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A new study suggests that names significantly change our perception of a person’s face and their racial identity.

Indeed, if Barack Obama had taken his mother’s last name, Dunham, and used the first name common in his earlier in life, Barry, people today might have a very different perception of him.   The study, called “Barack Obama or Barry Dunham?” and conducted by researchers at the University of New South Wales, set out to test the hypothesis that the presence of racially-suggestive names would influence participants’ perception of identical multiracial faces (image from here) .

Participants were shown a face and name for 3 seconds, then asked to rate the appearance of the face on a 9-point scale, where 1=”very Asian-looking” and 9=”very European-looking.”   The researchers found that the study participants rated multi-racial faces with European names as looking significantly “more European” than exactly the same faces when given Asian names.  In an interview, one of the researchers, Kirin Hilliar a UNSW PhD student, summarizes the study’s significance this way:

“The study reveals how socially derived expectations and stereotypes can influence face perception.  The result is consistent with other research findings suggesting that once people categorize a face into a racial group, they look for features consistent with that categorization.”

This sort of research seems to lend credibility to the importance of cognitive frames for shaping our thinking about race.    And indeed, this study seems to go beyond this to suggest that these cognitive frames are so powerful they even shape the way we see people.   We tend to see physical characteristics through a frame that selectively highlights certain attributes and codes those as racial signifiers.  This is important for sociologists and other scholars because many of our basic research relies on old notions of “race” as defined by a “group of people who share similar physical characteristics” (as the intro text I’m currently using defines it).   This leads to all sorts of logical fallacies about “shared characteristics” rooted in biology that simply don’t hold up to rigorous investigation or when examined in light of historical context (e.g., recall that the Irish and the Italians were once regarded as “biologically distinct” from white Americans).   “Race” is a social construct that we learn to see through a number of cultural cues including names.

The May 2008 issue of Scientific American has an interesting article “Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain” by Siri Carpenter dealing with “implicit association tests” (IAT) used in numerous psychological studies. These studies–which often study people’s reactions to white faces and faces of people of color–are relevant to public debates over whether many whites still think from a racist frame and act in racist ways. The article begins with an overview:

Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.

Several IAT studies reveal that a substantial majority of whites have an implicit white preference in face and related choices in IAT testing. As the concept of the white racial frame we use here suggests, there is much more to the age-old negative framing of Americans of color than cognitive stereotyping. There is the old visual imaging and there is an array of white emotions:

Some implicit biases appear to be rooted in strong emotions. In a 2004 study Ohio State psychologist Will A. Cunningham and his colleagues measured white people’s brain activity as they viewed a series of white and black faces. The team found that black faces–as compared with white faces–that they flashed for only 30 milliseconds (too quickly for participants to notice them) triggered greater activity in the amygdala, a brain area associated with vigilance and sometimes fear. The effect was most pronounced among people who demonstrated strong implicit racial bias.

Given nearly four centuries of white oppression of African Americans, and the extensive negative white framing to rationalize that oppression, there is no mystery about why black faces today generate strong white visual and emotional reactions:

Psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes linking young black men with crime, violence and danger are so robust that our brains may automatically give preferential attention to blacks as a category, just as they do for threatening animals such as snakes. In a recent unpublished study Richeson and her colleagues found that white college students’ visual attention was drawn more quickly to photographs of black versus white men, even though the images were flashed so quickly that participants did not consciously notice them.

Sadly, the implicit studies are similar to ethnographic field studies that have previously shown that the implicit racial bias begins at young ages, especially among young whites:

Many of our implicit associations about social groups form before we are old enough to consider them rationally. In an unpublished experiment Mahzarin R. Banaji . . . and Yarrow Dunham . . . found that white preschoolers tended to categorize racially ambiguous angry faces as black rather than white; they did not do so for happy faces. And a 2006 study by Banaji and Harvard graduate student Andrew S. Baron shows that full-fledged implicit racial bias emerges by age six, and never retreats.

Racist attitudes are not, as some whites today like to argue, of little consequence. Studies have also found that those who show substantial implicit bias are more likely to engage in racial performance and other racial discrimination:

Implicit biases can infect more deliberate decisions, too. In a 2007 study Rutgers University psychologists Laurie A. Rudman and Richard D. Ashmore found that white people who exhibited greater implicit bias toward black people also reported a stronger tendency to engage in a variety of discriminatory acts in their everyday lives. These included avoiding or excluding blacks socially, uttering racial slurs and jokes, and insulting, threatening or physically harming black people.

Given that the implicit bias is strong for a substantial majority of whites, it is not surprising that field studies show large amount of such racist behavior, in both backstage and frontstage settings. White racist thinking and action means a lack of certain emotions as well, a lack of empathy (a social alexithymia).

Fortunately as well, several of the implicit association studies have recently begun to explore whether the deeply held implicit reactions can be altered:

Seeing targeted groups in more favorable social contexts can help thwart biased attitudes. In laboratory studies, seeing a black face with a church as a background, instead of a dilapidated street corner, considering familiar examples of admired blacks such as actor Denzel Washington and athlete Michael Jordan, and reading about Arab-Muslims’ positive contributions to society all weaken people’s implicit racial and ethnic biases. In real college classrooms, students taking a course on prejudice reduction who had a black professor showed greater reductions in both implicit and explicit prejudice at the end of the semester than did those who had a white professor.

What has been created by humans can also be dismantled by human action, where there is the will to change long established systems of racist thinking and framing. Will is of course the operative word.

      For me as a young Black male, it has been a blessing and curse to apply for academic positions in predominately White Universities. First and foremost, it has been a blessing for my talents, education, and scholarly writings on social justice have gained enough attention that I am granted an opportunity to discuss my research among scholarly peers who more than likely have never heard of the significance to my area of study in regards to children. Therefore, God has simply allowed a platform to exist for me to spread the seeds of information that will hopefully translate into pushing others forward to attacking the machine of oppression. Since I have a job (not in higher education), I am not in a position like my other peers who are searching and have no financial cushion. For them they will probably have to sacrifice in order to take a position at a university. I can afford to be picky.
       The curse comes into play particularly for me in terms of my academic fields of social work and education. Now I know the academy itself is a haven for racist practices. Therefore, I should get over it, right? But social work programs more than others advocate for social justice, equality, and equity for all. But in actuality, they are practitioners of hypocrisy. Evidence of marginalization within social work departments and colleges can be seen through lack of attention within the curriculum in terms of people of color, lack of males of color (i.e., students and faculty), and a lack of actual racial empathy within MSW programs. As I interviewed this year, I have witnessed this and much more. So far, I have been met with smiles from faculty, until I present my research on the social reproduction of racism toward children in public schools. Due to my interests in social control and oppression targeting Black males (K-Higher Education), my current research has raised new questions about the political dynamics and current political tensions within today’s educational structure, particularly as these relate to race and class.

        I aim to expand my research by providing scholarship that illustrates how the White racial frame continues to covertly negate, oppress, and control People of color, specifically Black and Hispanic/Latino males within public school and within the university setting. (See: Fitzgerald, T. (forthcoming). [Book Untitled as of yet], Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers; and “Control, Punish, & Conquer: U.S. Public School Historical Attempts to Control Black Males,” Challenge: A Journal of Research on African-American Men, 12(1), 39-54).

        Now they see that I will not be scholar who is interested in the status quo in regards to research (i.e., welfare, mothers, gay and LGBT issues, and etc.). Smiles then turn to frowns followed by the racially motivated barrage of attacks that strike from the mouths of those who claim to stand along side the marginalized. This has occurred during 90 percent of my job talks. Interestingly enough, the room is filled with a vast majority of White females. If there are people of color, they typically are not Black. If some Blacks are present, they are more than likely female as well. And it is my experience, as Patricia Collins noted, that they too can move from oppressed to oppressor. The other 10 percent of my experiences have been filled with departments overtly and covertly letting me know that I am wanted for not the content and importance of my research, but for my hue and male genitalia. For them, it is a numbers game. I have come to the conclusion that a disproportionate number of SW programs speaking with the tongue of equality, even while the discipline and its practices fails to adequately address its own racism, female bias, and oppression.

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.”

         On his “Talking Points Memo,” a few days ago, Bill O’Reilly decided he has the knowledge and experience to lecture African Americans as a group for generating “race baiters” and for “accusations of racism.” He begins with this commentary:

As we’ve been reporting, millions of Americans of all colors are fed up with race baiters and accusations of racism. This vile stuff has been going on far too long. And now with the Wright controversy, critical mass has been reached. Here is a partial list of people that Jesse Jackson’s organizations have labeled racist: President Bush, President Bush the elder, President Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Don Imus, Trent Lott, Gary Hart and Jeb Bush.

He continues in this vein listing folks he thinks are “race baiters” and then comes up with this naive generalization:

Secondly, African-Americans should realize that this stuff drives good people away from constructive dialogue that might advance racial harmony in America. The race baiters and the profiteers actually hurt minorities by inhibiting sincere discussion.

So, let me understand what he is saying. We have African Americans on the one hand, and then we have good people on the other. It appears that only whites can be good people here. And blacks are most of the “race baiters.”

It is interesting that nowhere in the commentary does he lecture the majority of whites–including some he mentions as being accused (fairly in some cases) of racist commentary or discriminatory actions—the whites with whom he clearly has had much more experience, for continuing to create and perpetuate a U.S. society with high levels of subtle, covert, and overt racism. The evidence that the white majority still think and act in racist terms—and are the real problem in “inhibiting sincere discussion” and in preventing “racial harmony”–is rather clear. The evidence of continuing white racial hostility and discrimination in housing, employment, policing, education, media, and politics is easy to find, but somehow uninformed media commentators like O’Reilly seem uninterested in finding it and, indeed, in ending the substantial racial hostility and discrimination — the “realities of racism”–that are still pervasive in this country.

        The speech on race and racism given by Senator Obama, and especially the negative attacks on it and on others who bring up the issue of slavery suggests that we need to revisit the data on some of this country’s bloody 240 years or so of slavery:


The year is 1787, the place Philadelphia. Fifty-five men are meeting in summer’s heat to write a constitution for the “first democratic nation.” Here we have an early fictions central ever since to the white racial frame. These are men of European origin, mostly well-off by the standards of their day. Significantly, at least 40 percent are or have been slave owners, and a significant proportion of the others profit to some degree as merchants, shippers, lawyers, bankers from the trade in slaves, commerce in slave-produced agricultural products, or supplying provisions to slaveholders and slave-traders. The chair of the constitutional convention, George Washington, is one of the richest men in the colonies because of the hundreds of black men, women, and children he and Martha have held in bondage. Washington and colleagues create the first “democratic” nation for whites only. In the preamble the founders cite “We the People,” but this does not encompass those enslaved–one fifth of the then population. Slavery was central to the U.S. Constitution, as James Madison made clear in his detailed notes on the convention.


Slavery had once been of some importance in all states, but northern states were moving away from slavery, and some had a growing abolitionist sentiment. Even so, many northern merchants, shippers, and consumers still depended on products produced by southern plantations, and many merchants sold goods to the plantations. (Notice that this extensive slavery creates much of the wealth, the circulating surplus capital, of the new nation, and indeed helps greatly to create its possibility to rebel against Great Britain and be a new nation.)


By the end of the summer of 1787 there were at least seven sections in the new U.S. Constitution where the white framers had the system of slavery in mind: (1) Article 1, Section 2, which counts slaves as three fifths of a person; (2) Article 1, Sections 2 and 9, which apportion taxes on the states using the three-fifths formula; (3) Article 1, Section 8, which gives Congress authority to suppress slave and other insurrections; (4) Article 1, Section 9, which prevents the slave trade from being abolished before 1808; (5) Article 1, Sections 9 and 10, which exempt goods made by slaves from export duties; (6) Article 4, Section 2, which requires the return of fugitive slaves; and (7) Article 4, Section 4, which stipulates that the federal government must help states put down domestic violence, including slave uprisings.


We still live under an undemocratically made U.S. Constitution, one substantially made by white male slaveholders. It is still part of the essential political-economic foundation of systemic racism and white privilege in the US. There is much here to continue a national dialogue, one bravely raised by Dr. Wright and Senator Obama, and even acknowledged recently by Secretary of State Rice.

Curiously absent from the recent ESS Meetings here in New York, which included “mini-conference” on the 40th Anniversary of Elliot Lebow’s Tally’s Corner, was any discussion of popular culture representations of urban street corners aside from the occasional glancing blow at “hip hop” as unidimensionally negative. Fortunately, Brian Cook, an associate editor at In These Times, has provided a nicely sociological analysis of “The Wire,” the critically-acclaimed HBO series about street corners and the broader urban context in which they exist.  If you haven’t seen this series, do yourself a favor and add it to your Netflix queue and get caught up.  The series comes to an end with this season.)


Cook’s article pulls together quotes from several of the leading sociologists working in this field, starting with Elijah Anderson (originally interviewed by The Atlantic).  Anderson says:

“I get frustrated watching it because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

(UPDATED TO ADD: Amelia posted more of Anderson’s comments a few days ago over at Contexts Crawler.) Cook counters that this critique is “remarkably off-base,” and he goes into some depth to taking Anderson to task, arguing that he has a “desire for a Manichean fairytale” in which “God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people set themselves against the gangs and the addicts.”   But, this is just the sort of comforting fiction that The Wire aims to subvert, Cook says. While there are heroic acts, no individual or category of individuals (e.g., cops) has any monopoly on unambiguously good character traits.


The show is quite grim. And this stark grimness about the ‘war on drugs’ and the devastating effects specifically on black, urban citizens is as David Simon, the show’s creator, intended.   To evaluate whether or not this grimness is warranted or not, Cook once again turns to a sociologist, this time Bruce Western, and his Punishment and Inequality in America (2006).     The Wire foregrounds the kinds of stats that Western explores in his book, like the fact that blacks are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than whites, and that 60 percent of black high school dropouts are either imprisoned or ex-convicts.   Cook argues, and I tend to agree, that crafting a compelling narrative that humanizes these stats is an important, if insufficient, step toward redressing these disparities.


Of course, some people do escape urban poverty, and Cook goes on to cite yet another sociologist, this time Katherine Newman, to make this case.  In her book Chutes and Ladders (2006), Newman tracks 40 working-poor minorities across 10 years and finds that nine had been able to break into the middle class, suggesting that even at the bottom rungs of the economy, upward mobility is still possible.  Some critics of The Wire have argued that these kinds of stories are missing from this narrative, and thus it portrays the urban poor as victims incapable of rejecting the powerful forces that conspire to keep them at the bottom of the social ladder.  Yet, as Cook notes,

Newman also found that one-third of her subjects were either still unemployed or working for minimum wage, and that the decisive factor for the success stories was whether they belonged to families who could support them (or whether they didn’t need to support a family themselves). In other words, personal agency had little to do with it.

In the world created by Simon for The Wire there are very few, if any, of these sorts of supportive family networks.    For all this talk of grim reality, it may be difficult to understand why you’d choose to watch The Wire as a form of entertainment, but it is, as Cook notes, “an absolute joy to watch.”  The writing is several leagues above anything else on television, or in the theaters for that matter; the acting is superb; and the visual imagery is compelling without straining to be overly “artistic.”    Cook ends with a nod toward the dignity, even nobility, inherent in the struggle featured in the show, and again, I agree with his analysis here.  There is something ennobling about the kinds of valiant struggles these characters engage in.


Yet, for me, the piece that’s missing both from The Wire and from Cook’s analysis is the complicity, and sometimes quite overt racism, of whites (and a handful of elite blacks, like the character of Senator Clive Davis) who have created and benefit from the policies that have decimated urban centers.   For example, while there are passing references to state-level politics and even a passing reference to an ill-willed (supposedly white) Republican governor, there’s never any exploration of the connection between the racism inherent in much of the “war on drugs” and the kind of devastation of inner-city Baltimore.  Where is the white counterpart to the Senator Clive Davis character? Where, for instance, is the Grover Norquist or the Karl Rove or even, the Nelson Rockefeller? Within the context of The Wire, the “war on drugs” simply exists a priori and the show explores the consequences of such a policy on many of the residents of Baltimore.     That said, it’s a mighty fine exploration and certainly worth watching.

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.

Stephen Steinberg, a sociologist at Queens College - CUNY, has a new book called Race Relations: A Critique that the Chronicle of Higher Education calls “short” and “contentious” (subscription required to the Chronicle). Here’s the blurb from Stanford University Press:

“In a penetrating critique of the famed race relations paradigm, he asks why a paradigm invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution still dominates both academic and popular discourses four decades after that revolution.

On race, Steinberg argues that even the language of “race relations” obscures the structural basis of racial hierarchy and inequality. Generations of sociologists have unwittingly practiced a “white sociology” that reflects white interests and viewpoints. What happens, he asks, when we foreground the interests and viewpoints of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of racial oppression?

On ethnicity, Steinberg turns the tables and shows that the early sociologists who predicted ultimate assimilation have been vindicated by history. The evidence is overwhelming that the new immigrants, including Asians and most Latinos, are following in the footsteps of past immigrants—footsteps leading into the melting pot. But even today, there is the black exception. The end result is a dual melting pot—one for peoples of African descent and the other for everybody else.

Race Relations: A Critique cuts through layers of academic jargon to reveal unsettling truths that call into question the nature and future of American nationality.”

I haven’t read it yet, but it’s going on the top of the list for reading over the break between semesters.