racismreview.com

There is new evidence that African American, Asian and Native American junior faculty are less satisfied than white junior faculty with the climate, culture and collegiality of their institutions (image of Harvard Faculty Club Staircase via Flickr/CreativeCommons).

These findings are based on a new report based by COACHE that included a sample of 8,500 pre-tenure faculty members at 96 four-year colleges and universities — public and private, liberal arts oriented colleges and research universities.  According to Inside Higher Ed, this is the first time that COACHE has released data about differences among minority faculty from different racial/ethnic backgrounds, and some of these results are interesting:

Of the 10 climate measures in the survey, Asians were less satisfied on 6; Native Americans on 5; and African Americans on 4, all by statistically significant margins.

The piece at Inside Higher Ed does, eventually, address racism.   About half way into the piece, here’s the relevant bit:

African American faculty members are also less likely than their white counterparts to believe that tenure decisions are made primarily on job performance. Cathy Trower, research director of COACHE, said in a statement that these gaps suggest that ”African American faculty may be experiencing some lingering aspects of racism — real or perceived — as evidenced by their concern with fair treatment and lower satisfaction with the amount of interaction and collaboration with others.”

This is an old familiar strategy embedded in the white racial frame. Here, the research director adopts the white racial frame as she minimizes the experience of racism with her “real or perceived” comment.  As I mentioned a couple of days ago, racism on campuses is a persistent problem that affects students.  The persistence of racism on campuses, not surprisingly, also affects faculty.  While I think it’s important that those in power at predominantly white institutions talk about diversity and minority recruitment of faculty and students to change the complexion of those institutions, I think it’s equally important to simultaneously engage in conversations about the persistent racism in those institutions and what the cost might be for faculty and students of color.

In a June 30, 2008 piece over at blackprof.com, always insightful professor Richard Delgado points up how tough it is for a person of color to work in white America. He writes of a young African American-Latino law professor, named Raul Q. Washington, IV, who took his family to the beach and on returning

Raul ran across a colleague, Professor Imelda V. Hightower, III, in the faculty lounge…. Hightower, whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, asked Raul if he had been away for awhile, and when he explained that he had been at the beach with his family, remarked, “You look like you got a good tan.” …. Washington, whose skin is many shades darker than Hightower’s, found her remark puzzling. He wonders if it meant anything, or nothing at all. Should he have responded in kind …. let it go entirely, or given his colleague a lesson about melanin, skin tone, and evolutionary adaptation. At the edge of his consciousness he wonders whether her remark might have aimed at making him feel marginalized because of his skin color, about which he of course can do nothing, except, perhaps, stay out of the sun in the future.

Real lives are at stake when in everyday racism. Delgado makes a key point about the high energy costs of being a person of color in white-dominated worlds:

One of the tough things about being a person of color working in a largely white institution is the amount of time and energy one spends trying to decide what to confront and what to let go. The same remark from one person can be perfectly innocent. From another, it can spell trouble. Should one always challenge every ambiguous remark? Probably not. On the other hand, it makes sense to take note of who is responding to you in ways that may be racially fraught.

This Delgado story (he likes to construct stories to make sharp points, see here) reminds me of a probing interview in a research study I did. A veteran black professor who taught at a major historically white university summarized racism’s impact on a person’s energy this way:

If you can think of the mind as having one hundred ergs of energy, and the average man uses fifty percent of his energy dealing with the everyday problems of the world . . . then he has fifty percent more to do creative kinds of things that he wants to do. Now that’s a white person. Now a black person also has one hundred ergs; he uses fifty percent the same way a white man does, dealing with what the white man has [to deal with], so he has fifty percent left. But he uses twenty-five percent fighting being black, [with] all the problems being black and what it means.

One can view racial oppression as a vampire-like system for draining the energies of those targeted for oppression in many areas of society.

In many reports of everyday discrimination from Americans of color, we sense its energy-draining character. Just trying to fit into historically white social worlds remains highly problematical. A few years back, for example, a talented black journalist, Leanita McClain, committed suicide. She had won major journalistic awards and was the first black person on the Chicago Tribune editorial board. The reasons for her suicide are likely complex, but one factor looms large in her own accounts of her experience in the white world of large newspapers: Countering often discriminatory whites and pressures to conform. Bebe Moore Campbell (“To Be Black, Gifted, and Alone,” Savvy, December 1984), who was close to her, noted the conformity to white ways faced by black employees in mostly white workplaces: “To fit in, black women consciously choose their speech, their laughter, their walk, their mode of dress and car. They trim and straighten their hair.” In such white-dominated situations, Black Americans must often “learn to wear a mask.”

On their blog, which discusses brain research, PhDs Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang talk insightfully about false beliefs and how they get deeply imbeded into the brain. Most of their examples are not about racial matters, but this is one they do discuss:

we now recall that there was a false belief about John McCain, dating to the 2000 Presidential primary campaign. He was doing well until the South Carolina primary, at which time rumors surfaced about a mixed-race child that he had allegedly fathered. Apparently, this did not play well with Southern voters. Shortly thereafter, his candidacy faltered.

A key point they are making about false beliefs is that they

often have staying power if they evoke a strong emotional reaction. [They then cite] a study suggesting that feelings of disgust make an idea memorable.

In addition, Aamodt and Wang make other important points about how false beliefs and the brain operate in an op-ed piece in the New York Times:

False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way. The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned.

Notice the serious implications of this brain-imbeding process for the white racial frame, which is full of false beliefs, almost by definition: Lots of racist stereotypes and stereotyped images. One key reason the white racial frame has such depth and staying power in society is that most of it is heavily emotion-laden. Indeed, racialized emotions have been central to white framing from at least 1607 to the present day.

For centuries, whites have tried to rationalize with many false beliefs and notions the tension between their Christianity & sense of being good persons, and the age-old system of extreme racial oppression they have created and maintained.

Today, as in the past, the system of racial oppression requires that most whites contradict their own better moral precepts and live such a life that they must thus lie to themselves and others that they are highly moral and ethical. Intense and deep emotions have always been central to this process.

Back in October (2007), I wrote about the storm created by legendary genetic researcher Watson’s racist comments that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”  Now, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., prominent scholar of African American Studies at Harvard University and editor of The Root, has interviewed Watson.    The Root contains both a transcript (including some video) of the interview and an article by Gates analyzing the interview.  Both are worth reading in detail for anyone interested in ‘race’ and the expression of scientific racism.    (And, indeed, the ‘comments’ on both the transcript and the article are worth reading through if anyone wonders whether we’re in a ‘post-racial’ society.)  Near the beginning of his article, Gates writes:

He had uttered the unutterable, the most ardent fantasy of white racists (David Duke would wax poetic on his Web site that the truth had at last been revealed, and by no less than the discoverer of the structure of DNA). His words caused a ripple effect of shock, dismay and disgust among those of us who embrace the range of biological diversity and potential within the human community. It was as if one of the smartest white men in the world had confirmed what so many racists believe already: that the gap between blacks and whites in, say, IQ test scores and SAT results has a biological basis and that environmental factors such as centuries of slavery, colonization, Jim Crow segregation and race-based discrimination—all contributing to uneven economic development—don’t amount to a hill of beans. Nature has given us an extra basketball gene, as it were, in lieu of native intelligence.

Gates goes on to say that when he read about Watson’s remarks, he was “astonished, not to mention angered and saddened.”   He writes, “I was also determined to ask him about these comments directly.”  Thus, the interview.  Gates visited Watson at Cold Spring Harbor on March 17 for the interview, and afterward, Gates concludes:

I don’t think James Watson is a racist. But I do think that he is a racialist—that is, he believes that certain observable traits or forms of behavior among groups of human beings might, indeed, have a biological basis in the code that scientists, eventually, may be able to ascertain, that the “gene” is some mythically neutral space and what it purportedly “measures” or “determines” is independent of environmental factors, variables and influences. The difference, the distinction, between being a racist and a racialist is crucial.

In the passage that follows, Gates makes the case for what he sees as the difference between  being a “racist” and being a “racialist”:

James Watson is not the garden-variety racist as he has been caricatured by the press and bloggers, the sort epitomized by David Duke and his ilk, and he seemed genuinely chagrined, embarrassed and remorseful that Duke and other racists had claimed him as their champion, as one of their own, because of his remarks as quoted in the London Sunday Times. And, as we might expect, he apologized profusely for those remarks, contending that he had been misquoted, at worst, and his remarks taken out of context, at best.

It’s fascinating to me (perhaps not surprisingly since studying David Duke is part of my research), that Duke is sort of a ghostly presence  throughout this interview.  …. Continue Reading »

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has an interesting debate on studies of systemic (structural) racism funded by a few foundations. In a May 15, 2008 article, “Philanthropy’s Jeremiah Wright Problem,” William A. Schambra argues sensationally thus:

“Many Americans were startled to learn that the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whose campaign is built on an uplifting message of national unity and racial reconciliation, belongs to a church in Chicago where a very different view of America is preached by its longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Then he adds melodramatically:

Americans might be further surprised to learn that grants from the nation’s largest foundations sustain a similarly harsh view of a nation riven by an unrelenting and deeply oppressive racial divide. America, in this view, is steeped in “structural racism.” This “refers to a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial-group inequity,” according to “Structural Racism and Community Building,” a 2004 report from the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change (supported by the Annie E. Casey, Charles Stewart Mott, W.K. Kellogg, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations, among others).

He is critical of this foundational support for research and perspectives on structural racism, which concept and historical reality he seems to know nothing about. (He could look here and here, for a little education, perhaps.) He concludes his reactionary piece, thus:

Senator Obama ultimately decided that Mr. Wright’s “incendiary language” — language so similar to that thrown about freely by structural-racism theorists — reflected “views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.” Could the same be said about some grants made by our largest foundations?

Then there is the supportive view of what a few foundations are doing on systemic racism issues, and a critique of Schambra’s white-oriented thinking playing down systemic racism, by Aaron Dorman & Niki Jagpal, “Foundations and ‘Structural Racism’: Take Another Look,” a reply to the reactionary article on May 28, 2008:

But a clearer, more accurate picture of structural racism begs for a comprehensive definition that takes into account the milieu of the analysis. Moreover, Mr. Schambra uses the most seemingly provocative statements from the many reports he cites, but when read in context, the quotes are far less “startling” than Schambra would have readers believe. Andrew Grant-Thomas and John A. Powell offer a simple framework that describes structural racism as emphasizing “the powerful impact of interinstitutional dynamics, institutional resource inequities, and historical legacies on racial inequalities today.”

Then they point out that foundations are not doing all that much in support of critical systemic racism analysis:

Readers are left with the impression that our large national foundations are aggressively funding some radical leftist agenda that the American public is utterly unfamiliar with and, if enlightened, would be unsupportive of. Unfortunately, he fails to take into account key giving trends, resulting in an inaccurate, if not misleading, picture of the current state of philanthropy in the United States. Let’s look at the numbers. In a 2005 report, Independent Sector and the Foundation Center found that social-justice grant making in 1998 and 2002 comprised a meager 11 percent of overall foundation giving, and only a fraction of that was grants for issues identified by the structural-racism framework as barriers to equality. . . . . Is it true that our large foundations are so acutely aware of race and oppression in their grant making that they prioritize racially specific grants? Again, the data suggest otherwise. The 2008 edition of the Foundation Center’s annual Foundation Giving Trends: Update on Funding Priorities notes that in 2006, funding for racial or ethnic minorities increased by only 5.5 percent, while overall grant making rose by 16.4 percent.

Then they add this:

The structural-racism framework posits that analyses of racial inequality that ignore the historical decisions that led to institutional barriers to equality of achievement are insufficient in understanding race in the United States. To that end, explicitly identifying deliberate policy decisions that persist as barriers to equality is an integral component of any work that truly seeks to affect change in American racial attitudes.

Then take Schambra to task too for misrepresentations of philanthropic foundations:

In fact, a decade of research by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy shows how conservative foundations have been strategically advancing their agenda by providing sympathetic think tanks and advocacy organizations with flexible and multiyear grants, and supporting programs that specifically target public policy and promote conservative ideas.

And conclude with a pregnant question indeed:

In response, we ask: Why are the small percentage of structural-racism grants a cause for concern among Mr. Schambra and leaders of conservative foundations who have been so successful themselves at actually influencing government and policy decisions? Why should progressive foundations apologize for seeking to effectively address the needs of marginalized communities by funding organizations that seek to transform the institutions that perpetuate social inequities?

Why indeed?

Somewhere along the line, whites in the Pacific Northwest got a reputation for being more liberal and open-minded than those in the rest of the country. A recent newspaper story coming out of Seattle suggests that this is probably one more U.S. myth. A while back, Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Raj Manhas created a diversity department and hired an experienced psychologist Caprice Hollins, with a background in teaching diversity workshops and providing crisis-intervention services. She made some important and creative attempts at change (photo credit):

During her tenure, hundreds of district employees attended diversity workshops, the district began addressing the “discipline gap,” and scores on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning showed some limited progress in closing the achievement gap in some subjects.

Yet, when she started to do a serious job of dealing with the racist practices and mythologies of some white folks in Seattle, she ran into problems:

Hollins has earned the most attention for her missteps. She was at the center of a June 2006 brouhaha over a controversial page on the district’s Web site that suggested that planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English were examples of cultural racism.

No text for this letter is provided in the newspaper article, but there is significant literature (see references here and here) on how “standard English” is a really just a term for “white middle-class English,” which is in fact just one of many dialects of English. (All speakers of English speak a dialect, and they also all speak with an “accent.”) Much of the “values” emphasis in schools and the media is in fact a type of cultural racism because many “values” that are accented are those chosen by powerful whites  and with white interests in mind. The issues here are not only, which values? but also, who chooses? The Seattle newspaper article continues thus:

After her office sent two district staffers and 20 high school students to a three-day “white privilege” conference in April 2007, complaints led the Department of Education to investigate whether the district had properly used federal grant money to pay for a portion of the trip.

As one who attended the recent “white privilege” conference, I can  say that it was education-oriented and is exactly what U.S. teachers and students need to open their eyes to the ways in which various forms of racial, gender, ethnic, and heterosexist hostility and discrimination work in this society. This conference has speakers of many kinds, including academics talking about research, artists and poets from many marginalized groups doing their thing, workshops on a great array of racial, ethnic, gender, heterosexist topics, and very good book and information displays. About 1100 people attended the one this year in Springfield, Massachusetts. (It meets next in early April 2009 in Memphis, Tennessee.) The newspaper account continues:

And in November, Hollins was roundly criticized after she sent out a memo to teachers that listed “myths about the First Thanksgiving” and noted that “for many Indian people, ‘Thanksgiving’ is a time of mourning … As currently celebrated in this country, ‘Thanksgiving’ is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.”

So, whites even in liberal Seattle cannot handle the truth about U.S. history. This is pretty tame educational stuff, actually, when you consider that those early colonizing decades involved much genocidal action by those white English colonists against Native Americans, which we hide and/or misrepresent now as we as a country celebrate at Thanksgiving. According to the Seattle  newspaper report Hollins has been terminated:

Seattle Public Schools has eliminated 16 central-office positions in a money-saving reorganization that included removing the director of its controversial Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support. . . . Spencer, the district spokeswoman, said the department wasn’t being eliminated because of any of those incidents. Rather, district officials want to make sure that staff members in all departments share responsibility for promoting equity and diversity, she said. 

Seattle administrators are not saying why they really terminated her, but in the past they certainly have seemed sensitive to the feelings of powerful white folks whose mythological views of this society’s past and present are mildly encroached upon.


(Note: If you would like to write them, here is the information: School Board Office, 2445 Third Avenue South, Mail Stop: 11-010, PO BOX 34165, Seattle, WA  98124-1165.)

Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (formerly Black Issues In Higher Education) is a useful resource for those seeking information about racial and ethnic issues in higher education. Here is part of their formal statement:

The key to the achievement of this goal is knowledge and information about higher education. And when it comes to providing the information that underpins this, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education has been at the forefront for the past twenty years. . . . . Since its founding in 1984, Black Issues In Higher Education (which is now Diverse) has been America’s premier news source for information concerning these vitally important issues. That the magazine received the 2002 Folio award as the best education publication in America only attests to how well we have carried out our mission of being the most reliable source for those who understand the importance of these issues.

In a recent article they discuss racial and ethnic research centers, including one at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that grew out of an idea that I (full disclosure!) suggested to the provost there:

During this historic presidential election campaign, remarks with racial overtones have made headlines, offending some voters and garnering sympathy from others. The candidates have been required to interpret, explain, apologize for, denounce or distance themselves from these statements and those who made them. The missteps in the discussions about race at the highest levels of leadership in this country show the enormity and the complexity of the task faced by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society. As a component of UIUC’s diversity initiative, the university established the center five years ago with the mission of producing “vigorous scholarly and public debate on the multiple racial contexts of democracy” and analysis of the “national dynamics of racial divisions and of democratic possibilities.”

They add that this increase in racial and ethnic studies centers is not limited to Illinois:

Brought forth by other universities and researchers along the same lines, race and democracy research centers have been established at other universities, including Stanford University, Texas A&M University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Part of the job of these centers is to begin telling the truth about American history and our racial and ethnic history,” [Joe] Feagin says. “As a country, we have not faced our history.”

      A key argument in the most famous, recent affirmative action case, the University of Michigan’s Grutter v. Bollinger case, was that affirmative action in admissions was essential for students to learn how to live in, and interact with a diversity of people in, the modern world. Campus diversity was thus linked to the expansion of intergroup understandings and of human knowledge in college and university settings.

       A study just released by The Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California (Berkeley) DOES DIVERSITY MATTER IN THE EDUCATION PROCESS? provides some interesting evidence for this contention.

       Undergraduates at eight University of California campuses were asked such questions as, “How often have you gained a deeper understanding of other perspectives through conversations with fellow students because they differed from you in the following ways?” – “Their religious beliefs were very different than yours; Their political opinions were very different from yours; They were of a different nationality than your own; They were of a different race or ethnicity than your own; Their sexual orientation was different.”

       The report’s abstract summarizes the findings thus (italics added):

This exploration into student interactions that improve understanding, student attachment, and demographic characteristics of students attending the University of California in the spring of 2006 finds the University to be a diverse and healthy environment. Interactions among students with demographic differences are frequent and are rarely associated with decreased sense of belonging. . . . Overall, rich or poor, religious or not religious, immigrant or Mayflower, Republican or Democrat, underrepresented minority or overrepresented majority, UC students feel that they belong at the University of California. In spite of strong scores . . . the University is encouraged to expand discussions about diversity, to launch a more thorough examination of campus climate generally, and to especially consider the experiences of low income and African American students.

       More specifically, the findings are thus:

Over 40% of students reported that their understanding of others was often improved through personal interactions with other students who differed from them in terms of SES, politics and religion. Discussions [improved understandings] more commonly occurred (about 60% reporting frequent) where the topic was race/ethnicity and nationality—student differences that were more apparent because of visual differences or accent. . . . [S]tudents were attributing change to the fact that the other student in the discussion possessed the differing characteristics. This finding goes to the very heart of the argument that diversity must be present in the student body, not only the curriculum.

 

 

       The study is certainly a start on assessing the impact of diversity on students in higher education, but the approach here seems rather superficial and too psychological. In my view much more attention needs to be given to qualitative and ethnographic data on students’ lives and experiences with diverse campus environments. Savvy researchers need to do focus groups and in-depth interviewing, to get deeply into what the campus racial and other social climates are really like. The report itself acknowledges this need, to explore the campus climate, but it is odd that this was not part of this original study–especially given some of their survey findings, such as that African American students had a lower than average sense of belonging on the UC campuses.

       Major studies on campus racial climates have been published since at least the mid-1990s, and it is strange that these are neither fully cited nor significantly used in a report touching centrally on the impact of racial/ethnic climates.

There’s quite a controversy brewing within academic circles about a tenured full professor of psychology at Cal State U. Long Beach, Kevin McDonald, that raises important questions about the creation of knowledge, the academic enterprise and race. McDonald, who is an evolutionary psychologist, contends that Jews are a separate race driven by genetics and evolution to band together, both for “group survival” and to undercut white, Western culture. Further, he asserts that the Third Reich’s Nazi movement developed specifically to counter “Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.” He claims to be “agnostic” about whether or not the Holocaust happened, and yet, testified on behalf of infamous Holocaust-denier, David Irving. Not coincidentally, McDonald says that he testified in support of Irving because he was motivated by a desire to defend academic freedom, not deny the Holocaust. Although McDonald includes a disavowal on his website that he does not “condone white racial superiority, genocide, Nazism or Holocaust denial,” his actions - and his research - suggest otherwise, as Scott Jaschik demonstrates in his piece in Inside Higher Ed (Feb.14). Jaschik points out that a favorable story about McDonald’s work appears on Vanguard News Network, a white supremacist website. And, in Heidi Beirich’s thoroughly devastating piece on McDonald for SPLC’s Intelligence Report, she notes that his work is more popular than Mein Kampf with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In fact, David Duke draws heavily on McDonald’s work for his own antisemitic and racist autobiography, My Awakening, and the condensed version, Jewish Supremacism. And, according to Beirich’s report, in 2004 white supremacists David Duke (former Klansman and Louisiana legislator), Don Black, Jamie Kelso (of Stormfront, the main online portal for white supremacy) and Kevin Alfred Strom (of the neo-Nazi National Vanguard) all attended a ceremony in which McDonald was honored by The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist journal. McDonald is pictured here receiving the award, alongside Virginia Abernethy, a self-described “white separatist.”


As you might expect, the controversy is widely being framed as an issue that tests the bounds of academic freedom. This is both an obvious, and a deeply problematic, way to frame this particular case. On the one hand, McDonald is an academic with tenure (and a promotion by his peers to full professorship) who has controversial and unpopular views and should, within the rules of the academy, be allowed to express those views.


On the other hand, framing McDonald’s vile “scholarship” as within the bounds of what is acceptable and even protected within the academy is deeply problematic given the context of his position within a public university with a commitment to human rights, diversity, and to offering an equal educational environment for all who enroll there. I’m generally quite critical of absolutist defenses of “free speech,” and am persuaded by critiques of the first amendment grounded in critical race theory.


Yet, I find this particular case vexing Continue Reading »

In a study conducted over six years at Stanford, UC-Berkeley and Penn State, and just recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that many whites do not regard African Americans as “fully human.” (Hat tip to LibraryBob for telling me about this article.) The findings reveal that whites subconsciously associate blacks with apes and are more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of their broader inability to accept blacks as “fully human.” The researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments in which participants, mostly white male undergraduates, were then shown black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second before being asked to identify blurry ape drawings. According to the abstract:

“…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.The results showed that the subjects identified the drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces rather than with white faces.”

And, in what I can only call a genius research design, they combine the lab studies of implicit bias with archival content-analysis research of the language used in newspaper accounts from criminal cases:

“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.”

This is really groundbreaking research for the way it connects the sometimes apolitical and overly psychological implicit bias research to the broader social context of white racism. In an interview, the lead researcher, Jennifer Eberhardt of Stanford, says:

“This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done. This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work — intuitions — you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] was — how we were able to pick it up every time. African Americans are still dehumanized; we’re still associated with apes in this country.”

The researchers also showed study participants words like “ape” or “cat” (as a control) and then a video clip of a television show like “COPS” in which police are beating a man of unknown racial identity. Then, the researchers showed the participants a photo of either a black or white man, described him as a “loving family man” yet with a criminal history. They then asked participants to rate how justified they thought the beating was. Those who believed the suspect was black were more likely to say the beating was justified when they were primed with words like “ape.” The conclusion researchers come to is that the “Black-ape” association has a significant impact on (white) people’s judgments of Blacks as criminal suspects and serves to endorse violence against Blacks.

Eberhardt goes on in the interview to set out the competing narratives about racism and bias in America:

“One is about the disappearance of bias — that it’s no longer with us. But the other is about the transformation of bias. It’s not the egregious bias anymore, but it’s modern bias, subtle bias. We want to argue, with this work, that there is one old race battle that we’re still fighting. That is the battle for blacks to be recognized as fully human.”

Well said, Prof. Eberhardt ~ and brava on some brilliant research.