A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com

2015/01/07 1 Comment

Further to my earlier post (The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men), a good interview with Jennifer Eberhardt, another psychology professor looking into subconscious biases:

We’re finding that the beliefs of the police aren’t generally that different from everyone else’s. A lot of the tests we’ve done, we give them to students, to ordinary citizens and to police officers. We’re finding the results are generally similar. The police are people like everyone else.

….One thing I do is work with police departments. We do workshops where we present these studies and show what implicit bias is, and how it’s different from old-fashioned racism. I don’t think this alone can change behavior. But it can help people become aware of the unconscious ways race operates. If you combine that with other things, there is hope.

A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com.

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The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men

2015/01/05 4 Comments

Good in-depth article on the psychology and neurology of subconscious bias and how it is part of our automatic thinking and sorting:

Science offers an explanation for this paradox—albeit a very uncomfortable one. An impressive body of psychological research suggests that the men who killed Brown and Martin need not have been conscious, overt racists to do what they did (though they may have been). The same goes for the crowds that flock to support the shooter each time these tragedies become public, or the birthers whose racially tinged conspiracy theories paint President Obama as a usurper. These people who voice mind-boggling opinions while swearing they’re not racist at all—they make sense to science, because the paradigm for understanding prejudice has evolved. There “doesn’t need to be intent, doesn’t need to be desire; there could even be desire in the opposite direction,” explains University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek, a prominent IAT researcher.”But biased results can still occur.”

The IAT is the most famous demonstration of this reality, but it’s just one of many similar tools. Through them, psychologists have chased prejudice back to its lair—the human brain.

Were not born with racial prejudices. We may never even have been “taught” them. Rather, explains Nosek, prejudice draws on “many of the same tools that help our minds figure out whats good and whats bad.” In evolutionary terms, its efficient to quickly classify a grizzly bear as “dangerous.” The trouble comes when the brain uses similar processes to form negative views about groups of people.

But here’s the good news: Research suggests that once we understand the psychological pathways that lead to prejudice, we just might be able to train our brains to go in the opposite direction.

The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men | Mother Jones.

And yes, I did take the Implicit Association Test (also available at UnderstandingPrejudice.org) and scored just as miserably as the Chris Mooney, the author of this article. Very sobering, and I encourage all to take it.

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The last mile of equal rights is the hardest – Saunders

2014/12/04 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders on the challenges of reaching the last holdouts on equal rights:

Likewise, after several decades of extremely difficult activist struggles and hard-fought public-opinion victories, getting 80 or 90 per cent of the population to embrace the concepts of racial and sexual equality, and to stop tolerating discrimination and abuse, happened surprisingly quickly and easily. A generation came of age who were nearly unanimous in those beliefs.

But that last 5 or 10 per cent pose a set of very different challenges: These are the hard cases that actively defy majority opinion.

Economists Laurence Chandy and Homi Kharas noted recently that poverty is such a problem: Half as many people are in absolute poverty as 30 years ago, but halving the last bit will be much tougher: those “persistent pockets of poverty” are in economies and cultures far more resistant to change.

Their advice for poverty should be ours for equal rights: The last bit won’t take care of itself. New movements, and new and tougher government initiatives, will be needed. It’s time for a final civil-rights movement. The last mile is always the hardest, but it’s also the most important.

I suspect, however, the idea that we will attain 100 percent eradication of poverty, or 100 percent eradication of racism and sexism, is unrealistic.

Not an excuse not to try, but just to be realistic in expectations.

The last mile of equal rights is the hardest – The Globe and Mail.

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The truth about race, the police and Ferguson – Macleans.ca

2014/11/28 Leave a comment

Sobering look at the enduring prevalence of racism, and how engrained attitudes are:

Yet, a look at the research suggests the problem of police officers killing unarmed black men is not all about white police forces. In 2002, University of Chicago psychology professor Joshua Correll published The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a landmark study testing racial bias. Correll and his team devised a video game-type experiment in which test subjects were shown images of black and white males, some armed, some not. The subjects had to decide when and when not to shoot.

The results speak for themselves. “Participants fired at an armed target more quickly if he was African American than if he was white, and decided not to shoot an unarmed white target more quickly than an unarmed African American target.”

Here’s the kicker, though: Correll found little difference in the willingness or not to shoot between black and white test subjects. In 2007, he replicated the study with actual police officers, and came to a similar conclusion: A young black male is as likely to be a target of a black police officer as his Caucasian partner.

….In a sense, Michael Brown was victim to the most deadly demonstration of how black males (and blacks in general) are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. Even if his life doesn’t end at the hands of a cop, a black youth will face myriad examples of as much throughout his life.

Statistically, as a recent Kirwan Institute study suggests, he is more likely to be singled out as aggressive, mean and/or intellectually deficient for similar behaviour than a white kid. Should he enter into the justice system, he is more likely to be charged with a greater crime than someone with lighter skin; even if he isn’t, the black kid is more likely to be treated more harshly by judges and jurors.

Several studies have shown how blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death when their victims are white; yet another shows a correlation between death penalty sentences and typically black features. In America, the darker your skin and the fuller your lips, the higher the likelihood you will be sentenced to die for your crimes.

The truth about race, the police and Ferguson.

Much more serious than Barbara Kay’s piece:

Barbara Kay: Ferguson is the exception, not the norm in U.S. race relations

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The Racial Divide Over Ferguson « The Dish

2014/11/27 Leave a comment

racial-divide-fergusonNo surprise in the different perceptions, but still striking.

The Racial Divide Over Ferguson « The Dish.

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When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4 – Kristoff

2014/11/18 Leave a comment

Kristoff on the enduring legacy of race and history:

Yet one element of white privilege today is obliviousness to privilege, including a blithe disregard of the way past subjugation shapes present disadvantage.

I’ve been on a book tour lately. By coincidence, so has one of my Times Op-Ed columnist colleagues, Charles Blow, who is African-American and the author of a powerful memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” I grew up in a solid middle-class household; Charles was primarily raised by a single mom who initially worked plucking poultry in a factory, and also, for a while, by a grandma in a house with no plumbing.

That Charles has become a New York Times columnist does not mean that blacks and whites today have equal access to opportunity, just that some talented and driven blacks manage to overcome the long odds against them. Make no mistake: Charles had to climb a higher mountain than I did.

WE all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We’re in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead. Do we ignore this long head start — a facet of white privilege — and pretend that the competition is now fair?Of course not.

If we whites are ahead in the relay race of life, shouldn’t we acknowledge that we got this lead in part by generations of oppression? Aren’t we big enough to make amends by trying to spread opportunity, by providing disadvantaged black kids an education as good as the one afforded privileged white kids?

Can’t we at least acknowledge that in the case of race, William Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4 – NYTimes.com.

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Racism still an uncomfortable truth in Canada

2014/11/14 Leave a comment

Interesting experiment and pretty convincing results and analysis:

Subjects are shown a series of black faces and white faces on a computer screen. Researchers track the subject’s eye movements, to measure what the subject looks at, and for how long.

More than a thousand subjects were tested. White subjects tended to look deeply into the eyes of white faces, and were less likely to look into the eyes of black faces. Instead, they were almost three times as likely to focus on the lips or noses of black faces.

“It suggests they’re processing them not as individuals, but as members of a group,” said Kawakami.

This split-second eye bias can have some important consequences, according to Kawakami. When we don’t make eye contact with someone, we’re less likely to be able to decode their emotions, and less willing to trust or remember that person.

“Even though it might happen within the first 100th of a second, we know that downstream that can tell us whether you might hire a person, whether you have positive or negative associations with that person and whether you’re willing to interact with that person,” Kawakami explained.

Kawakami’s latest work is consistent with what some psychologists call “aversive racism.”

Unlike overt racism — blatant expressions of hatred and discrimination against racial minorities — aversive racism is characterized by more complex and subtle expressions of ambivalence toward members of a minority group.

“People are very careful about what they say about people from other categories. They’re really egalitarian, they try to be fair, but when we measure them in more subtle ways, when they’re not conscious of their responses and they’re not able to control them, then we find that racism is still quite prevalent in North America,” said Kawakami.

Mindfulness and greater self-awareness can help mitigate but not an easy or automatic process.

Racism still an uncomfortable truth in Canada: Duncan McCue – Canada – CBC News.

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The face Canada showed the world – Margaret Wente

2014/11/10 Leave a comment

Margaret Wente’s cheery piece on what Canada got right, referring to the Hamilton video experiment on attitudes towards Muslims (Hamilton racism social experiment ends with a punch | Toronto Star) and the community efforts to clean up the damage at the Cold Lake Mosque (Volunteers help clean vandalism from Cold Lake mosque):

When I wear the poppy, I sometimes think of my dad and grandfather, who fought so that some day we could live in a nation just like this. But why us? Why are we the lucky ones? How have we managed to escape the racial and ethnic strife that plagues most of the rest of the world?

One reason is that Canada is so new. Almost all of us are immigrants – newcomers ourselves not so long ago. And our dual English-French identities have been a great test of our ability to accommodate our differences without tearing each other to shreds. So far, so good. We’ve learned a lot from that.

Our identity is not defined by blood, or by our sense of destiny. We have no concept of Volk. We’re just folks. We don’t care who you are or where you came from or who or what you worship, as long as you share our good Canadian bourgeois values. Don’t litter. Send your kids to school. Wear a poppy.

We are blessed with a lot of elbow room, and we have borders that are relatively impermeable. No massive waves of refugees and migrants wash up on our shores. We never imported guest workers who we thought would go home, but didn’t.

Unlike Europe, our immigrants come from all corners of the planet. We’ve dodged the problem of large subgroups that self-ghettoize and don’t assimilate. Here, everyone gets thrown together and winds up at Tim Hortons or maybe Starbucks. And the locals are extremely friendly, which means that the whole world wants to come here, so we get our pick. We have created a virtuous circle of tolerance and openness that is rivalled only by Australia, a nation just like ours, only with a better climate and a worse accent.

As my friend and colleague Sheema Khan said of Mr. Albach’s video, “This is the face that Canada is showing to the world.” After two terrorist attacks, people punched out the bigots and took flowers to the mosque. No wonder we’re the envy of the world.

The face Canada showed the world – The Globe and Mail.

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Why I don’t believe people who say they loathe Islam but not Muslims

2014/11/07 Leave a comment

Valid point (like saying “some of my best friends are Jewish”):

Racial and religious hatreds have one thing in common: they are not inspired by the race or religion of the hater, but by the religion or race of the victim. This is clearest in the case of antisemitism, which can appear as either a racial or a religious hatred, or indeed both. What’s constant is that it involves hating Jewish people, whatever the reasons given. Similarly, if you hate black people, you hate them on racist grounds whatever the colour of your own skin, and if you hate Muslims, Catholics, Quakers or Mormons, you hate them for their religion – whatever your own beliefs. So it is perfectly possible for religious hatred to be motivated by atheism and it may be quite common in the modern world.

The claim that Islam isn’t a race and so it is entirely rational to hate and fear it gains its moral force from the implicit claim that there is something uniquely horrible about racial hatred. I don’t think there is, though I see why we assume it: 50 or 60 years ago racial prejudice was an entirely natural part of English life. In order to change that, it was necessary to mark it as a uniquely dreadful and disfiguring condition: racism became a kind of moral leprosy. Without in any way wishing to roll back that progress, it’s worth noting that in other societies and at other times racial prejudice has not been the most urgent incitement to communal hatred.

Why I don’t believe people who say they loathe Islam but not Muslims | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

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Hamilton racism social experiment ends with a punch | Toronto Star

2014/10/30 Leave a comment

More dramatic than polling on attitudes:

One man immediately pushes back:

“You know, you can’t stereotype and judge people by their clothes, or their nationality or anything else, you know what I mean? What happened there, it was incident of fanatics.”

A woman pipes up, too:“It was awful and tragic, but I don’t think that’s any reason to persecute someone just because what they’re wearing.”

But Giamou keeps making his case, eventually trying to physically remove his fellow actor. At that point, someone jumps to the Muslim man’s defence and slugs Giamou in the face.

After a brief clip that shows him talking to a police officer, Giamou, who has a bloody face, offers this conclusion:

“So the social experiment had a negative ending to it, but its positive because he stood up for him and I appreciate that, that’s good, that’s good.”

Hamilton racism social experiment ends with a punch | Toronto Star.

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