grant.

The Obama website reports that the project is 50 percent complete. We are not told what that means, however.

Here’s how this website describes the project:

“This collaborative project outlines a series of studies investigating the role of individual differences in executive functions (EFs) in expression of implicit racial bias. Executive functions refer to higher-order control processes that regulate thought and action. Although an individual’s performance on laboratory-based implicit bias tasks is typically interpreted as a straightforward manifestation of his/her underlying automatic bias, recent preliminary evidence suggests that performance on all such tasks implicates executive control processes, such as the overriding of dominant or pre-potent responses. According to the team of researchers involved in this project, racial bias, as assessed by implicit bias tasks, is a complex construct jointly affected by automatic bias and individual differences in EF abilities.”

While this seems deliberately vague, additional research led to the “Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory” in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and the video game that has been under development since 2000.

We are told that the video game “presents a series of images of young men, some armed, some unarmed, set against realistic backgrounds like parks or city streets. The player’s goal is to shoot any and all armed targets, but not to shoot unarmed targets. Half of the targets are Black, and half are White. We have used this game to investigate whether decisions to ‘shoot’ a potentially hostile target can be influenced by that target’s race.”

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The problem is that Correll told NPR, which was recently doing a story about the shooting of the black youth Trayvon Martin, that his research at this point suggests even blacks have preconceived notions about other blacks being potentially dangerous.

NPR reported, “Correll says the participants are universally more likely to fire at black men — whether the shooter is young, old, male, female or even black.” Correll told NPR, “Everybody [on the video game] was faster to shoot a black target than a white target, and the magnitude of that bias was equivalent” regardless of race.

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