Prejudice is common. You don’t have to look far to find it in education, criminal justice, employment, and elsewhere. For instance:
Prejudice is common, and yet the majority of us think ourselves free from it. How is that?
Psychologists Drs. Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald of Harvard and University of Washington, respectively, are among the many whose scientific research paints the idea of “colorblindness” as largely a self-satisfying fiction. Their work shows that prejudice is, in fact, a human norm. Contrary to the bias-free self-perception most of us carry, research has shown that the human animal is generally, by nature, biased against outgroups—those who don’t look or sound like them. In America, you must add to this predisposition the fact that Afro-Americans—the American descendants of African slaves—were socially and legally held in contempt as sub-human and then as sub-citizens for 188 years of this country’s 240-year lifespan. For Americans, anti-black prejudice is not just human nature, but historical nurture. Combine the nature and nurture of American prejudice, these researchers demonstrate, and you have a mighty force under which we all labor—both black and white. The question then becomes, do we acknowledge and attempt to address that bias, or pretend that we’re above it, even as we indulge it while proclaiming ourselves “colorblind.”
It is the toxic combination of natural and nurtured prejudice that Banaji and Greenwald measure in what they call Implicit Association Tests (IAT). These are psychological tests designed to reveal unconscious biases against various groups—blacks, women, etc. In the introduction to their book, “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People,” Banaji and Greenwald state:
“In this book we aim to make clear why many scientists, ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden-bias blindspots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware.”
The race IAT (the only one I’ll be discussing here) considers how we equate black faces with weapons and danger. Banaji and Greenwald write:
“The belief that Black men are criminals persists even though the likelihood of any given Black male being a criminal is low. Needless to say, the existence of a stereotype associating a given group with violence and crime is grave and has important implications for the individual, group, and society.”
An academic understatement. If white police officers think that every time a black man reaches for his pocket, he’s reaching for a gun, they will shoot a lot of black men. And they do. A black man is 21 times more likely to be shot by a police officer than a white man.
The race IAT first asks takers to self-report their association of blacks with weapons. This “self-reported” aspect of the test asks you if you acknowledge explicit bias (i.e., do you admit that your have racist views). Next comes the “automatic” part of the test, meant to uncover unacknowledged or ‘automatic’ bias (do you hold racist views even though you think or say you don’t).
In the test, you’re first asked to label objects as “harmless” or as “weapons.”Harmless objects include things like soda cans and cell phones. Next, you label faces as “African American” or “European American.”Once accustomed to that, you are asked to associate, for instance, a soda can with one of two labels: “weapon or African American,” or “harmless object or European American.”
Seventy percent of the more than eighty thousand race IATs showed more difficulty associating White with weapons than associating Black with weapons. The authors write:
“First, the automatic Black = weapons association is much stronger among all groups who took the test—White, Asian, Hispanic, and even African American—than is suggested by surveys that asked questions about this association. Second, the size of this automatic stereotype varies noticeably by groups—it is largest in Whites and Asians, next largest in Hispanics, and smallest in African Americans. But even African Americans show a modest Black = weapons stereotype [emphasis mine].
“Third, comparing results of the two kinds of tests—reflective self-report and automatic stereotype—reveals another interesting fact about who carries the stereotype. The higher the education level, the lower the endorsement of the association between Blacks and weapons on the reflective self-report answers. However, on the test of automatic stereotypes, the IAT, education level matters not a whit. Those with the greatest education carry as strong an implicit Black = weapons stereotype as do those with the least education.”
Not surprisingly, higher education levels translated to less self-reported association between blacks and weapons. Well-educated folks assumed they were more free from prejudice. However, the test showed just as strong a black=weapons stereotype among the highly educated as among the less well-educated.
In either group, it didn’t matter that test-takers admitted no animus toward blacks. A majority still displayed prejudice toward blacks in the automatic portion of the test.The researchers call this “unconscious” bias. Nor did it matter how well-educated the subjects were. They still displayed bias against black faces in more readily associating them with weapons and violence.
Not only that, but studies also show that bias and preference form early.By around age five, racial preferences begin to show themselves based on a child’s natural propensity to favor those who look like him or her—a propensity that is then reinforced by social cues, and then hardens into open negativity toward black faces surprisingly early. [Interestingly, the study found that young children chose to befriend a black child with a native accent before a white one with a foreign accent. It seems language can trump race in the “hatestakes.”]
One study seeking to determine when infants graduated to race-based preference tested how readily children aged 10 months, 2.5 years and 5 years exchanged toys with other-race individuals. In the first two tests, the youngest children exchanged toys as readily with same race individuals as with other-race individuals. The five-year-olds, however, “expressed explicit social preferences for own-race individuals.” [v]
Other studies came to similar conclusions. One entitled, “The Development of Implicit Attitudes. Evidence of Race Evaluations from Ages 6 and 10 and Adulthood,” found that not only does racial bias appear around age 6, but that children even acknowledge it around that age:
“Remarkably, implicit pro-White/anti-Black bias was evident even in the [6-year-olds], with self-reported attitudes revealing bias in the same direction. In 10-year-olds and adults, the same magnitude of implicit race bias was observed, although self-reported race attitudes became substantially less biased in older children and vanished entirely in adults, who self-reported equally favorable attitudes toward Whites and Blacks. [vi]
In other words, the six-year-olds have not yet learned to hide their bias.By age 10, however, they have, and declare themselves less biased than tests show them to be.By the time they’re adults, the self-satisfying fiction of “colorblindness” is complete. Adults say they are free from bias when tests show they are not.
A 2010 study commissioned by CNN found that five-year-old “white children have an overwhelming bias toward white, and that black children also have a bias toward white but not nearly as strong as the bias shown by the white children.”
“A 5-year-old girl in Georgia is being asked a series of questions in her school library. The girl, who is white, is looking at pictures of five cartoons of girls, all identical except for skin color ranging from light to dark.
“When asked who the smart child is, she points to a light-skinned doll. When asked who the mean child is she points to a dark-skinned doll. She says a white child is good because "I think she looks like me", and says the black child is ugly because "she's a lot darker." [vii]
That’s by age five. Add to that a couple more decades of negative imagery and inference of blacks as dangerous, ignorant, and inferior and what do you get? You get the average American adult.
It’s imperative to reiterate that black children also displayed anti-black bias—just less so than white children. This phenomenon was first observed when, in the 1940s, Afro-American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clarke conducted now-famous experiments using dolls to assess the impact of racism and segregation on the self-esteem of black children aged three to nine. The dolls were identical in all aspects except skin and hair color: some were black with brown hair, and some white and blond. Questions were designed to determine children’s preferences, their knowledge of racial differences, and their self-identification with racial groups.
“The results of the Clark and Clark (1947) study revealed that 67% of Black children preferred to play with White dolls, 59% chose the White doll as the nice doll, and 60% chose the White doll as having a nice color. Additionally, 59% chose the Black doll as being the one that ‘looks bad.’ Interestingly, overall only 58% of Black children selected the Black doll as the one that ‘looks like you.’ ” [viii]
Now, back to the 2010 CNN study:
“The tests showed that white children, as a whole, responded with a high rate of what researchers call "white bias," identifying the color of their own skin with positive attributes and darker skin with negative attributes. … even black children, as a whole, have some bias toward whiteness, but far less than white children [emphasis mine].” [ix]
A 2013 paper for the Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology acknowledged a wealth of studies buttressing the IAT work and doll studies addressed above, and went further to cite some sources of the displayed bias.
“The enduring findings of doll studies (Banks, 1976; Byrd, 2012; Cross, 1985; Gray-Little & Halfdahl, 2000) are seen as indicative of messages in American society that devalue African Americans. These messages are transmitted early in the lives of African American children despite all of the gains of the civil rights movement, the growth of the African American middle class and the election of the first American Black president (Veroni-Paccher, 2012).” [x]
One is tempted to call the next citation among the most “shocking,” but it is not. The lure to use “shocking” is societal training whispering like a devil in your ear. To call it ‘shocking’ suggests a naivete that feeds the fiction that we’re all pure at heart when it comes to things ‘race.’ But the following should not surprise anyone who has lived in this country and has a glancing familiarity with the facts of its history. The following should disgust, but it should not shock.
It’s important to note that what researchers are finding is not simple preference bias. It is not simply one group (principally whites) saying, ‘I prefer my own kind.’ On the contrary, research shows an overt contempt for those of African descent. It shows a vicious dehumanization that is an American birthright, a legacy of our shared American history.
“Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants’ basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts. Specifically, this Black–ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not.” [xi]
The research, conducted over six years at Stanford and Penn State, used principally white, male undergraduates. The researchers “primed” their subjects with black or white male faces flashed on a screen for a fraction of a second. “Researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces.”
“The researchers consistently discovered a black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other non-white groups, such as Asians. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.” [xii]
In discussing their work, the researchers point to the fact that the iconic “march of progress” evolutionary illustration almost invariably ‘progresses’ from ape to a white man—presenting the latter as the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement.
White man as the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement.
These researchers also looked at the practical implications of this dehumanization. They primed their subjects with words associated with apes, like “monkey,” or “gorilla,” or with words associated with big cats, like “lion” or “panther.” The cat words were used as a control since they also suggest Africa and violence. The students were then shown a video clip of police violently beating a man “of indeterminate race.” However, a mugshot of a black or white man was shown prior to the clip to indicate who was being beaten.
“Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either ape or big cat words…. But those who thought the suspect was black were more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat words.” [xiii]
What are the results of this dehumanizing link?
“This link has devastating consequences for African Americans because it ‘alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against black suspects.’ For example, the paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, African Americans convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant language, such as ‘barbaric,’ ‘beast,’ ‘brute,’ ‘savage’ and ‘wild.’ ‘Those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not,’ the researchers write.” [xiv]
A tendency to prejudice alone does not make a person bad. It makes him or her a person like most people. Period. A bad person is one who, contrary to all evidence, denies that he or she is just as prone to prejudice as any other human, just as susceptible to the grotesque lessons of American history as anyone else. A bad person is one so convinced of his own semi-godliness that he insists he’s free from bias, so no thought or action of his could ever be based on prejudice. Having declared himself preternaturally pure of heart and thought, he has permission to act on those prejudices without guilt or shame—and lets them congeal into actions that actively harm other people. That individual is then appalled when someone calls him a racist.
Consider the human propensity toward prejudice akin to many inclinations we suppress because they’re socially destructive and potentially dangerous. We teach our young not to relieve themselves where they stand, not to throw tantrums when they don’t get what they want, not to sneeze without covering their noses and to wear clothes in public. The pull to prejudice is no different. It is an animal propensity that Americans historically turned into a vicious form of social control and personal erasure. It requires active work and learning to suppress. Denying it has not made it go away. Suggesting non-race-based solutions to race-based problems in order to salve the majority’s tender feelings at the suggestion that they’re not ‘colorblind’—this has not worked either. The statistics at the top of this piece and current events, including the most recent presidential nominating contest, prove that. Denial doesn’t work. Our human nature and the American history by which we’re bound never go away. Everyone pretending that he or she is the exception is delusional. The odds are overwhelming that you harbor just as varied a set of prejudices and biases as all the rest of us.
Thus, the question becomes, what are you going to do about it? Returning to the apt analogy—prejudice as a common but potentially toxic bodily function—will you walk around with a steaming pant-load pretending you smell nothing? Or will you acknowledge the impulse, recognize its stench, and work to control it?
[i] www.naacp.org/...
[ii] New York Civil Liberties Union, “Stop and Frisk Data.” www.nyclu.org/...
[iii] www.washingtonpost.com/...
[iv] Black Preschoolers Far More Likely To Be Suspended, NPR, March 21, 2014 www.npr.org/...
[v] Baron AS, Banaji MR. The development of implicit attitudes: Evidence of race evaluations from ages, 6, 10, and adulthood. Psychological Science. 2006;17:53–58. [PubMed]
[vi] Kids’ Test Answers on race bring mother to tears,” CNN, March 25, 2010 edition.cnn.com/...
[vii] Phillip Jordan and Maria Hernandez-Reif, “Reexamination of Young Children’s Racal Attitudes and Skin Tone Preferences,” Journal of Black Psychology 2009:35: 388, April 14, 2009 www.sagepub.com/...
[viii] Study: White and black children biased toward lighter skin, CNN, May 14, 2010 www.cnn.com/...
[ix] Using the Science of Psychology to Target Perpetrators of Racism and Race-Based Discrimination for Intervention Efforts: Preventing Another Trayvon Martin Tragedy,” Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
[x] Goff, P. A., Eberhardt, J. L., Williams, M. J., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 292-306.
[xi] Stanford University, “Discrimination Against Blacks Linked To Dehumanization, Study Finds,” February 8, 2008, Science Daily www.sciencedaily.com/...
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
