American DenialBy: Randi Hovey

Jenee Desmond-HarrisVox.com

“Why so many Americans still deny

racism exists when the evidence is everywhere”

The Inspiration• An American Dilemma• Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal

(1944)• Hypocrisy of Jim Crow South

• “How can a society that is so devoted to equality, justice, and equal opportunity both allow and enable a system of laws and practices that oppress a significant percentage of the population?”

• Unconscious bias

• Racial profiling – police violence

• Educational inequality• Economic disparity• Incarceration crisis

American Denial• Christine Herbes-Sommers and Kelly Thompson• Llewellyn Smith

• Implicit bias (unconscious racism)• Common root of discrimination in modern

society• Historic and Modern studies• Objectives

• Raise the questions, “Why do I think this?/What are the consequences?”

• Open conversation• Determine solutions for bias

The Research• Mahzarin R. Banaji (Harvard)• Implicit and explicit memory applied to

social constructs• Implicit Association Test (IAT)

•  ”a measure within social psychology designed to detect the strength of a person's automatic association between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory.”

• Controls for social-desirability bias

The Research• Implicit Association Test (cont.)• Computer-based test of subconscious memory associations• Seven tasks

• Categorization of stimuli into two categories using Black/White and various positive and negative words

• Measures implicit memory using response latency

• http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/american-denial/implicit-association-test.html

The Research• Kenneth and Mamie Clarke

• Black doll/white doll test (1940s)• Young children are asked to identify which doll

represents certain adjectives• Children are then asked what doll they are • 1/3 of black children identify the white doll with positive

adjectives• Faced with the question of what doll they are, they don’t

want to identify themselves with all the negative adjectives they associated with the black doll.

• Suggests internalized biases that effect racial minorities as well as dominant groups

• May represent earlier evidence of implicit bias• Modern replications have found identical results

Other Research• Test for implicit bias in medical care• Patients equal in all respects except skin color • Black men with identical symptoms are given blood pressure

medicine much less often• Studies on employment bias• Identical resumes treated differently after race identification

• Research on identification by teachers and officers• Black boys are deemed older and less innocent

Conclusion• Asking people to think about racism in a way that is not

apportioning blame• “It’s about how we are all victimized by the destructive ideas

we’ve internalized … and how that affects the institutions we depend on.”

• There is a significant capacity for denial in our culture• “…a lot of it is self-protective, but in the end a lot of the stuff

that is self-protective is destructive to others and to society as a whole.”