A few months ago a paper came out, The Threat of Appearing Prejudiced and Race-based Attentional Biase, which got a lot of press. Here's the important part:
The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students, 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.
Two salient points are that the subjects were young Stanford students. These aren't likely to be individuals pining for Jim Crow; rather, Stanford like most campuses attempts to raise consciousness on various race issues last I checked. Second, the effect is not one where all non-whites trigger the ape association; Asians do not. I bring this paper up partly because it relates to my comment yesterday that white-Asian multiracials can, and often do, pass as white or "mainstream" socially in the United States. In contrast, someone who is white-black is black according to society. Ward Connerly is a black conservative because he is 1/4 black in terms of ancestry; Dean Cain, who played Superman on television, just happens to have had a ethnically Japanese grandfather. This difference is important to note when we talk about racial issues; not all white vs. non-white can be swapped without effect. So here's a new report from ScienceDaily, Fear of Messing Up May Undermine Interracial Contact:
Study participants indicated that they worry about inadvertently getting in trouble for somehow seeming biased. As a result, the study suggests, they behaved in a way that research shows people respond when faced with stimuli that cause them to feel threatened or anxious: they instinctively look at what is making them feel nervous and then ignore it. In this case, study participants, 15 white college students, indicated that they were motivated to respond in non-prejudiced ways toward blacks primarily for appearance's sake because of concern about social disapproval -- rather than because of their internal values. ... Richeson's study draws from a body of such clinical psychology research on threat and attention. Basically, that research shows that people who have anxiety about various stimuli in everyday life tend to ignore what is stressing them out, unlike people with clinical anxiety, who tend to fixate on what triggers their anxiety. Richeson stresses in every class she teaches on stereotyping and prejudice that a solution to a problem often presents another problem. Ironically, her study suggests, standards to create a diverse yet harmonious society may unwittingly be encouraging anxious responses toward blacks.
The wording is a little strange here; the primary issue is that the authors are finding that there are implicit dynamics undernearth any conscious motivations. Just as most white male Stanford students will disavow associating blacks with apes, most white Americans are careful not to admit to fearing blacks, especially black males. In the first Beyond BeliefV. S. Ramachandran admitted to his assocation between black males & crime when elucidating the nature of information processing and inference generation. I'm pretty sure if Ramachandran was a white native born American he would never have admitted this in front of dozens of colleagues and on video tape. I also doubt Ramachandran would have looked surprised when Neil deGrasse Tyson rose up and politely bitched him out. Honestly, what sensitized American would use that example to illustrate the associative nature of the mind in a public forum, especially when a black man is sitting right there in the front row? Despite Ramachandran's long residence in the United States I suspect he hasn't internalized the cultural reflexes which any normal white, upper middle class or above, or college educated or above, individual would have developed through socialization from elementary school on up. But I think we need to cautious not to oversimplify the reaction to black males as undifferentiated racism. I recall a few years back watching American Beyond the Color Line, where Henry Louis Gates Jr. travels through black America. There was one segment on affluent and successful couples who had moved to upper class black enclaves; at one point one woman said it was so great to be around black people as now their social lives were better and their children could go over to the neighbors' houses to play. I found this pretty weird; is racism so bad that their children were totally isolated in their cul de sacs? Couldn't they strike up friendships with their neighbors? I myself am not white, and have spent the vast majority of my life in a "white world," and have never felt particularly excluded or alienated. Yes, I've had my non-trivial brushes with racism, but it's never been an omnipresent factor hanging over my head, at least to my knowledge. There are a few points that are relevant. First, I think I can pass as black American if my hair is shaved cut short, but I suspect most people can infer that my ancestry is from the Indian subcontinent. Perhaps the day to day racial reflxes didn't kick in to the same extent as they would if I was perceived as a black American. I'm rather sure that if I was perceived as a black American most people would assume that I'm not as intelligent as I am (and they might be less likely to look to me for help with setting up their wireless card at Starbucks as often happens to me).^1 As it was I was asked where I was from, if I worshipped cows, and what not. Second, there is the important fact that we aren't just our group identity, but individuals. In all honesty there are people who you can infer by looking at them or knowing their name a great deal about their values & folkways. If someone's last name is "Patel" there is a far greater than average chance that they won't eat beef, if their last name is "Ali" there is a far greater than average chance that they won't eat pork. I'm not one of those individuals. Frankly, there's just a whole lot weird about me that my ethnic identity might quickly become a lot less salient than it would be if I was a more vanilla individual. Finally, there's the fact that black Americans have a self-identity as being part of a distinctive and robust American subculture with its own norms, values and folkways. The creation of black American communities of wealth might not be a factor of "push" as much as "pull." People are more comfortable with their own kind. When I say "own kind" there might be some negative associations which crop up; but that doesn't need to be. Kind might be racial, religious or class-based; which American society notionally frowns upon as axes of association. But, it might also be ideological or lifestyle based, which American society is only coming to grips with. Quite often I am in social situations where I am the silent and invisible token "conservative." In these scenarios there is an unstated assumption of common "progressive" values and norms, and the discourse basically operates with some axioms as givens. People talk about Republicans or conservatives is they are an alien species which they clearly can't conceive of as being present & listening. This is not an unfamiliar situation for me; in high school many of my friends were very conservative or Mormon. They knew I tended to disagree on a variety of issues, but for the sake of speed they would pretend as if we shared the same assumptions anyhow because otherwise the conversation just wasn't as fluid. I knew enough about Mormonism to catch some allusions or metaphors for example; being a minority of one I accepted that even if I didn't share the norms and values I should be fluent in them so as to be able to trade in the common semantic currency. The same dynamic applies when I am socializing with liberals; I might not agree with all the axioms but I make sure I know the general score because it makes the conversation more intelligible. I started this post with pointing to research which suggests that many white Americans have an association between blacks and apes, and am now ending with a discussion of the conscious domain of norms and values. There's a lot of grey territory in between, and many times norms and values bleed into the implicit territory through repetition (e.g., I've been in discussions where there was no question that everyone in the room supported abortion rights, there just wasn't any other conceivable possibility). A lot of the shape of public policy is determined with how facts and norms relate to each other, how we determine the ends and what means we find possible and palatable. All these are complicated questions, and unfortunately there's a lot of room for over-simplification and personal parasitism. If for example it is found that someone who is married to a black individual also has associations of blacks with apes what are you to conclude? Should they be scouraged for their racism? The implicit and explicit minds blur into each other, but neither should one be judged by the other, and each has their role. Women are much more racially conscious when speed dating (that is, they have much stronger preferences for individuals of the same race than men). Should we conclude that women are the repositories of race consciousness? I think we can explain this finding in a simpler manner in terms of differentiating between male and female ends in this sort of dating...if you know what I mean. In terms of personal parasitism, having lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my life so I believe I have a lot of experience with this. I've encountered many people who excoriate white Americans from the South for being racist bigots who can't appreciate diversity; at the same time I observe that many of these same individuals are internal migrants from the Bay Area or Los Angeles. In other words, it is rather easy to criticize others for being racist when you yourself are relatively insulated from said issues by virtue of residence in a region without much diversity. This an example of using racism as a status marker. In contrast, during one of my college jobs I had an acquaintance who was black who would use his racial minority status to insulate himself from "first firing" (his term). Basically he explained his modus to me as thus: he totally slacked off when he first began working at a new job until the supervisor called him in to talk about his lack of workplace productivity. He would then object that as a large black male he found that people were scared of him and judged him excessively harshly; instead of being fired he would get a reprimand from the nervous supervisor, and he would henceforth work just enough not to be fired. It took them about a month of him not working before he was called when I worked with him (when he worked near me it was pretty annoying since he always wanted to talk or shoot the shit, distracting me from my task). Social issues are complex. Social science is riddled with results not reproduced or not properly controlled in terms of confounds. Relating these often tendentious data to how we want to organize the world is often difficult. People unreflectively praise diversity, but generally my own experience is that ideological or value differences can make it almost impossible to derive agreed upon inferences from a body of work. Whenever I post on the nuances of evolutionary and population genetics in terms of various human races, I often notice many links which declare that "See, race does not exist!" Well, actually, I do think that reasonably construed human races do exist! But I don't object too strongly because to get from here to there often takes a lot of work, and many of the differences hinge on disputes over definitions of words and the weights upon each definition. This isn't too surprising; there are many posts where I toss out some empirical results without much commentary where others draw totally inverted conclusion from my own. But then I know my own values, I don't know theirs. 1 - I don't encounter black Americans very often, but I've remarked several times that it seems white Americans are much more likely to let stupid comments slide if they are are uttered by a black American than otherwise. My own self-perception is that though I have some slack on several issues (e.g., my Islamophobia) many times my comments will elicit objections or critiques as if I am a peer rather than whatever black people are perceived as.
