September 7, 2014, by Tom Stafford
Implicit racism in academia
Subtle racism is prevalent in US and UK universities, according to a new paper commissioned by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and released last week, reports The Times Higher Education.
Black professors surveyed for the paper said they were treated differently than white colleagues in the form of receiving less eye contact or requests for their opinion, that they felt excluded in meetings and experienced undermining of their work. “I have to downplay my achievements sometimes to be accepted” said one academic, explaining that colleagues that didn’t expect a black woman to be clever and articulate. Senior managers often dismiss racist incidents as conflicts of personalities or believe them to be exaggerated, found the paper.
And all this in institutions where almost all staff would say they are not just “not racist” but where many would say they were actively committed to fighting prejudice.
This seems like a clear case of the operation of implicit biases – where there is a contradiction between people’s egalitarian beliefs and their racist actions. Implicit biases are an industry in psychology, where tools such as the implicit association test (IAT) are used to measure them. The IAT is a fairly typical cognitive psychology-type study: individuals sit in front of a computer and the speed of their reactions to stimuli are measured (the stimuli are things like faces of people with different ethnicities, which is how we get out a measure of implicit prejudice).
The LFHE paper is a nice opportunity to connect this lab measure with the reality of implicit bias ‘in the wild’. In particular, along with some colleagues, I have been interested in exactly what an implicit bias, is, psychologically.
Commonly, implicit biases are described as if they are unconscious or somehow outside of the awareness of those holding them. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been shown to be the case (in fact the opposite may be true – there’s some evidence that people can predict their IAT scores fairly accurately). Worse, the very idea of being unaware of a bias is badly specified. Does ‘unaware’ mean you aren’t aware of your racist feelings? Of your racist behaviour? Of that the feelings, in this case, have produced the behaviour?
The racist behaviours reported in the paper – avoiding eye-contact, assuming that discrimination is due to personalities and not race, etc – could all work at any or all of these levels of awareness. Although the behaviours are subtle, and contradict people’s expressed, anti-racist, opinions, the white academics could still be completely aware. They could know that black academics make them feel awkward or argumentative, and know that this is due to their race. Or they could be completely unaware. They could know that they don’t trust the opinions of certain academics, for example, but not realise that race is a factor in why they feel this way.
Just because the behaviour is subtle, or the psychological phenomenon is called ‘implicit’, doesn’t mean we can be certain about what people really know about it. The real value in the notion of implicit bias is that it reminds us that prejudice can exist in how we behave, not just in what we say and believe.
Cross-posted at mindhacks.com. Run your own IAT with our open-source code: Open-IAT!
So many issues here! First the IAT – to me, words are contextual and not absolute; I would struggle to complete that test. Second – aren’t people who identify themselves as having racist prejudices more likely to be alert to their behaviours and seek to moderate them? Then there’s the question of racism v familiarity – I recall research from a while ago that showed difficulties with cross-cultural identification of facial expressions and mannerisms (Chinese/White western and also vice versa) so that neither group really ‘got’ the other. If people haven’t been exposed to a multi-cultural society, even by TV proxy (and let’s face it, British TV only really presents ‘other’ cultures smoothed out into identifiable western versions – or criminals) then they may miss crucial information or even feel embarrassed about looking for it. I suspect implicit racism is not much different from other kinds of bias such as sexism which seem to be dimensional, running from openly hostile discriminatory hatred through institutional ingrained normalisation, to lack of awareness and finally (I think) almost over-compensation. I recognise this through similarities with attitudes to adults with intellectual disability – we’ve pretty much been through that whole gamut and it requires a capacity for reflective self analysis that not everyone, including academics, is capable of. I’d like to think we’ve come a long way from the historical and comparable board room anecdote in which a woman makes a suggestion and the Chair says, ‘That’s a very good idea, Miss Jones – would a man like to make it?’ but apparently not.