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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.”