Gorski, P. (2012) Complicating White Privilege: Poverty, Class, and the Nature of the Knapsack. TEACHERS COLLEGE RECORD.
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Study: People Associate 'Education' With Lighter Skin
Research participants remembered 'educated' black men as having a lighter skin tone.
Reading an academic paper on racism is like reading an alien's take on the human species.
In their summary of the way humans think, these aliens
describe racism as "phenotypic features associated with the social
categorization of racial groups [that] have been strongly linked to
stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination." Don't those humans know
those "phenotypic features" (i.e., genetic factors) that form race only account for 6 to 10 percent of the
genetic differences between humans? Silly humans. Often this
stereotyping manifests itself in what's called "skin tone memory bias,"
or, in the common tongue, racism.
For all their academic euphemisms, the psychologists on a new study in the Journal Sage Open, are
not aliens. But they do cooly describe the way subjects implicitly
associate "ignorance" with dark skin tone, and "education" with light
skin tone.
The students tested at San Francisco State
University were shown words like "ignorant" and "educated" for 33
milliseconds. These subliminal prompts are part of a phenomenon known as
priming, a manipulation by researchers that preps participants' minds
for a given experiment. After the subliminal word, they saw a picture of
a black man.
Priming is a powerful tool for psychologists. Basically,
simple words or cues activate semantic networks in the brain and make
the ideas connected to that semantic network easier to access. The
effect is commonly illustrated by a simple experiment: When a researcher
hands a person a cup of warm water, they're more likely to describe
someone as being warm or friendly. In flashing the word "ignorance"
before their participant's eyes, the psychologists make everything with
an "ignorance" association in their participant's mind all the more
accessible.
What
they found was this: The students primed with "educated" were more
likely to rate the black man's skin tone as lighter on a memory test
later. "Black individuals who defy social stereotypes might not
challenge social norms sufficiently but rather may be remembered as
lighter, perpetuating status quo beliefs," the authors summarize. That
is, when primed to think of a "black person" and "educated" in the same
mental space, the black person becomes whiter. The stereotype distorts
the memory.
The researchers elaborate:
Whereas encountering a Black individual after being
primed with the word educated might pose a challenge to existing
beliefs, encountering a Black individual after being primed with the
word ignorant would likely not require resolution or a misremembering of
skin tone to align with these beliefs.
The effects of skin bias have real consequences: The "more
black" a person appears, the more they are likely to be sentenced to
death (in an experiment). In the real world, darker-skinned women were found to spend more time in jail.
Now, it's unfair to label this study's participants as
outright racists. Just because a subliminal cue changes their
perceptions of a person doesn't mean those perceptions change the way
they might engage with or treat that person in the real world. What the
study does show is that these connections exist, and they can subtly change our behavior without us ever knowing it.
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