Although many of the world’s most powerful nations have
participated in slavery, the United States was unique in the extent to which it
based its political structure and its economy on the institution of
slavery. In so doing, it created a
situation that it has struggled to deal with for the last 150 years. The inevitable end to enslavement for
millions of black African Americans left a white-dominated society with a need
to incorporate all of these new citizens.
People who enslave others must produce a moral
justification for themselves. If one
chooses to make slaves of members of a race, then that race must consist of
people who are deserving of subjugation.
If whites are humans, then blacks must be subhuman in some way or
another. It was as simple as that. And that belief, imprinted over centuries,
did not disappear with the end of the institution of slavery. In fact, it persisted openly throughout much
of the twentieth century. It seems to
continue to propagate within our culture even though overt forms of discrimination
have become illegal.
Keith Payne addresses the implicit form of racial bias
that has continued in the US in his book The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die. In one chapter Payne devotes a chapter to the ties
between racial bias and inequality. He
concludes that discrimination persists although it has become more covert. He also demonstrates that while explicit bias
is much less apparent, implicit bias is quite common. Most troubling, but perhaps most enlightening,
he provides examples which indicate racial bias is often subconscious,
resulting from a lifetime of conditioning.
Payne provides this perspective.
“When
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed overt racial discrimination, and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended explicitly discriminatory voting practices,
society did not change overnight in response.
Following that 350-year period of perfectly legal subjugation, a mere
half century—less than a single lifetime—separates us from whites-only lunch
counters, water fountains and schools.
How much have things changed since then?
It depends whom you ask.”
“If you
look at polls, the proportion of Americans favoring overtly racist ideas like
segregated schools and hiring discrimination has declined from clear majorities
in the 1960s to single digits today.
These trends have been regarded as an encouraging sign, but perhaps we
have drawn too much encouragement from them.”
There are a number of studies
that indicate racial discrimination, while more subtle, is still alive and
well. One of the more famous studies, by
sociologist Devah Pager, consisted of sending out equal numbers of young black
and white men with résumés crafted to be
equivalent. They were also given
equivalent narratives to introduce themselves to prospective employers.
“The
white applicant was called back twice as often as the equally qualified black
applicant. Similar studies have been
repeated with the same results in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and other
cities. They have also been replicated
in areas other than employment. Black
renters are much more likely than equally qualified white renters to be told
there are no vacant apartments. Black
shoppers are offered less favorable deals on cars and higher interest rates on
mortgages than equally qualified whites.
Antiblack bias is alive and well in twenty-first-century America.”
People acquire their racial
attitudes from family, from friends, and from what they view. Since de facto segregation is still common,
much of what is learned about other races is absorbed from the media. The sum of all those inputs programs an
individual to respond to other races in certain ways. The examples of bias listed above derive from
conscious decisions to discriminate.
What Payne wants us to realize is that racial bias can arise from
subconscious mechanisms and lead to what he refers to as implicit bias. One can
be biased without actually realizing it.
Payne describes his own
enlightenment as he sought a tool to measure implicit bias in a rather important
context. He was interested in learning
the probability that a person would mistakenly assume a harmless object was a
gun when it was associated with a black person.
His objects were mostly tools like wrenches and pliers that were chosen
to be metal and similar in size to a handgun.
The idea was to quickly flash a picture of a white or black person,
followed by an image of an object. The
subjects participating in the measurement were given only a brief instant to
decide whether the object was or was not a gun.
Payne tried the program out on himself as he verified that it was
working properly. He was startled by
what he discovered.
“When I
looked at my data I got about 80 percent correct. That was not a bad result, but the pattern of
my errors was disturbing: I was much more likely to mistake harmless objects
for guns when a black face had been flashed initially.”
“Sitting
there in my lab, trying to beat my own bias test and failing, I felt for the
first time the discomforting gap between my good intentions and my biased
behavior, known as implicit bias.”
His explanation for his own
behavior, and that of the average person who would take such a test, is that
when we are faced with ambiguous data, our subconscious has been programmed to
make a choice, and that choice will be the one we subconsciously expect to be
the case.
“One of
the best-established findings in all of psychology is that people make sense of
uncertain or ambiguous circumstances by relying on their expectations. The less time there is to think carefully,
the more they depend on them.”
Payne’s experience certainly is
relevant to the rash of police shootings of black people that have occurred in
recent years. His data indicates that
not everyone exhibits this bias, but enough do to allow him to assert that the
average person will be biased with respect to race. One might expect that this knowledge can be
used to eliminate this tendency, but that is not the case.
“In
some versions of the experiment, we even warned the subjects that the race of
the face would bias them and urged them to resist that prejudice. But cautioning didn’t help, and in fact it
made the bias even worse, because then the topic of race was more prominent in
subjects’ minds. Good intentions don’t
protect us from unintended biases.”
Payne’s results have been
duplicated by other researchers in their own laboratories. This is a significant finding. One has to wonder how this mental programming
was accomplished. How did this
association of black people with guns occur?
Payne perhaps provides us with a clue in a discussion of another bias
against blacks.
According to Payne, we have been
programmed to think of poor people who are deserving of assistance as whites,
and those who are on “welfare” as undeserving blacks.
“Not
only does income inequality heighten racial bias, but prejudice can also
perpetuate income inequality. Decades of
studies have found a strong correlation between dislike of black people and
opposition to social welfare policies aimed at helping the poor.”
“’Welfare’
simply refers to the suite of race-neutral government programs aimed at helping
the poor, so these results don’t make much sense on their surface.”
“But it
turns out that when Americans talk about ‘the poor,’ they mean something very
different from when they talk about ‘welfare recipients.’ The best predictor of wanting to slash
funding for welfare recipients is racial prejudice. People who believe that black Americans are
lazy and undeserving are the most likely to oppose welfare spending.”
It seems the traditional media
has played a role in establishing biases.
It is scary to consider what social media will contribute to interracial
strife.
“While
it may not be surprising that the average person views welfare in racially
tinged terms, the truth is that welfare recipients are about evenly divided
among white, black, and Hispanic recipients.
But when [political scientist Martin] Gilens analyzed depictions of welfare
recipients in television and newsmagazines since the 1960s, he found a clear
racial bias: When welfare recipients were depicted as the ‘deserving poor,’
they were mostly white, but when they were portrayed as lazy and dishonest,
they were overwhelmingly black.”
Insidious cultural messaging coming from
parents and peers might be foreseen damping out in a few generations. But when it is deeply imbedded in our mass
media, that situation can be corrected quickly.
Whether or not change occurs depends on people like Payne getting the
message out.
Payne leaves us with this final
thought on the matter of implicit racial bias.
“Understanding
implicit bias requires taking a more nuanced approach to the individuals we are
easily tempted to label as ‘racist’ or ‘not racist.’ If you consider whether you yourself are
biased, and why, you will likely focus on your conscious thoughts and beliefs,
your values and good intentions. Having
reflected on what a fundamentally good person you are, you will conclude that
implicit bias is other people’s problem.
Although we would all like to believe ourselves to be members of the ‘not
racist’ club, we are all steeped in a culture whose history and present is
built on massive racial inequality. Research
has shown that a majority of even well-meaning people—and their children—show
signs of implicit bias when tested.”
The interested reader might find
the following articles informative:
No comments:
Post a Comment