In order to better understand why racism still exists, it helps to study it like a science. Keon West, social psychologist at Goldsmiths at the University of London, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his rigorous research into racist beliefs, the results of social experiments that show how far we’ve moved the mark since the Civil Rights era and what we can definitively say about prejudice today. His book is “The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know but Probably Don’t—Yet.”
An explanation for social prejudice today
By Madelyn Walton, Think Intern
Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle DEI at the federal government level, and several companies and organizations are following his lead.
Keon West is a social psychologist at Goldsmiths at the University of London. He joined host Krys Boyd to discuss experiments and theories that have validated racist beliefs and the future of DEI.
“I would define racism as any detectable difference in behavior that is based on race and not on any other factors,” West says.
Studies have detected racism through dating culture, classroom structure, the workplace, and police violence.
“These experiments are incredibly straightforward and all you need to do is create any situation where everything is identical except for the race or what we call the stimulus that people are getting,” West says.
Research found that in a social experiment where Black people and white people both have criminal records and apply for jobs, the white candidate is more likely to receive a call back.
“That is a horrifying finding because it shows that the cost of being Black is bigger than the cost of the criminal record,” he says.
Several major companies and government agencies have been pulling their DEI efforts.
“A lot of people who are rolling back the diversity, equity and inclusion work say that they want a society where everyone is treated with equal dignity and respect. And that’s just not the society that anyone has,” West says. “If we want that society, we have to do work to get there.”
Whether the racial bias is implicit or unconscious, it still results in a prejudiced environment.
“In a world full of imperfect people, racism becomes really quite a horrible thing.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] We have unquestionably made progress from the days when skin color determined where people could live or work or go to school or even use the bathroom in parts of the United States. But while those changes were a big deal when they happened, they feel like a very low bar today and they don’t say anything definitive about the state of racism in the 21st century. People often argue about the extent to which racism is still a thing in the modern era, but even the sincerest expressions of opinion on either side are just that they are opinions. From K-E-R-A in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. To understand the actual state of racist perceptions and behaviors and outcomes, we need hard facts. And my guest has devoted his career to finding them by applying scientific experimentation and rigor. Keon West is a social psychologist at the University of London. His book is called “The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know, but Probably Don’t Yet.” Keon, welcome to Think.
Keon West [00:00:58] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:00] If another scientist wanted to study, say, ducks, they could safely skip over the work to prove that ducks exist. But that is where you have to start, right? As a scientist studying racism?
Keon West [00:01:12] Yes, I’d say so. Racism is a lot trickier than ducks in many ways. I often say that physicists have an easy time. It’s easier to work with bricks or bowls or, you know, bits of string because those things don’t have opinions about themselves. A brick doesn’t want to prove to you that it falls faster than a feather. It just does. Whereas people are tricky. They they do things, but they don’t like to admit that they do them. And so a lot of the experimental work is getting around people’s desire to hide things.
Krys Boyd [00:01:42] Right. You can’t just ask questions about the persistence of racism by polling a representative sample of people because they may not tell you the whole truth.
Keon West [00:01:53] You can’t. All the time. There are some areas where that actually works incredibly well. So one area is in the realm of dating. For some reason, many people think even today that dating romantic relationships, sexual relationships are exempt from the usual rules of not being racist. They’re quite comfortable just saying that they have a preference for one race or another. And in other areas, children children are really wonderful for researchers because they haven’t yet learned the finer points of social decorum. So if you ask them things, I’ll just tell you. And that’s very, very easy. But with adults in most situations, most people wouldn’t admit to being racist. In other situations like work or friendships, that turns most people off.
Krys Boyd [00:02:40] So you need to come up with experiments that can show people are treated differently based on their racial identity. This has famously been done many times right around hiring discrimination. Tell us about these experiments carried out with CVs or what we call resumes in the U.S..
Keon West [00:02:56] Yes. So these experiments are incredibly straightforward and all you need to do is create any situation where everything is identical except for the race of the what we call the stimulus that people are getting. I’ll talk about an experiment that I did with some colleagues of mine, and it’s incredibly straightforward. You just get a few hundred copies of a CV that’s completely the same CV. Always identical. Same qualifications. Same education, same experience, same everything. But for half of those CV’s, you change the name at the top of the CV. So a very white sounding name. And the other half you change to a very black sounding name, for example, and then you send the CVs out. You see what comes back. And when you do this, you reliably find that the, quote unquote white CVs get a higher number of calls to interview. They get a higher number of job offers. They get offered better pay. They get offered higher positions. But in every way they get treated better. And that’s how you can prove that race is a factor in hiring decisions that even when everything else is held constant, there’s still that effect of race that comes out.
Krys Boyd [00:04:06] What happens if experimenters go beyond black and white and throw in some names that might sound Asian or Latino or Middle Eastern or indigenous?
Keon West [00:04:15] Yes. So things get slightly more complicated, but only more complicated in a single line, really. So I think what might be useful would be to look at numbers for big studies that do this, and then they can determine the gaps between what white CVs get and what black CVs get. So, for example, studies will regularly find that white CVs will get a lot more callbacks than black CVs. Some studies will find that they get almost twice as many. And some will find that they get about 50% more. But then if you include like, let’s say, Latinos in that same study or names that sound like their Latino names, you’ll find that they tend to fall in the middle. So they don’t get as many callbacks as the white people. They don’t get as few as the black people. They get in the middle. And it’s worth remembering that everyone in this experiment is the same person. Everyone has the same qualifications, the same experience, but you get that white than Latino than black. And if you add in, let’s say, East Asian names, then East Asians come between Latino names and white names. And you can keep doing this. You can keep adding in different races of names. And people have done this. And from that they get a pretty clear hierarchy of how many callbacks you’ll get depending on your race.
Krys Boyd [00:05:30] Has anyone ever tried going back and speaking to the hiring managers who seem to privilege white sounding candidates? I mean, I wonder how they might account for those patterns.
Keon West [00:05:41] Well, going back and speaking to them, not so much, but there has been some incredibly clever research that has used not just CVs, which is great and that’s excellent for controlling. So that makes sure that nothing else is leaking into the system. So it’s not the behaviors of anyone in the experiment. I mean, people who are conducting the experiment never interact with these hiring managers directly because they don’t want to mess the experiment up. But sometimes they are curious. They do want to know, well, what are these people doing and how are they? How are they reaching these racist decisions? And studies that have done this have done it by getting black, white and Latino people who look otherwise the same. So they are similarly dressed. They behave the same way. They speak the same way. They act the same way. They’re trained to do this, but they’re different in terms of their race. And when they do that, what they find is just a shocking amount of overt racism and lying actually is really what they find. They find that people will say things like when the Black and so you have to understand there’s that sliding scale. So things things that will happen very often to the Black person and essentially never to the white person will happen some of the time to the Latino person. But I’m just going to use a Black person because it’s simpler in this experiment. But they’ll say to the black person when he shows up, sorry, the positions already filled, or, you know, we don’t have any interviews today. You know what? Your CV looks fine, but we’ll have to check your references. And then when the white person shows up, even if he shows up after the Black person has already been told the position is full, they’ll say, no, it’s not full. Please come in, come in, sit down. Can you work today? So they’ll they’ll say a lot of things that they know are not true just to get rid of the Black person and sometimes just to get rid of the Latino person, but not to get rid of the white person.
Krys Boyd [00:07:25] So this is very dispiriting, Keon, But as you note in the book, it would be a dream come true for many people of color if like the only arena where racism affects their lives is hiring. But in fact, it’s, you know, been demonstrated to affect many other things throughout life. What sort of studies have focused on the experiences of children in classroom setting?
Keon West [00:07:47] Yes. So first of all, I want to acknowledge that what you’re saying is absolutely true. So if there was an area of life that is testable and this is essentially every area of life, when we test it, we find racism in it, that there just aren’t areas that we test and don’t find these effects. That’s unfortunately not how things work. But when it comes to the experiences of children, one of the things that makes me really sad is hearing people talk about children and saying they don’t want to discuss racism with children. They don’t want to bring it up with their children because they’re concerned that they will sully the children in some way, that they’ll destroy their innocence. When the science is pretty clear that children are both the victims and perpetrators of racism by the time they’re three years old. We know that children do this. Again they’re normally quite straightforward. So if you ask them who’s nicer, who’s smarter, who’s prettier, they will just tell you a lot of the time that white people are better in all of these ways because no one’s told them that they’re not allowed to say that. And even with slightly savvier children, there are ways of getting this information out of them that takes a lot less work than getting it out of adults. But also, there are other things. So when you look at the way teachers respond to children, there was a very, very clever study that used eye tracking devices and asked teachers to look out for troublesome behavior or challenging behavior in the classroom. If they didn’t do this, the teacher would the teachers would look at all the children about equally, but if they asked them to look out for the challenging behaviors, the teacher’s eyes would suddenly focus on the Black children, in particular the black boys. And this was true even when the Black children were not misbehaving at all, when they were being perfectly well behaved, when the teachers were expecting negative behavior, they were expecting it from the Black children.
Krys Boyd [00:09:36] There are these famous studies about children being allowed to choose a doll, a doll that looks Black or a doll that looks white. Can you talk us through that and talk us through the context of that?
Keon West [00:09:46] The idea was to test a couple of things in Black children, the language at the time was Negro children, which would be highly offensive today, but it was 70 years ago. And so that’s what people said. And I think most people have an image in their mind of the adult study where there is a little brown doll and little white doll and the children are asked to pick which of the dolls they’d want to play with. And they watch in a kind of tragic horror as the darker skinned children, the black children pick the white doll. And that definitely was a part of the experiment. The experiment, however, went much further. It wanted to see whether the children could understand which of the dolls looked more like them. So did they understand what it meant to be black, and did they like it? Did they enjoy their blackness? And the results of the study were overwhelmingly and depressingly know. Well, yes, they did understand what it meant to be black, but they didn’t enjoy it very much at all. The study details some children running out of the room crying. Just I think they used the term convulsed in tears because they didn’t like being associated with the black doll, thought it was less attractive, less desirable. So they understood exactly what they were saying. They were saying, I understand that I am a Black person and I understand that Black people are less desirable in the society in which I live. And they were saying it in the language of children, which was a very sad thing to read.
Krys Boyd [00:11:12] So the choice of a black doll reflected this very young children’s understanding that white people, white associated toys, have more status.
Keon West [00:11:23] Yes, that they are of higher status, but they are of higher value. And this was despite the children’s ability to recognize quite clearly that they were black people, that if they were a doll, they would be a brown doll and they did not want to be.
Krys Boyd [00:11:38] You mentioned a few minutes ago that when you ask people about their dating preferences, they often have no qualms, you know, explicitly stating a racial preference. What does that about? How do people who presumably would like to think of themselves as not racist justify being overtly racist in this one arena?
Keon West [00:11:57] Yes. Well, first of all, I want to say that even people who have these preferences generally do not think of themselves as overtly racist. They think that they have a preference. They think that they have desires that are not governed by the rational parts of their minds or something else. And I could get into the specifics of how you can do this. I mean, I think it is racist. I think that to explicitly declare a preference for a particular race of people in an arena of life is, to me, definitionally a racist thing to do. But I would also say that people discriminate all the time, and actually the unhelpful thing to believe is that people don’t realize that discriminating. People will, for example, walk down the streets if they see a group of black men coming the other way, they’ll cross the street. And that is an act that is clearly a discriminatory one. And if you ask them, sometimes they will say, I wouldn’t cross the street if it had been a group of white men. But they’ll say, I’m not being racist. They’ll invent a list of psychological excuses that explain their behavior as being justified or rational. They might start citing crime statistics. They might make other claims about the prevalence of certain studies in the news. And people can do this for a variety of different things, and they do it not just for black people, but they’ll do it, for example, about Muslims. They’ll say, well, they have different cultures or they do this or they do that. And in many areas, not just in dating, when people are aware that they’re behaving in discriminatory ways, they often make appeals to pseudo logic to justify this behavior. So dating is is a really sharp and there it’s very, very clear in which people will just say, I don’t want to date ethnic minorities, but in other ways, sometimes smaller ways. People will do this in other areas of life as well. But what we’re seeing there is the same kind of pseudo rational processes that exist in dating extending throughout the spectrum of human behavior.
Krys Boyd [00:13:56] Keon, just to be clear here, I mean it it seems quite racist to express a preference for, say, one’s own race in dating. Is it also explicitly racist to express a clear preference for a different race in dating?
Keon West [00:14:11] I think this gets into a question of definitions and I think there I could I could see people making arguments that for one reason or another it isn’t. I would say most of the time probably I would define racism as any any detectable difference in behavior that is based on race and not on any other factors. So if you, for example, express a preference of a certain proportion of white men would say, I explicitly prefer East Asian women. Is that racist? Because it’s a preference. And the answer is generally yes, because this tends to align with other racist stereotypes which come out in other ways. So the reason why certain numbers of white men explicitly prefer East Asian women, but there is not the reverse preference for East Asian men is because East Asians are often stereotyped as hyper feminine and subservient, which is an idea that might seem to be serving them in the specific dating pool with white men, but isn’t actually particularly helpful in a lot of other ways. Just like someone might say, Well, I explicitly prefer all these Black people for my basketball team, and that seems very positive, except the research shows that if you buy into that part of the stereotype, you’re also more likely to buy into the hypermasculinity, the aggressiveness, the criminality. So you probably don’t want Black people doing your accounting, which again, isn’t very nice because there’s a lot of black people who are excellent accountants and they’re terrible at basketball.
Krys Boyd [00:15:48] So in the United States, as you well know, we have lived through years of stories that demonstrate seem to demonstrate that Black people are more likely to be shot by police than white people. There are some Americans who believe police shootings of Black civilians receive disproportionate attention. So what can what can science tell us? What do the raw numbers reveal here?
Keon West [00:16:10] Yes. So I think, first of all, we have to ask ourselves, who is shot more frequently? Under what conditions are they shot? Can these shootings be explained by any other aspects of the behavior? And the science is pretty clear that a no, that that race is definitely still a factor, that actually black victims of police brutality are actually more likely to be unarmed, that in many places black people are more likely to be stopped by the police, despite being less likely to be caught with contraband, for example. But there was also a really ingenious set of studies done in which they put people in a simulator. And I don’t know if you’ve ever played one of those very old arcade games where you’re supposed to shoot these enemies when they pop up in front of you. Maybe I’m showing my age, but do you understand the kind of game?
Krys Boyd [00:16:57] I’m definitely old enough to remember those, sure.
Keon West [00:16:59] Yeah. Okay. So you’re playing the Terminator game and the Terminator robots pop up and you’re supposed to shoot the Terminator robots and not shoot the civilians. So this is the name of the game. And they put people in simulators like that where you’re supposed to shoot people who have guns but not shoot people who don’t have guns. It sounds like a pretty simple game, except they mix the people up. Sometimes the people who have guns are white and sometimes are Black. And sometimes people who don’t have guns are white and sometimes are Black. And what the experimenters were looking for were the mistakes that people were likely to make under these conditions. And I’ll cut straight to the chase. They tended to make two mistakes. They tended not to shoot white people who were, in fact, carrying guns. They were just a bit too slow to do that. And they tended to shoot black people who weren’t carrying guns, who are carrying wallets or can openers or something like that. And you can see this emerge for both police officers and for laypeople actually much more drastically for laypeople. There is evidence of training in how to use a gun is quite a useful thing. Just a regular person with a gun, according to these studies, is a terrible idea because they were they were just shooting Black people all the time. I think the researchers actually use the phrase trigger happy, which is not a phrase you normally expect to see in a psychological journal. But it was just demonstrating the extent to which people would tend to make this mistake. And so race is definitely a factor in these shootings. And we know scientifically that it’s a factor in the shootings. And when people say, well, how can how can you say that you can’t you know, we made these decisions based on things that had nothing to do with race. I would actually fire the question back. How could you possibly know that when you’re reacting in a split second decision? You definitely don’t have the time to evaluate your reasons for making those decisions. You are responding largely based on instinct, especially if you don’t have the training for it. And in these circumstances, you are under no condition to tell people what made you decide to pull the trigger. You just can’t do it. But the research does expose the things that make people decide to pull the trigger, and race is definitely one of them.
Krys Boyd [00:19:05] Many people who resist the idea that policing in the United States affects people very differently depending on their race have noted this problem of so-called black on black crime as the bigger issue in that most violence affecting Black Americans is carried out by black civilians. But this is also true for white Americans, right? Like it’s white on white violence that is most likely to hurt white Americans.
Keon West [00:19:27] Yes. If you are a white person who is a victim of a violent crime, the the person, the race of the person most likely to be the aggressor is another white person. This is also true for everyone else. So these are statements that could be made in all directions. The white on white crime exists and is the most prevalent form of violent crime against white people, Asian on Asian crime and black on black crime. But we don’t hear about white on white crime, even though the most likely person to kill a white person is another white person. We don’t hear about white on white crime very much. And part of the reason is because if you think about it for a moment, that is a it’s a ridiculous thing to point out. The existence of crime between white people is simply not a thing that relates to how white people should be policed or how they should be treated. The argument based around black on black crime is a dehumanizing document. It says that their lives are already worth so little they already kill each other, so little. But I try to imagine if I think her name was Justine Damond, who was killed by a police officer named Noor. It was a few years ago and he I might be getting the name slightly wrong when he shot her and killed her, which is, you know, a genuinely tragic thing. It’s a terrible thing to happen. No one raised the specter of white on white crime, and anyone who did so would have seemed to be incredibly crass and and hideous as a person. Because how does this affect a woman, his mind, their own business being shot by a police officer? It would just be a terrible thing to say. Most people are killed by people who they live with and who they know and who they share community and spaces with. And unfortunately, society is still segregated enough that most white people spend most of their time with other white people. Most Black people spend most of their time with other Black people. And as a result, if you’re going to be hurt, you’re going to be hurt by the people who surround you.
Krys Boyd [00:21:26] I think most listeners know about disproportionate incarceration rates by race in this country, and I believe in the UK as well. This is a huge problem in and of itself. But it turns out once people have done their time, they’re released from prison. They go to get a job. That ability to find like legitimate work is also shaped by race. Tell us about that.
Keon West [00:21:47] Yes. So I think the research that is probably most relevant here is a really interesting study that looks at what happens when people have a criminal record and when that shows up on their CV. So I’ve already talked a bit about CV studies in general where you just take a CV and it’s exactly the same CV and you replace the names, the ones white ones, black, and then you see how many callbacks they get. And of course, the white people are getting more callbacks than the black people. That’s that’s one thing. But sometimes people go one step further and they make a slightly more complex design in which you have white people and black people, but you also have people who either have a criminal record or don’t have a criminal record. So that’s four people. A white guy with a criminal record, white guy with no criminal record, black guy with a criminal record, black guy with no criminal record. So no surprises that the people with no criminal record do better in this competition. They’re more likely to be called for interview than the people who who have a criminal record. So we know that the criminal record is costly. But what some studies find, which is really shocking and dismaying, is that white people with criminal records still get a higher proportion of callbacks than black people without criminal records. And that is a horrifying finding because it shows that the cost of being black is bigger than the cost of the criminal record, that it is better to be a white person who has on on his CV I have been to prison for doing crimes than to be a black person with no such thing on their CV. This finding isn’t unique to what happens when you come out of prison. Some of my own research, for example, a study I did a couple of studies actually looking at how people interpret crimes. I looked at newspaper reports of crimes that were exactly the same crime, but they were either white people apparently committing the crime or Muslims apparently committing the crime. And when the Muslims were committing the crime, it was perceived as a worse crime and as a terrorist crime, even though it was the same crime. Other studies show that if you present the same evidence against the Black person versus the white person, exactly the same evidence, the Black person is perceived as guilty or based on exactly the same evidence that when they’re found guilty, they’re given longer sentences based on exactly the same crime, that at every stage the justice system is worse, that you are found guilty faster, your continued, you’re perceived to be guilty or you’re locked away for longer. And when you get out, the penalty is much higher. So much higher. So it’s not there’s no point at which this is easier on people who aren’t white. It’s always harder.
Krys Boyd [00:24:22] So hearing about all this, I mean, this is just a handful of a litany of studies that you articulate in the book. I have to imagine that occasionally you wonder how it is that people can still think that racism is not an issue in the 21st century. But I wonder if you can talk about the study you did in 2021 that looked at the definitional boundaries people place around discrimination depending on how they are positioned in society.
Keon West [00:24:48] Yes, I’d love to talk about that study. And I would say broadly, people don’t know about racism. I think because we don’t talk about studies like these enough. We talk a lot about feelings. And I have feelings about racism, and I assume you do as well. But I think we should talk about studies like this more. But the definitional boundaries question is a very interesting question. And I don’t want to take too much credit for that. The notion of the definition of boundaries was actually developed by my friend Katie Greenland, who is a professor in Cardiff, which is in Wales. I realize this is an American show, so people might not know regarding this, but that’s in Wales is the different part of the UK with Katie and myself and Collette Venlo, who’s in Belgium. And the idea was that people have an idea in their heads of what’s really racism. So what counts as real racism, you know, the bad stuff we should be worried about and stuff, that’s probably fine. You know, that’s maybe a little bit racist, but we don’t need to worry about it. And we should only feel bad about the stuff that crosses the boundary into real racism. So some of the things we do to to justify these differences and this comes back to the discussion of how people pick romantic partners. It’s what we say, Well, it’s only racism if it’s malicious or if it’s deliberately meant to hurt people. It can’t be racism if it’s based on ignorance. It can’t be racism for a whole bunch of other reasons. So they list all of these reasons and they they they use these to then essentially justify anything. So you can just say racial slurs. But if people don’t know what your intentions are, you could say, well, my intention wasn’t to hurt anyone or I didn’t realize it was a bad thing to say or I wasn’t trying to be malicious. It wasn’t deliberate. Then you are excused, essentially. And what you can do is you can measure these definitional boundaries of racism and you can see what else they are correlated with. Now, unsurprisingly, if you take these definitional definitional boundaries of racism and you see, well, I wonder how they correlate with other expressions of race related stuff like really explicit racism, or they’re very positively correlated with that, but they’re also positively correlated with implicit expressions of racism, which is interesting to know. They are correlated with things like a dislike of certain groups like BlackLivesMatter. Other people aren’t very fond of that. They’re correlated with colorblindness, which many people think is a good idea but actually is not very good. And so you can see that this isn’t a good thing. And the other thing that our research showed, which I think was the most interesting part for me, I hope it’s interesting for you, is that these things seem like stable boundaries, but actually they move around quite a bit. So you might apply these reasons some of the time, but not all the time. And what we find is that for some people they will apply this kind of reasoning when they’re being racist. So it’s the kind of of person who will say all these things about, let’s say, Black people and say, well, you know, I wasn’t trying to be malicious, so it doesn’t count. But if there is any point at which he feels like he’s being discriminated against, those reasons will no longer be interesting to him. He will no longer apply that reasoning. So his definition of boundaries will shift to be inclusive of a lot more things. And it’s not just racism. It applies to other things like sexism as well. But by doing that little shifting of boundaries, essentially you can claim victim status in conditions when you wouldn’t claim to be a perpetrator had you done the reverse. And that’s what makes it quite difficult to have healthy conversations about racism.
Krys Boyd [00:28:26] What is the difference, Keon, between implicit bias and unconscious bias?
Keon West [00:28:32] I think that’s a great question. Unconscious bias is the famous one, I would say is probably the easiest distinction. Implicit bias is the one that is spoken about a lot less except in academic circles. Implicit bias, though, is the one that the scientists came up with and decided to measure. So the most famous tests for what people call unconscious bias is actually called the implicit associations test, not the unconscious bias test. And implicit just means bias that we can detect. So bias that is there. Definitely there. But that people are either unwilling or unable to communicate about with you. So that would cover a lot of ground actually, that would go back to covering even the explicit racism and lying that we were talking about earlier, that people do that. But if you ask them, are you racist, would you be willing to to hire a black person or a Latino person or whatever else? And they say, yes, absolutely. But then they just lie when these people come in to interview. That would be covered by implicit racism as well, because it’s racism that they won’t communicate about, but that we can still detect unconscious racism. Unconscious bias is different. The assumption is that the person themselves that these people are entirely unaware of the fact that they’re doing anything discriminatory. And I think actually the jury isn’t entirely settled on whether it is impossible really to be aware or let me put it differently. People are people are not entirely convinced that it’s impossible to be aware of your own racism, either through observation or introspection, which means you can look at yourself and notice that you don’t have that many friends who are this color or that color. You don’t hire that many people who are this color. That color. You can observe your own behavior and you can think about how you feel when you interact with other people and whether there are people who are entirely unconscious about their racism is a bit of a question. I think there probably are people who are unconscious some of the time, but there’s definitely evidence that there are people who are at least partially conscious but are doing some interesting things that are either just lying, which some people do, or they’re doing that interesting set of pseudo rationality that we talked about. People have a lot of ways of not thinking of their behavior as racist even when it is, and that’s probably more of what’s happening than just people being completely unconscious.
Krys Boyd [00:30:57] If people are convinced that their own biases must be unconscious, are they somehow less motivated to try and eradicate those biases?
Keon West [00:31:07] The research says yes, and that is a real worry. There’s a really great study and they had people in one of two conditions in both conditions. They were told about someone who is definitely being biased, but in one of the conditions, they were told that this bias was unconscious. And in the other one, they were told that it was conscious. So they were rather they were primed to think about either unconscious bias or conscious bias when they were looking at the bias this person was was perpetuating. And when they were thinking about unconscious bias, they were less interested in the bias. They didn’t think the person should be held accountable to the same extent. They were less interested in any consequences. They were less interested in doing anything in response. And this is quite a serious problem because right now the unconscious bias narrative is incredibly popular. There are so many books, so many programs and unconscious bias. I’ve heard so many people say so many times, most bias is unconscious or almost all bias is unconscious today. And that’s just not true. Or there’s just there is no evidence that this is true. This is just the thing that people say. But the prevalence of this belief in unconscious bias does unfortunately, have the effect of making people less interested in handling the bias. And that’s a real problem.
Krys Boyd [00:32:26] Why is the phenomenon referred to as reverse racism primarily by white people more complicated than many white people think it is?
Keon West [00:32:36] Yes, I can understand if you’re a white person who’s unaware of a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about. So if you think the world is largely fair, if you think that when white people and Black people have exactly the same qualifications and experience, they will get exactly the same jobs. If you think when they do exactly the same work, they’re given exactly the same pay. If you think when a white person and let’s say a muslim person commit exactly the same crime, they’re perceived as equally guilty. If you think that’s what’s happening in the world, then I could see why you might think that that any system that then gives nonwhite people any kind of, let’s say, advantage is horribly unfair. So you’d see things like affirmative action policies as reverse racism and that now they’re disadvantaging white people. But that’s not how scientists tend to think about them. And or at least that’s not how scientists who work in the field tend to think about. I have no idea how biologists and physicists tend to think about it, but it’s not their field. But people who do work in the field don’t think of it that way. We tend to think of racism as the prejudice plus the power, and that in order to really make racism work, you need a whole system behind you so that when you decide to enact your prejudice, the the and the enacting of that prejudice flows smoothly. So if you were to decide you have the power today, you could just decide, I don’t like interviewing, I don’t like interviewing anyone who’s not white. And you probably wouldn’t be wise to say that out loud. But if you really wanted to do that, you could pull that off and you probably wouldn’t have to face too many consequences unless you got very silly and got very vocal about it. It wouldn’t work the same way if people of color tried to do the same because there’s just not as much in place to make that hard. And if you go back to the see the experiment, the way things work now is that for the same qualifications, white people are being hired more often and given more money and better treatment. And so if you say, well, I’m going to explicitly favor white people, you are playing into that system, you are strengthening it. If you say, I’m going to explicitly favor black people, even when people do this, it tends to barely even the system up. And in many cases it doesn’t even the system up. It tends to kind of move towards parity. And remember, parity is for people who have exactly the same qualifications. That’s the ideal non bias state and we almost never get there even with all the quote unquote reverse racism. And I think for that reason we have to consider the two sentiments quite differently. They just don’t accomplish the same thing.
Krys Boyd [00:35:12] As you know, we are seeing a major pullback on DEI efforts by companies and organizations and government agencies in the U.S. when DEI efforts include training for employees. Does it actually work to reduce racist outcomes and interactions in the workplace?
Keon West [00:35:32] I’d say unfortunately, it works inconsistently. And this is a problem. It’s a problem that I’ve noticed. It’s a problem that other people have noticed. I’m also, at the moment the editor of a Handbook on Diversity, Equity and inclusion. One of the editors, I should say the other editors include some really amazing social psychologists. Much bigger, much, much more, much more powerful than I am in the realm of social psychology and many of whom are American as well. So they are there on on that side of the Atlantic. And other people have written about these issues. They’ve written about the inconsistent effects and they’ve written about ways of solving these inconsistent effects. Unfortunately, at the moment, DEI work. Diversity, equity and inclusion work doesn’t have standards or protocols or best practices. It is quite disjointed and any disjointed practice would result in inconsistent effects. We would not accept such levels of disjointed practice from teaching or from medicine or from dentistry. We want to know what works and we want to make sure people are doing what works. And of course there’s research on what works is quite a lot. There’s reams of it and we know we know what works very well within academia, but this doesn’t normally leak outside of academia. It’s there’s a lot of there’s a lot of missed opportunities for communication. And sometimes that’s our fault because we as academics don’t communicate very well. Sometimes it’s other people’s fault because they’re not looking or they don’t know to look. But the end result is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it might make things worse. I think that people have to be aware of that and they should choose carefully what they’re doing. I don’t think any of that undermines the fact that work like this absolutely has to be done. We don’t live in a meritocracy now. A lot of people who are rolling back the diversity, equity and inclusion work say that they want a society where everyone is treated with equal dignity and respect. And that’s just not the society that anyone has. And if we want that society, we have to do work to get there.
Krys Boyd [00:37:39] Assuming that the people providing this training are typically people who really want to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. What are some of the ways that that training can go wrong and make things worse?
Keon West [00:37:54] I want to acknowledge that I would assume most people involved in that want to make the world a better place. I just think, as with anything else, good intentions are not the benchmark that we need to hit. We need accurate information. I have a number of friends and family members who would, for example, recommend remedies for illnesses that do not work. And I don’t think that they recommend these remedies because they dislike me and want me to be ill. I think they’re just not doctors. And so it’s great that you will recommend this lemon or that rum or whatever else to cure this illness. But these are not effective cures for these illnesses. These are just things that you believe. And your good intentions, while lovely, are probably just going to keep me sick. And that is also true in everything else, which is why we need standards and we need best practice. So they will come in and they have really good intentions, but they can make mistakes. And one of the mistakes I talk about in the book, which a lot of people make quite easily, is that they think they can make people less racist by saying things like, Don’t be racist, which intuitively sounds like it would make you less racist, but actually doesn’t really work for a number of reasons. Number one, people are already probably on that. They’re on that train anyway. Like if they’re here, they probably don’t want to be racist. But also if you tell people don’t do something, that they just do the thing. So if I tell you, don’t think about a white bear, what are you thinking about now?
Krys Boyd [00:39:23] White bear.
Keon West [00:39:25] You’re thinking about a white bear because that’s how humans work. And unfortunately, anyone who has children will tell you this The least effective way to get people to do something or to stop doing something is by saying, don’t do this thing. A much more effective thing would be to give them something to aim at instead to say, do this, accomplish this specific goal, become the most egalitarian company in the tri county area, or increase your the diversity of your board of directors to this or, you know, fix the the apparent gap in the sense of belonging in your community. A specific goal with a forward thinking positive intention is so much better than a don’t be racist intention. But if you don’t if you don’t know that, you’re likely to make that kind of mistake.
Krys Boyd [00:40:12] Well, this is really ironic. You cite research that demonstrates that this kind of training is more likely to have the desired effect when it is voluntary rather than mandatory. Now, I’m not saying that people who show up voluntarily don’t have some problems with, you know, unequal treatment of people based on race that don’t need correcting. But I have to imagine, like the most racist workers are never going to show their faces in voluntary bias training.
Keon West [00:40:39] Yes. So, again, that might be because of the kind of things people do in bias training. There are other things that work incredibly well, and I do talk about things in the book that work incredibly well, even on people who do not want them to work. One of the things I spent a lot of my early career working on is something called intergroup contact, which is essentially a fancy way of saying meeting and interacting with people who are not like you. So if you’re a white person and you just you think, I’m super racist and I don’t like Black people and I don’t want to like Black people, I’m not interested in liking Black people. You can’t make me like Black people. The truth is, actually we can if we just put you in a situation in which you will have to interact with black people all the time, even for people who do not wish to be less racist, this tends to make them less racist over time. It’s an incredibly effective intervention. I wouldn’t say it works 100% of the time, but I’d say it’d be really hard to find an intervention that’s more effective than that. It’s incredibly effective. Now, this is true for intergroup contact. It’s not true for other things. There are other things you can do to people that will have backlash effects that will make them angry, that will make them lash out and become resistant. But it’s knowing which things work really well and which things work really consistently and which things don’t, that can make a key difference in how we approach reducing bias, reducing racism and improving things like diversity and inclusion.
Krys Boyd [00:42:04] Can you talk about aversive racism?
Keon West [00:42:07] Yes, I hate that name. I know racism, but it was invented by a psychologist and myself, so I won’t complain about it. But the idea is that aversive racism is the kind of racism you get from people who are averse. This is why I don’t like the name. It’s a very you’re averse to Black people and awkward phrasing, and you have an aversion also to the idea of thinking of yourself as as racist. So it’s two kinds of aversion that are coinciding with each other. And one study that looked at this in jury decisions, which I thought was really interesting, I looked at what happened when people have evidence presented against them but isn’t very good. So, again, it was a familiar setup. The same evidence is presented against the defendant, the defendant, either white or black. Unsurprisingly, the white defendant is generally found to be less guilty than the black defendant. We know this happened, so this is a familiar pattern. But what happens when you change the evidence? You can make the evidence airtight. Amazing. Just rock solid evidence. And when you do that, then, yes, the white person is still found to be less guilty than the black person. But the difference is quite small or relatively small. What happens when you mess with the evidence? When you say the evidence is bad, it’s been tampered with. It’s not as good. Well, then the white person really drops in their perception of guilt. They’re not guilty at all. Really. They’re fine. They’re really fine. You know, the evidence is bad. But when you have the tampered evidence with the Black person, they actually get guilty or it’s an interaction because this is now an ambiguous situation in which you’re allowed to be racist. But also people react negatively because now they’re allowed to assume the black person was guilty and they’re kind of annoyed that this guilty black person is going to get off because of the tampered evidence. So they perceive them as even guilty. And that is an interesting finding. It shows that as long as everything’s perfect, if you cross your eyes and dot your Ts, you’ll treat white people and black people the same. And if there is any other excuse, then this goes really quite badly. And some research that I did with some students of mine, really lovely students of mine, found that this also works in other things like romantic relationships. So if you show people a picture of a woman with a man and the man is white or the man is black, and then you tell them that there a rumor about the man in the picture. So the boyfriend has a negati ve rumor about him. And you can stress this rumor is totally unfounded. The source of the rumor is not a good source of information. That rumor will not really affect the perception of the white boyfriend, but will drastically affect the perception of the black one. Wow. The Black. The Black one is seen as much worse because of this rumor. And the frightening conclusion from that is that if you’re not going to be white, then you had better be perfect. In fact, you’d better be perfect with no enemies. Because if you have even the dodgy est of evidence, that’s a very British term. But if you have even the digestive evidence against you, people will take it much more seriously. And even if there really isn’t any, people will still be attuned to that because it creates enough ambiguity for people to be negative. But to say to themselves, I’m not being negative because of racism, I’m being negative because of this evidence or that rumor or something else. And that’s the frightening part. You can’t you can’t permanently escape from imperfection. There is there is no way to do that. And in a world full of imperfect people, racism becomes really quite a horrible thing.
Krys Boyd [00:45:31] Keon West is a social psychologist at the University of London and author of the book “The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know but Probably Don’t Yet.” Keon, thank you so much for this conversation.
Keon West [00:45:43] Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Krys Boyd [00:45:45] Think is distributed by PRX the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and anywhere you like to get podcasts and our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
