color bias, juries, and Obama

[carolinayellowdog]

This is a blog post I wrote in 2009 about the book The Hidden Brain:

<em>The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives </em>by Shankar Vedantam (Spiegel and Grau, $26.95)

This new book by a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post offers a fascinating summary of recent psychological findings on the unconscious mind. Three of the ten chapters focus on race in various ways, while others analyze how the hidden brain’s implicit biases influence our behavior in matters including gender, disaster response, and terrorism. The first chapter about race describes the research of Canadian scholar Frances Aboud, who has worked with children of all ages exploring the way bias develops. Multiple researchers have found that young children tend to assign positive adjectives to white people and negative adjectives to black people, regardless of the beliefs of their parents and teachers. (Also independent of the race of the respondent.) Aboud discovered that friendships across racial lines are common among very young children but become steadily less so into adolescence. But the same pattern was found with linguistic communities in Canada. Aboud studied a bilingual school in Montreal and found that children coming from anglophone and francophone homes increasingly choose friends of the same background as the get closer to adolescence. Vedantam relates this to the increasing emphasis of adolescents on group membership and identification. His conclusion about Aboud’s findings is that “What is disturbing to me…is not that children are biased. It is that pervasive bias can occur without anyone—parents, teachers, or the children themselves—wanting it to happen.”(p. 75)

Racial bias in application of the death penalty in the US has been repeatedly demonstrated in statistical analyses, but in his chapter “Shades of Justice” Vedantam explains something that I had not previously known. Studying only African American defendants, a Stanford University research team found that “Defendants who looked more stereotypically black than average were more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty as those who looked less black.”(p. 177) This would suggest that implicit bias is not binary in black and white but rather a continuum, at least in the case of juries and defendants of color. The last chapter focusing on race, “Disarming the Bomb,” is an account of the 2008 Obama campaign’s recognition of implicit bias, and its generally successful attempts at countering it. Psychologist Drew Westen and pollster Celinda Lake are interviewed, and at the close of the chapter Westen is quoted as saying that Obama’s skin color “made a big difference” and “Had he looked like Kwame Kilpatrick, it is not at all clear to me that he could have made it.”(p. 229)

This research is relevant to Melungeons and other mixed ancestry groups because it shows a pervasive unconscious bias against dark-skinned people, a bias against which darker people are themselves not immune. This explains the tendency to genealogical dissociation, people cutting off darker branches of their family trees and denying/ignoring the mixed ancestry in their backgrounds. At least we are now in the position where most Americans consciously reject racism, and thus can identify and analyze unconscious biases that are the legacy of centuries of oppression. But being able to confront unconscious bias does not necessarily entail being willing to do so.

All the back-and-forth about racism lately sent me back to that quote, and then back to 1989, when I was even more proud and happy
when Virginia elected Doug Wilder governor than when Obama was elected in 2008. I believe, without being able to cite research like the abovementioned studies, that Wilder's complexion made him acceptable to many white voters who would have balked at someone darker, but who would not consciously cop to their implicit bias. (Plus, he has the whole Virginia gentleman accent and attitude down pat.)

The finding that darker defendants are treated worse among African-Americans would probably be replicated among Hispanics, whites, and Asians-- the lighter you are the more acceptable, so Japanese are better than Filipinos for example. And a principle found to bias juries surely biases voters as well.

Comparing Obama's numbers to Kerry's is instructive in showing where race and color helped and hurt him. In Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, he ran way ahead of Kerry, 7 points here as I recall; in the Deep South many points behind Kerry's 2004 percentages. But I cannot help thinking that a biracial candidate with no discernable accent carried these three southern states whereas a darker more "black-sounding" candidate would have been rejected.

We may have made a lot of progress in terms of conscious racist ideology, but as for unconscious race and color bias... if it influences juries to the extent it obviously does, it's a massive force to be reckoned with. Wild accusations of racism on the one hand provoke too-much-protestation on the other, and I wish both parties would familiarize themselves with the nuances reported in the abovementioned book.

[JustAnotherGen]

1. The unconscious bias

Is what is more "real" to black Americans today. That's just my initial thought.

To me - what Paula Deen said pales in comparison to the marginalization of black children in the public school system.

The continued "surveillance" of black women as responsible for the ills of society.

The differences in sentencing for drug charges.

I could go on, and on.

The N Word seems to be the litmus test at DU for racism - when in fact it is not - its simply a word used by bigots - amongst others. It's when a bigot unconsciously sentences a black convict to death when they wouldn't a white "defendant" that racism rears its ugly head.

I'm buying this book to familiarize myself with the concept further. Thanks.

[Number23]

2. Yeah, because THAT'S easy

The N Word seems to be the litmus test at DU for racism

I've said that for years. Alot of white people think that because they aren't running around calling everyone niggers they can't be racist. You talk to ANY black person of ANY age and ask them the number of times they've been called nigger by a non-black person. Most will probably say never though some will probably say a few times.

But you ask those same black people do they ever feel they've been discriminated against in the myriad ways that people of color are discriminated and to the one, I'll bet everyone will have a story.

So this "I'm not racist, I've never burned a cross in anyone's yard" is just a very convenient, very easy way for white people to let themselves off the hook. If you start to ask more delicate questions that probe the subconscious bigotry that is the bane of black people's existence and the real source of so much racial pain, THAT'S where isht starts to get real.

[carolinayellowdog]

5. framing it in terms of racist memes infecting innocent people's brains might help

It seems like "I'm not guilty, I'm innocent" is very important to people whose reflex is denial when we talk about racism. So, concede that point and say "you are totally innocent about the pervasiveness and insidiousness of racism, so wise up."

[carolinayellowdog]

4. teachers with the best of intentions can be doing things to perpetuate bias

I'm thinking that if school children are indiscriminately friendly at 5 and have sorted out into ethnic subgroups by 15-- and this true in Canada not just a US phenomenon-- maybe teachers have as much to do with this as parents or media and society. They didn't learn their bias at home-- or at least didn't manifest it until they got to school, in this Aboud research.

[Number23]

3. An interesting sounding read.

"What is disturbing to me…is not that children are biased. It is that pervasive bias can occur without anyone—parents, teachers, or the children themselves—wanting it to happen.”

Which is why it takes alot of insight, perspective and compassion to wipe out racism. It is entirely possible for the most virulent racists to not even know that they exist. It takes alot of work to not be racist because racism is such a huge part of the fabric of this country.

Color bias is also a huge issue and has been for centuries. But it all boils down to one thing, at least in this culture -- the pervasive, insidious view that one race, one color (white) is the mainstream, the most beautiful, the most desirable, the most superior.