March 31, 2015 • 37 mins
To "see no color" is to gloss over the deep-seated racial issues that exist today. Find out about how something so abstract - like unconscious racial biases - can have real-world implications in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
as promised, this episode is all about that's right, we
promised to bring you the Gordian Knot of race and
(00:24):
Gordian knot. We use that phrase because in Greek and
Roman mythology, the Gordian knot was an extremely complicated knot
tied by Gordius a king and Asia minor. And this
knot has come to symbolize a complicated and seemingly unsolvable problem.
But here's the crux here. If you want to solve it,
(00:44):
it requires novel and bold actions. And we're trotting out
this metaphor today because we're discussing the Gordian knot of
race as it exists here in the United States, Yes,
here in the the United States where we have a black president,
and as well discuss how I just framed the problem
is in itself a slippery slope of logic that leads
(01:07):
to questions like, well, how can racial inequity exist in
a country with a black president? Right? Because this is
this idea that, after all this outward evidence of racism,
isn't there anymore? Right that we feel like maybe racism
has receded into the shadows and something like the klu
klex Klan, they're not hanging out visibly anymore at least,
(01:31):
And that leads us to something even more pernicious, and
it's called racism without racist. Yeah. You know, you mentioned
the bold actions of solving the Gordian not earlier. Uh.
And of course the classic example of that is that
Alexander the Great shows up and just cuts it in
half and says, hey, I solved or not? And you
know that works in the Greek myth. But with with
(01:53):
with racism, you see some you see a number of
different false uh solving of the of the riddles, of
false unravelings of the not. For instance, the sort of
Alexander the Great move of cutting it in half is
it's sort of like saying, hey, well, look there are
no overt racist in my immediate sphere of influences, there
(02:14):
are no overt racist in my workplace. Um. And and
then in this leads to people saying such kind of
stupendous things as oh, we live in a post racist world,
a post race world, and of course, all of that's
uh completely false. Um Because even if you do not
have overt racism, if you don't have uh, you know,
(02:35):
hate groups in your immediate midst um with you know,
outright and open discrimination in your workplace, etcetera, you still
have the reality of unsuspecting people who see the world
through a racially biased lens. That's right, because you have
subtler forms of racism, and it persists within the cultural fabric,
(02:55):
as we'll discussed today. Sun Heel Milanovon is a professor
of economics that Harvard, and in an opinion piece for
The New York Times, he articulated this problem of racism
without racist quote. Ugly pockets of conscious bigotry remain in
this country, but most discrimination is more insidious. The urge
to find and call out the biggot is powerful, and
(03:17):
doing so is satisfying, but it is also a way
to let ourselves off the hook. Rather than point fingers outward,
we should look inward and examine how, despite best intentions,
we discriminate in ways big and small. So while there
may be good intentions behind this notion of c no color,
it actually does a disservice to trying to achieve equality. Yeah,
(03:39):
and I think that Stephen Colbert always did a great
job of that on the Colbert Report. Um, he had
the recurring bit where he would say, I don't see race.
People tell me I'm white because X, and then there
would be some sort of punchline that implied the the
the the innate racism of Stephen Colbert, the character um
because yet to say that you don't see race, that
(04:01):
race doesn't factor into your uh, into your daily life,
even into your perception of those around you, is ludicrous.
Uh Because when you when is we're going to discuss
in this episode, when you when you look below the surface,
there is there is a lot going on there. There's
there is a tremendous amount of a scientific research that
shows that that people do uh notice race, gender, wealth, weight, etcetera.
(04:26):
That we see all of these things, even if we
don't want to believe that we see these things, we
see them and we factor them into our judgments of others.
Right now. According to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we think both
fast and slow, fast meaning that we rely on patterns
that determine unconscious decision making that we call sometimes intuitive judgment,
(04:49):
and slow meaning the couple of factors that were actively
consciously weighing when we're making a decision. And within this
configuration there is something called implicit bias, and that plays
directly into fast thinking. Now, the National Center for State
Courts rights that, unlike explicit bias, which reflects the attitudes
(05:10):
or beliefs that one endorses at a conscious level, implicit
biases the bias and judgment and or behavior that results
from subtle cognitive processes, so implicit attitudes and implicit stereotypes,
and that they often operate at a level below conscious
awareness and without intentional control, And that these sort of
implicit biases they develop over time, and usually it's because
(05:35):
of some sort of social connection. This can be your
family and the sort of implicit bias that they may
have that you have assumed for yourself. It can be
your friends, It can be um, just people that you
even look up to and what their views are. Now,
you could also have it from an accumulation of personal experience,
and um, I'm talking about experiences that connect certain racial
(05:58):
groups with fear or other negative effects. The National Center
for State Courts talks about a study in which white
individuals who scored highly on measures of implicit racial bias
also reacted to images of unfamiliar black faces with stronger
amygdala activation. So we've talked about this before. The amygdala
(06:20):
is associated with emotional learning and fear conditioning. So you
see implicit bias played out in that way, those kind
of associations which played directly into brain processes. And then
you know that people share a common social understanding of stereotypes.
So again here is implicit bias kind of leaking into
the cultural fabric. So maybe you don't subscribe to that
(06:42):
particular stereotype, but the fact that it's in our culture
and it may be bandied about means that you may
be passively absorbing it into your own worldview. Yeah. I mean,
they're like symbols, which we've discussed at length before. The
symbol is out there, and the symbol is is informing
your mind, uh at times at a subconscious level. And
(07:04):
the same can be said of any of these, uh,
these various stereotypes for different racial groups. Again, patterns at
the subconscious level. And then there's something called implicit egoism,
which is basically that we tend to prefer people like ourselves.
However we define that and at the surface level that
tends to be how we look. So there there are
(07:25):
those different ways that implicit bias begins to seep into
our lives. Now, when it comes to measuring implicit bias,
we have a very handy and uh and proven tool
at our disposal. UM. It comes to us from University
of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald created the Implicit Association Test,
(07:46):
or the I A T and and he and a
few associates, Uh, they put it out there. They they
continue to develop it, and since they initially rolled it out,
the test has been used in more than one thousand
research studies are on the world and more than ten
million versions of the test have been completed. UM at
an Internet site that we're gonna have a call out
for later, UM with the I A T and and
(08:10):
I encourage everyone to take it. We we both took it,
and it's a very it's a very interesting experience. Uh.
And you'll see why as I explain it here. UM.
You have to categorize a sequence of words or images
such as a black face or a white face and
words uh as such as good bad by pressing one
(08:30):
of two labeled buttons. So, for instance, you might be
instructed to press the left button when you see a
black face or whenever a negative word appears. Okay, so, um,
you know, black face shows up, push that left button.
The word distrustful shows up, you push that left button,
then the right button. Then you press the right button
when you see a white face or a positive words
(08:50):
a white face trustworthy or some word of that nature.
But then they flip it around. Okay, so you have
to press one button for black positive and one for
white negative. Um. And then then and this is where
the interference effects come into play. Individuals who associate black
with bad will respond much more slowly when black and
(09:12):
good share the same response button. Now, UM, I don't
know if you have the same experience when you were
taking this online, but um, and again I was coming
into this after reading about how it works. But you
really do kind of feel your mind being pulled in
half on some of these where you're having to to
stop and think, all right, wait, which which side am
I am I associating this word with versus versus the
(09:34):
other side. Yeah, it's kind of like the Stroop tests
in that way, because it really, uh, it really takes
a lot of attention because you already have that pattern down,
and so they begin messing with the pattern and that's
where they find that space where they can kind of
ferret out your the delay time right, and also your
choices because sometimes you'll get it wrong and it will
(09:55):
tell you right, give me the wrong choice, um, And
it gives you a bit of insight there also gives
you about five ten questions about just your general feelings
about politics, right, and then later on more specifically about
how you feel about um, Europeans VERSUS African Americans and
(10:19):
so on and so forth. So some of it you
do have to try to bring a bit of awareness
to what your feelings are and you have to be
really honest about it too. Yeah, and didn't take long
at all to to fill it out. But it's amazing
how much depth it has, especially you know, if you're
just comparing it to you know, which X men are
you test on on on the internet? Um. Now, again,
(10:42):
since this was initially rolled out, UM, it's been used
a lot and the and the status really back up
its effectiveness. UM. In fact, when it comes to race,
seventy of those who took a version of the test
that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious or implicit preference
for white people compared to blacks, and you can compare
that to a twenty self reporting percentile. So the individuals
(11:04):
who who took this particular version of the test of
them are are are self reporting that they prefer the
white UH faces, that they have a preference for the
white faces, but seventy are actually proving that out based
on their delay times. So the reporting isn't adding up
to what their actual actions are, right, and this shows
how they're really cutting into with this test. They're really
(11:26):
cutting into that implicit bias, to that level of bias
that we're not aware of in our daily life, that's
just going on under the surface of our conscious cognition. Now,
a two thousand nine meta analysis headed by Anthony Greenwald,
who of course UH invented the thing UH, looked at
one twenty two published and unpublished reports of a hundred
(11:47):
and eighty four different research studies, and they found that
in socially sensitive areas, especially black white interracial behavior, the
test had significantly greater predictive value than self reports. Again,
that's seventy verse twenty do we mentioned overall? UH. This
meta analysis study looked at numerous uses of the I
A T including consumer preference black white, interracial behavior, personality differences,
(12:11):
clinical phenomena, alcohol and drug use, non racial inner group behavior,
gender and sexual orientation, close relationships, and political preferences. And
across all nine of these areas measures of the test
were useful in predicting social behavior. Now, it's worth noting
that in consumer and political preferences, both self reporting and
implicit measures effectively predicted the behavior, but self reports had
(12:36):
significantly greater predictive validity. So again, this test kind of
serves to to prove out how much of our decision
making and judgment UH is taking place below the surface.
I mean, the good news is that implicit by us
is malleable to some degree, and it's responsive to the
person's motives and environments. And we'll talk about that more later. Yeah,
(12:58):
let's talk about empathy, which which is of course is
one of the most important factors in untying and unraveling
that hideous knot. Yeah, and and also an important factor
in just being one of the cornerstones of humanity, right, Like,
that's part of the whole cooperative where we're all signing
into this agreement that we're going to try to help
and support each other as much as possible. Well, not
(13:19):
all of us have signed that, but you know, generally
that's the idea in trying to survive as a species.
So you would think that empathy would be hardwired in
all of us into some degree. It is, but it
may be that levels of empathy exist now. In a
two thousand and thirteen study called Racial Bias and Perceptions
(13:40):
of Others Pain by try Walter at All, this idea
of the racial empathy gap was explored. The researchers asked
participants to rate how much pain they would feel in
eighteen different scenarios. We're talking about anywhere from stubbing your
toe to getting shampoo in your eye. Yeah, the worst
(14:00):
is the worst. Then they rated how another person a
randomly assigned photo of an experimental target would feel in
the same situation, and sometimes the target was white, sometimes black,
and each experiment, the researchers found that white participants, black participants,
and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less
(14:24):
pain than whites, and the researchers were really interested in that,
particularly why why other black people might think that black
people experience pain less? And so um they did some
follow up studies trying to drill down a bit more
as to the cause here, and they found that the
(14:45):
more privilege assumed of the target, the more pain the
participants perceived for that person. So this is very closely
tied to race because we're talking about privilege and um,
you know, the so to economic status of that person,
and the reason for this misperception of pain, this idea
(15:08):
that black people could endure more pain or have less
pain was directly related to this assumption that that because
black people face more hardships, they wouldn't feel as much pain.
This was their conclusion. So basically, at the subconscious level,
the brain is saying that person has experienced more pain
(15:30):
in their life probably and therefore they're a little more
used to pain. They can they can handle it right.
And again they bring up the semantics here because they're
talking more about privileged people versus nonprivileged people. But they're
also seeing the racial bias here because the assumption with
the stereotype also is that the less privileged person would
(15:50):
be the black person. Gotcha. Now, additional studies have looked
into this situation, including a two thousand ten Italian study
from Seppens University in Rome. And this study took both
Italians and UH and and black Italians Italians of African descent,
and they watched short films depicting needles penetrating a person's
(16:13):
hand or a Q tip gently touching the same spot
UH and then they measured their their their their, their
empathetic response to that bit of footage. So the results
which line up with what we've been discussing here, people
watching the painful episode responded in a way that was
specific to the particular muscle they saw being stimulated. When
(16:34):
the film character was of the same race, but those
of a different race U, it didn't it didn't evoke
the same senseo motor response. Now, they conducted further studies
where the researchers tested individual's responses to pain inflicted on
models with violet hands. Now that I read this is
violent Wandes initially in the study, which really threw me off.
(16:55):
But violet colored hands. So they essentially are throwing in
a third non existent race of violet colored people here. Okay,
So in and in these cases, the participants empathetic response
was restored. So, in other words, since they have no
script for what violet colored people would uh would deal
with in terms of pain in their life. They just
(17:17):
revert to normal. They're like me, which is an interesting
and interesting fact to it. And then there's a two
thousand and fourteen University of Virginia psychology study that looked
at children. Specifically, they looked at American children between seven
and ten, and specifically they looked at the American children,
and they found that children between seven and ten reported
that black children feel less pain than white children. Uh
(17:41):
So here we see explicit bias emerging um in early childhood. Now,
there's zero evidence for racial bias in this study among
study participants at the age of five and younger, but
the bias began showing up among participants at the age
of seven and then became a prominent at the age
of ten. So this is this is an area that
(18:02):
the researchers are still exploring because obviously, as we've discussed,
we have the the explanation that well, it's based on
on what you you think the the personal history for
an individual of this race is and where they fall
in the socio economic spectrum. But it's uh, you know,
it's kind of a lot to expect that level of
of judgment going on with children that are seven to ten, right, So,
(18:24):
to what extent is that going on, or to what
extent is this tied to explicit egoism. It's a good question.
It's just it's a pretty stunning study because to know
that children that young would be developing those ideas and
expressing them, at least unconsciously or even overtly, is really disturbing.
(18:46):
And I think kind of parts the curtain of the
curtains of the brain to give us more insight into
how things are working under cover. Jason Silverstein and his
article on this very topic wrote, quote, the racial empathy
gap helps explain disparities and everything from pain management to
the criminal justice system. But the problem isn't just that
(19:08):
people disregard the pain of black people. It's somehow even worse.
The problem is that the pain isn't even felt. In
other words, empathy is not being engaged. And when empathy
isn't being engaged, then you're objectifying that person. And that's
that's where your your cornerstone of humanity is crumbling. Yeah, so,
(19:30):
I mean, I mean it plays into everything from you
see a story about some sort of misfortune happening to
an individual of another race on television and you're less
involved in the story. Uh. It plays into your just
your your ability to interact with everyone around you, like,
are you engaging with the same level of empathy, are
you on the same page, Are you giving the same
(19:50):
value to everyone in your surroundings. No? And that's what
was so interesting about that implicit association test. The i
A T that I took is that yeah, I uh
suspected that I would have some racial biases, but and
I came out as slight on the test. They don't say, hey,
you're a racist. They say that you have a slight
preference for European Americans. Um. But still, like, that's it's
(20:15):
unsettling to think that this may have been playing out
in different ways that I operate in the world. And
so that's why I think it's so important for people
to try to to drill down a bit into themselves
and figure out how it might be playing out, because
this would make the difference. You have searched for a
(20:36):
house before, yes, yes, a couple of times. Yeah, the
grueling work of trying to find some sort of housing,
and it turns out that again, the racial bias exists
here in the housing market. John Taylor, the president and
chief executive the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which helps improve
(20:56):
housing and underserved communities, told The New York Times in
an interview that polling shows that many Americans think financially
stable customers have the same opportunities to obtain good housing
regardless of race. Again, this is the c no color logic, right,
And this just isn't so, because there is a two
thousand and thirteen national study that was commissioned by the
(21:19):
Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and they found
some startling inequities. They had eight thousand tests. Here, they
had one white and one minority tester of the same
gender and age, posing as equally well qualified renters or buyers,
visiting the same housing provider or agent, and in more
(21:41):
than half of the test cases, both testers were shown
the same number of apartments or homes, but in cases
where one tester was shown more homes or apartments, the
white tester was usually favored, leading to a higher number
of units shown to whites. And overall, black prospective runners
were presented eleven percent fewer rentals than whites, Hispanics about
(22:03):
twelve percent fewer rentals, and Asians about ten percent fewer rentals,
and as perspective, buyers blacks were presented presented seventeen percent
fewer homes and Asians fewer homes. So UM, what's interesting
about this is that it plays out in individual scenarios,
and you can look at that information if you want.
(22:24):
You can see these individual scenarios where UM, once the uh,
the real estate agent found out that this person was
black or Hispanic, they would actually cancel the appointments. So
there were canceled appointments and so on and so forth.
But what I also found is that white testers were
more frequently offered lower rents, told that deposits and other
(22:44):
moving costs were negotiable or were quoted a lower price,
and taking into account fees, deposits and rents, apartments were
more likely to cost white slightly less in the first
year rental than blocks might pay. So it's not you,
it's it's it's an issue of access to housing, but
it's also an issue to the cost of housing as well.
(23:05):
And by the way, these tests were performed in twenty
eight metropolitan areas with no substantial difference across cities or regions.
And it's not just housing. There was a study by
Ian Iris and Peter Siegelman, and they found that more
than three hundred paired audits at new car dealerships revealed
that dealers quoted significantly lower prices to white males than
(23:28):
to black or female test buyers. And they were using
the identical scripted bargaining strategies for the same model of car. Okay,
So there was no variation in here because they were
trying to do the exact, uh replicated scenario over and
over again. The only difference, of course was gender and race.
And the black test buyers were offered initial prices roughly
(23:51):
seven hundred dollars higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
So you know, this sort of bells and whistles that
a dealer might throw in on on a car for you,
you know. And we, of course we also see implicit
bias come into play in the workplace and and and
in whether one gets a job or not, whether one
is paid an appropriate amount and amount that is on
(24:11):
the level with under individuals with the same skill set, expertise, etcetera. UM.
For instance, just to look at us, some quick census
stats from two thousand thirteen US Census Stats, UM, black
men were paid seventy of what white men were paid.
White women, by the way, we're paid seventy eight percent
of what white men were paid. And uh, African American
(24:32):
women were paid sixty percent of what white men were paid.
But that's once the paycheck is actually in play. When
it comes to even just getting a job and having
the chance to have a fair shot at a position, um,
the bias comes into play in some some really startling ways. Uh.
There are a couple of studies that look at this. One.
It's a two thousand three study titled are Emily and
(24:53):
Greg more Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment
on labor market discrimination. This is p in American Economic Review,
and it casts some interesting light on all of this. Now,
what they did. The researchers mailed out thousands of resumes
to employers with job openings and and measured which ones
were selected for callbacks for interviews. Some of these were
(25:14):
randomly tagged with stereotypically African American names, such as the
title suggests Jamal or Lakisha, and some with stereotypically white
names like like Emily or Greg. Okay, So what they
found was that the same resume was roughly fifty percent
more likely to result in a callback for an interview
(25:35):
if they had a white name. And then, in two
thousand nine, another study actually tried this out in person.
They sent in actual people for low wage job interviews,
identical resumes, identical interview training, and yet they found that
African American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs
(25:57):
at the at a rate as low as white applicant
with a criminal record. Now, in terms of discriminating against
African American names, we can also look to healthcare and
we see a study supporting this bias. At two national conferences,
when seven and twenty doctors were shown patient histories and
asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much
(26:21):
less likely to recommend cardiac catholization, which would be a
really helpful procedure to black patients, even when their medical
files were statistically identical to those of white patients. Now,
there's another study about racial bias in healthcare, and this one, though,
takes more of a generational approach, and it's interesting. Um,
(26:45):
there were two hundred two first year medical students at
Johns Hopkins who participated in implicit association tests. All right,
that was the test that we talked about earlier. Six
had an unconscious biased toward whites and fourteen percent innately
favored blacks. They also determined that of the students had
subconsciously favored upper class people. Again, there's that that privileged
(27:09):
bias there, while just three percent showed a preference for
those of a lower cap class. So here's the thing
about the first year med school students. They found that
the unconscious preferences of students did not affect how they
assessed or treated patients of various races and incomes depicted
in the scenarios. And this is good news because what
this is saying is that this generation may have been
(27:33):
exposed to educational curriculum focused on cultural competency and that
helped them to improve their awareness in the management of
their unconscious preferences. So while the racial bias existed, their
behavior stemming from it, uh, we're not affected. Which is
a bit of a bright spot in all of this information. Yeah,
(27:55):
I mean, that's that's definitely a bright spot. But yeah,
when you start breaking down like all the ways that
that that racial bias explicit and implicit um disadvantage an individual,
I mean, it's really staggering because we've talked about studies
that have they have looked into how it affects the
purchase of a vehicle, the renning of an apartment, acquiring
(28:18):
a job, but other studies have looked at the how
it negatively impacts a person of colors ability to get
a response from their legislator. Here back about research opportunities
at a university received fair treatment from a jury. Uh.
One study even found that a white hand holding an
iPod received more offers than a black hand holding the
(28:41):
same iPod on eBay. So yeah, it ends up impacting
like pretty much every area of your life, you know, healthcare, schools,
every and interaction comes with a potential handicap. All the
little things we in in life that we take for granted,
and as well as the big things like dealing with
employment and and UH and and and law enforcement. It's
(29:03):
it's staggering. Well. And the housing thing I thought was
particularly unsettling because not only are people given less choices,
they were sometimes shuttled into different communities and so you know,
the real estate agents or the real estate companies were
actually trying to get you know, the their black clients
(29:23):
to go into black neighborhoods, and so this begins to
affect what your choices are in schools as well. And
so you see that play out as you say, all
these these little um all these little choices combined with
the big choices that are essentially stacked against you, at
the end of the day, that stacked just becomes massive
and overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, I can't help but think
(29:45):
of things like this in Dungeons and Dragons terms. It's
like having a character sheet with all your stats and
then someone says, oh, just go ahead and knock you know,
five off of all your stats. You know, all your
your your your abilities, and your potential. That would be
grossly un air in any micro reality of a game,
but it's the kind of inequality that is everywhere in
(30:07):
the real world. Yeah, it's like that dollar a bill
analogy that we talked about in the school to prison pipeline.
You know, if you're if everybody's at the starting line initially,
and then you have to keep taking steps back because
you you're being handicapped, then you're not going to get
to that dollar bill as fast, right, and that dollar
bill represents your future. And moreover, you have to then shoulder.
(30:27):
If you're a person of color, you have to shoulder
those stereotypes that are put upon you. So there's also
this expectation um that's an albatross psychologically, and then it's
playing itself out in these real world scenarios. So it
would seem that to change this, to have a paradigm
change in racial biases, to try to get to a
(30:50):
place of equality, it would all hinge on empathy again,
the willingness to empathize. And nothing is a greater motivator
of empathy then someone trying to imagine what it would
be like for themselves. And of course we've got a
study for this, and of course it has to do
with a rubber hand. Again, I feel like the rubber
(31:12):
hand study just keeps popping up. Two thousand and thirteen
study conducted by the European Research Council and published in
Cognition used this rubber hand illusion to get participants in
the mindset of one another, and it's really effective. We've
talked about it before. It plays into something called pro
(31:33):
pre aceptive drift, and that's where your mind essentially adopts
the fake limb as its own and then reacts to
it when a fake hand is touched while at the
same time the experimenter is touching the participant's own hand,
which is hidden out of you. So that's how this
set up this illusion works now using Caucasian participants, the
researchers in this case tested the participants implicit attitudes towards
(31:57):
people with dark skin. Then they used a dark skinned
rubber hand to make them feel as if it was
their own hand. Afterward, they tested participants racial attitudes after
the experiment, and the results, well, the more intense the
participants illusion of owning the dark skin rubber hand, the
(32:17):
more positive their racial attitudes came or became afterward. And
it's because this illusion created an empathy overlap, creating less
differences in the mind of the non white participants, getting
them to that place of empathy that they needed to
be in. Yeah, I mean, so much of what we're
talking about here just brings me back to the the
(32:38):
admittedly tired and worn out analogy. Uh, don't judge a
book book by its cover, right, But yet, as we discussed,
that's that's what our brain does. Our brain has a
certain economy to it. It has to process all of
the stimuli at at a pretty fast rate. So it
ends up judging books on covers because that isn't sometimes
(32:59):
an effective way of figuring out what's inside of a book.
But uh, but if we can actually stop to consider
what's behind the book, to consider to at least flip
it over to read the back right, Uh, you have
a lot more empathy. You I'll have a lot more
understanding of what's going on, and you have even a
potentially a better ability to just distinguish. Um. We see
(33:19):
a lot of this in law enforcement. Um and and granted,
the whole it's the whole discussion of law enforcement and
race is an entire topic onto itself, but you do
see a lot of research coming out of that area.
Two thousand nine, Brown University and University of Victoria researchers
developed a new measurement system and protocol, which they call
it Effective Lexical Priming Scores or ALPS, to train Caucasian
(33:42):
subjects to recognize different African American faces. Um And it's uh,
it's has a certain amount of common with the I
that we we already discussed. It's a lot of looking
at faces and then teaching the individual to sort of
stop and look beyond Uh. Their initial judgment call of
that face, essentially, in other words, teaching people to notice
(34:03):
the difference between the beneath or behind the all too
easy classification of race, which is again, yes, looking beyond
the cover of that book, and it's as you said,
there there is a kind of pattern recognition that works
behind the scenes. Again, it's that fast, slow thinking that
we can't necessarily help because that's that's how our brains work.
(34:25):
But we can help it in slowing down and recognizing
that our racial biases exists, so that the next time
that we go through that process, we've tagged it and
there's there's an awareness there. Yeah, I feel like this
is a common theme that comes up in the in
the podcast. Is that so a mere awareness of how
you're thinking and why you're thinking is not, you know,
(34:47):
a cure all, but it's so often the first step
in addressing the situation. Just realizing how you're dealing with
the situation, how you're judging a situation, how you're processing
the information and it's coming into your brain. Well, especially
if you consider it as a behavior, because we can
change our behaviors, right, if you think that you're just
(35:08):
inherently going to be uh, racially biased. Then you're probably
not going to change your behaviors, right, because you think
that's a part of who you are. But if you
realize that some of it is just this uh background
noise that you've absorbed culturally, maybe within your family, then
you understand that to be a sort of behavioral loop
in the brain that can be changed. Um. We or
(35:30):
did everybody go and test your hidden bias? Uh? You
can do this at tolerance dot org. They're actually a
bunch of different kinds of biases that you can test
against gender, race, religion. It's fascinating, um, and it will
help you to come to a better understanding of how
(35:50):
you operate in the world. Yeah. Plus, just the process
of taking the test is just kind of it's a
little mind blowing. Um. It's an interesting experience. So I
recommend it even if you're just into tests. Yeah. On
a meta level, right, you can see it because you're like,
I see the pattern, I see you messing with my
brain and then they mess with your brain and you're
not quite sure if it happened. It's a it's nice
(36:11):
trickery and test taking. Also, um, check out the excellent
Radio and Love podcast episode called silver Dollar. It's really
fine storytelling. It is first person narrative about what it
is to be a subject of racial bias and how
one man dealt with it. So I can't recommend that enough.
(36:35):
It's great And if you want to check that out,
if you want to go to that tolerance dot orga
link that we mentioned. Both of those will be included
on the landing page for this podcast episode at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's also where you
will find all of our blog posts, all of our videos,
all of our stuff that we've done. That's the mothership
(36:56):
and want to reiterate to that. Again, we did not
cover law enforcement or the legal system when it comes
to racial bias. This is a topic unto itself. Um So,
if you have any thoughts on this topic or any
future ones that you would like to recommend to us,
you could do that by emailing us at below the Mind.
How staff works dot com for more ONNS and thousands
(37:21):
of other topics. Does it have stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
as promised, this episode is all about that's right, we
promised to bring you the Gordian Knot of race and
(00:24):
Gordian knot. We use that phrase because in Greek and
Roman mythology, the Gordian knot was an extremely complicated knot
tied by Gordius a king and Asia minor. And this
knot has come to symbolize a complicated and seemingly unsolvable problem.
But here's the crux here. If you want to solve it,
(00:44):
it requires novel and bold actions. And we're trotting out
this metaphor today because we're discussing the Gordian knot of
race as it exists here in the United States, Yes,
here in the the United States where we have a black president,
and as well discuss how I just framed the problem
is in itself a slippery slope of logic that leads
(01:07):
to questions like, well, how can racial inequity exist in
a country with a black president? Right? Because this is
this idea that, after all this outward evidence of racism,
isn't there anymore? Right that we feel like maybe racism
has receded into the shadows and something like the klu
klex Klan, they're not hanging out visibly anymore at least,
(01:31):
And that leads us to something even more pernicious, and
it's called racism without racist. Yeah. You know, you mentioned
the bold actions of solving the Gordian not earlier. Uh.
And of course the classic example of that is that
Alexander the Great shows up and just cuts it in
half and says, hey, I solved or not? And you
know that works in the Greek myth. But with with
(01:53):
with racism, you see some you see a number of
different false uh solving of the of the riddles, of
false unravelings of the not. For instance, the sort of
Alexander the Great move of cutting it in half is
it's sort of like saying, hey, well, look there are
no overt racist in my immediate sphere of influences, there
(02:14):
are no overt racist in my workplace. Um. And and
then in this leads to people saying such kind of
stupendous things as oh, we live in a post racist world,
a post race world, and of course, all of that's
uh completely false. Um Because even if you do not
have overt racism, if you don't have uh, you know,
(02:35):
hate groups in your immediate midst um with you know,
outright and open discrimination in your workplace, etcetera, you still
have the reality of unsuspecting people who see the world
through a racially biased lens. That's right, because you have
subtler forms of racism, and it persists within the cultural fabric,
(02:55):
as we'll discussed today. Sun Heel Milanovon is a professor
of economics that Harvard, and in an opinion piece for
The New York Times, he articulated this problem of racism
without racist quote. Ugly pockets of conscious bigotry remain in
this country, but most discrimination is more insidious. The urge
to find and call out the biggot is powerful, and
(03:17):
doing so is satisfying, but it is also a way
to let ourselves off the hook. Rather than point fingers outward,
we should look inward and examine how, despite best intentions,
we discriminate in ways big and small. So while there
may be good intentions behind this notion of c no color,
it actually does a disservice to trying to achieve equality. Yeah,
(03:39):
and I think that Stephen Colbert always did a great
job of that on the Colbert Report. Um, he had
the recurring bit where he would say, I don't see race.
People tell me I'm white because X, and then there
would be some sort of punchline that implied the the
the the innate racism of Stephen Colbert, the character um
because yet to say that you don't see race, that
(04:01):
race doesn't factor into your uh, into your daily life,
even into your perception of those around you, is ludicrous.
Uh Because when you when is we're going to discuss
in this episode, when you when you look below the surface,
there is there is a lot going on there. There's
there is a tremendous amount of a scientific research that
shows that that people do uh notice race, gender, wealth, weight, etcetera.
(04:26):
That we see all of these things, even if we
don't want to believe that we see these things, we
see them and we factor them into our judgments of others.
Right now. According to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we think both
fast and slow, fast meaning that we rely on patterns
that determine unconscious decision making that we call sometimes intuitive judgment,
(04:49):
and slow meaning the couple of factors that were actively
consciously weighing when we're making a decision. And within this
configuration there is something called implicit bias, and that plays
directly into fast thinking. Now, the National Center for State
Courts rights that, unlike explicit bias, which reflects the attitudes
(05:10):
or beliefs that one endorses at a conscious level, implicit
biases the bias and judgment and or behavior that results
from subtle cognitive processes, so implicit attitudes and implicit stereotypes,
and that they often operate at a level below conscious
awareness and without intentional control, And that these sort of
implicit biases they develop over time, and usually it's because
(05:35):
of some sort of social connection. This can be your
family and the sort of implicit bias that they may
have that you have assumed for yourself. It can be
your friends, It can be um, just people that you
even look up to and what their views are. Now,
you could also have it from an accumulation of personal experience,
and um, I'm talking about experiences that connect certain racial
(05:58):
groups with fear or other negative effects. The National Center
for State Courts talks about a study in which white
individuals who scored highly on measures of implicit racial bias
also reacted to images of unfamiliar black faces with stronger
amygdala activation. So we've talked about this before. The amygdala
(06:20):
is associated with emotional learning and fear conditioning. So you
see implicit bias played out in that way, those kind
of associations which played directly into brain processes. And then
you know that people share a common social understanding of stereotypes.
So again here is implicit bias kind of leaking into
the cultural fabric. So maybe you don't subscribe to that
(06:42):
particular stereotype, but the fact that it's in our culture
and it may be bandied about means that you may
be passively absorbing it into your own worldview. Yeah. I mean,
they're like symbols, which we've discussed at length before. The
symbol is out there, and the symbol is is informing
your mind, uh at times at a subconscious level. And
(07:04):
the same can be said of any of these, uh,
these various stereotypes for different racial groups. Again, patterns at
the subconscious level. And then there's something called implicit egoism,
which is basically that we tend to prefer people like ourselves.
However we define that and at the surface level that
tends to be how we look. So there there are
(07:25):
those different ways that implicit bias begins to seep into
our lives. Now, when it comes to measuring implicit bias,
we have a very handy and uh and proven tool
at our disposal. UM. It comes to us from University
of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald created the Implicit Association Test,
(07:46):
or the I A T and and he and a
few associates, Uh, they put it out there. They they
continue to develop it, and since they initially rolled it out,
the test has been used in more than one thousand
research studies are on the world and more than ten
million versions of the test have been completed. UM at
an Internet site that we're gonna have a call out
for later, UM with the I A T and and
(08:10):
I encourage everyone to take it. We we both took it,
and it's a very it's a very interesting experience. Uh.
And you'll see why as I explain it here. UM.
You have to categorize a sequence of words or images
such as a black face or a white face and
words uh as such as good bad by pressing one
(08:30):
of two labeled buttons. So, for instance, you might be
instructed to press the left button when you see a
black face or whenever a negative word appears. Okay, so, um,
you know, black face shows up, push that left button.
The word distrustful shows up, you push that left button,
then the right button. Then you press the right button
when you see a white face or a positive words
(08:50):
a white face trustworthy or some word of that nature.
But then they flip it around. Okay, so you have
to press one button for black positive and one for
white negative. Um. And then then and this is where
the interference effects come into play. Individuals who associate black
with bad will respond much more slowly when black and
(09:12):
good share the same response button. Now, UM, I don't
know if you have the same experience when you were
taking this online, but um, and again I was coming
into this after reading about how it works. But you
really do kind of feel your mind being pulled in
half on some of these where you're having to to
stop and think, all right, wait, which which side am
I am I associating this word with versus versus the
(09:34):
other side. Yeah, it's kind of like the Stroop tests
in that way, because it really, uh, it really takes
a lot of attention because you already have that pattern down,
and so they begin messing with the pattern and that's
where they find that space where they can kind of
ferret out your the delay time right, and also your
choices because sometimes you'll get it wrong and it will
(09:55):
tell you right, give me the wrong choice, um, And
it gives you a bit of insight there also gives
you about five ten questions about just your general feelings
about politics, right, and then later on more specifically about
how you feel about um, Europeans VERSUS African Americans and
(10:19):
so on and so forth. So some of it you
do have to try to bring a bit of awareness
to what your feelings are and you have to be
really honest about it too. Yeah, and didn't take long
at all to to fill it out. But it's amazing
how much depth it has, especially you know, if you're
just comparing it to you know, which X men are
you test on on on the internet? Um. Now, again,
(10:42):
since this was initially rolled out, UM, it's been used
a lot and the and the status really back up
its effectiveness. UM. In fact, when it comes to race,
seventy of those who took a version of the test
that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious or implicit preference
for white people compared to blacks, and you can compare
that to a twenty self reporting percentile. So the individuals
(11:04):
who who took this particular version of the test of
them are are are self reporting that they prefer the
white UH faces, that they have a preference for the
white faces, but seventy are actually proving that out based
on their delay times. So the reporting isn't adding up
to what their actual actions are, right, and this shows
how they're really cutting into with this test. They're really
(11:26):
cutting into that implicit bias, to that level of bias
that we're not aware of in our daily life, that's
just going on under the surface of our conscious cognition. Now,
a two thousand nine meta analysis headed by Anthony Greenwald,
who of course UH invented the thing UH, looked at
one twenty two published and unpublished reports of a hundred
(11:47):
and eighty four different research studies, and they found that
in socially sensitive areas, especially black white interracial behavior, the
test had significantly greater predictive value than self reports. Again,
that's seventy verse twenty do we mentioned overall? UH. This
meta analysis study looked at numerous uses of the I
A T including consumer preference black white, interracial behavior, personality differences,
(12:11):
clinical phenomena, alcohol and drug use, non racial inner group behavior,
gender and sexual orientation, close relationships, and political preferences. And
across all nine of these areas measures of the test
were useful in predicting social behavior. Now, it's worth noting
that in consumer and political preferences, both self reporting and
implicit measures effectively predicted the behavior, but self reports had
(12:36):
significantly greater predictive validity. So again, this test kind of
serves to to prove out how much of our decision
making and judgment UH is taking place below the surface.
I mean, the good news is that implicit by us
is malleable to some degree, and it's responsive to the
person's motives and environments. And we'll talk about that more later. Yeah,
(12:58):
let's talk about empathy, which which is of course is
one of the most important factors in untying and unraveling
that hideous knot. Yeah, and and also an important factor
in just being one of the cornerstones of humanity, right, Like,
that's part of the whole cooperative where we're all signing
into this agreement that we're going to try to help
and support each other as much as possible. Well, not
(13:19):
all of us have signed that, but you know, generally
that's the idea in trying to survive as a species.
So you would think that empathy would be hardwired in
all of us into some degree. It is, but it
may be that levels of empathy exist now. In a
two thousand and thirteen study called Racial Bias and Perceptions
(13:40):
of Others Pain by try Walter at All, this idea
of the racial empathy gap was explored. The researchers asked
participants to rate how much pain they would feel in
eighteen different scenarios. We're talking about anywhere from stubbing your
toe to getting shampoo in your eye. Yeah, the worst
(14:00):
is the worst. Then they rated how another person a
randomly assigned photo of an experimental target would feel in
the same situation, and sometimes the target was white, sometimes black,
and each experiment, the researchers found that white participants, black participants,
and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less
(14:24):
pain than whites, and the researchers were really interested in that,
particularly why why other black people might think that black
people experience pain less? And so um they did some
follow up studies trying to drill down a bit more
as to the cause here, and they found that the
(14:45):
more privilege assumed of the target, the more pain the
participants perceived for that person. So this is very closely
tied to race because we're talking about privilege and um,
you know, the so to economic status of that person,
and the reason for this misperception of pain, this idea
(15:08):
that black people could endure more pain or have less
pain was directly related to this assumption that that because
black people face more hardships, they wouldn't feel as much pain.
This was their conclusion. So basically, at the subconscious level,
the brain is saying that person has experienced more pain
(15:30):
in their life probably and therefore they're a little more
used to pain. They can they can handle it right.
And again they bring up the semantics here because they're
talking more about privileged people versus nonprivileged people. But they're
also seeing the racial bias here because the assumption with
the stereotype also is that the less privileged person would
(15:50):
be the black person. Gotcha. Now, additional studies have looked
into this situation, including a two thousand ten Italian study
from Seppens University in Rome. And this study took both
Italians and UH and and black Italians Italians of African descent,
and they watched short films depicting needles penetrating a person's
(16:13):
hand or a Q tip gently touching the same spot
UH and then they measured their their their their, their
empathetic response to that bit of footage. So the results
which line up with what we've been discussing here, people
watching the painful episode responded in a way that was
specific to the particular muscle they saw being stimulated. When
(16:34):
the film character was of the same race, but those
of a different race U, it didn't it didn't evoke
the same senseo motor response. Now, they conducted further studies
where the researchers tested individual's responses to pain inflicted on
models with violet hands. Now that I read this is
violent Wandes initially in the study, which really threw me off.
(16:55):
But violet colored hands. So they essentially are throwing in
a third non existent race of violet colored people here. Okay,
So in and in these cases, the participants empathetic response
was restored. So, in other words, since they have no
script for what violet colored people would uh would deal
with in terms of pain in their life. They just
(17:17):
revert to normal. They're like me, which is an interesting
and interesting fact to it. And then there's a two
thousand and fourteen University of Virginia psychology study that looked
at children. Specifically, they looked at American children between seven
and ten, and specifically they looked at the American children,
and they found that children between seven and ten reported
that black children feel less pain than white children. Uh
(17:41):
So here we see explicit bias emerging um in early childhood. Now,
there's zero evidence for racial bias in this study among
study participants at the age of five and younger, but
the bias began showing up among participants at the age
of seven and then became a prominent at the age
of ten. So this is this is an area that
(18:02):
the researchers are still exploring because obviously, as we've discussed,
we have the the explanation that well, it's based on
on what you you think the the personal history for
an individual of this race is and where they fall
in the socio economic spectrum. But it's uh, you know,
it's kind of a lot to expect that level of
of judgment going on with children that are seven to ten, right, So,
(18:24):
to what extent is that going on, or to what
extent is this tied to explicit egoism. It's a good question.
It's just it's a pretty stunning study because to know
that children that young would be developing those ideas and
expressing them, at least unconsciously or even overtly, is really disturbing.
(18:46):
And I think kind of parts the curtain of the
curtains of the brain to give us more insight into
how things are working under cover. Jason Silverstein and his
article on this very topic wrote, quote, the racial empathy
gap helps explain disparities and everything from pain management to
the criminal justice system. But the problem isn't just that
(19:08):
people disregard the pain of black people. It's somehow even worse.
The problem is that the pain isn't even felt. In
other words, empathy is not being engaged. And when empathy
isn't being engaged, then you're objectifying that person. And that's
that's where your your cornerstone of humanity is crumbling. Yeah, so,
(19:30):
I mean, I mean it plays into everything from you
see a story about some sort of misfortune happening to
an individual of another race on television and you're less
involved in the story. Uh. It plays into your just
your your ability to interact with everyone around you, like,
are you engaging with the same level of empathy, are
you on the same page, Are you giving the same
(19:50):
value to everyone in your surroundings. No? And that's what
was so interesting about that implicit association test. The i
A T that I took is that yeah, I uh
suspected that I would have some racial biases, but and
I came out as slight on the test. They don't say, hey,
you're a racist. They say that you have a slight
preference for European Americans. Um. But still, like, that's it's
(20:15):
unsettling to think that this may have been playing out
in different ways that I operate in the world. And
so that's why I think it's so important for people
to try to to drill down a bit into themselves
and figure out how it might be playing out, because
this would make the difference. You have searched for a
(20:36):
house before, yes, yes, a couple of times. Yeah, the
grueling work of trying to find some sort of housing,
and it turns out that again, the racial bias exists
here in the housing market. John Taylor, the president and
chief executive the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which helps improve
(20:56):
housing and underserved communities, told The New York Times in
an interview that polling shows that many Americans think financially
stable customers have the same opportunities to obtain good housing
regardless of race. Again, this is the c no color logic, right,
And this just isn't so, because there is a two
thousand and thirteen national study that was commissioned by the
(21:19):
Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and they found
some startling inequities. They had eight thousand tests. Here, they
had one white and one minority tester of the same
gender and age, posing as equally well qualified renters or buyers,
visiting the same housing provider or agent, and in more
(21:41):
than half of the test cases, both testers were shown
the same number of apartments or homes, but in cases
where one tester was shown more homes or apartments, the
white tester was usually favored, leading to a higher number
of units shown to whites. And overall, black prospective runners
were presented eleven percent fewer rentals than whites, Hispanics about
(22:03):
twelve percent fewer rentals, and Asians about ten percent fewer rentals,
and as perspective, buyers blacks were presented presented seventeen percent
fewer homes and Asians fewer homes. So UM, what's interesting
about this is that it plays out in individual scenarios,
and you can look at that information if you want.
(22:24):
You can see these individual scenarios where UM, once the uh,
the real estate agent found out that this person was
black or Hispanic, they would actually cancel the appointments. So
there were canceled appointments and so on and so forth.
But what I also found is that white testers were
more frequently offered lower rents, told that deposits and other
(22:44):
moving costs were negotiable or were quoted a lower price,
and taking into account fees, deposits and rents, apartments were
more likely to cost white slightly less in the first
year rental than blocks might pay. So it's not you,
it's it's it's an issue of access to housing, but
it's also an issue to the cost of housing as well.
(23:05):
And by the way, these tests were performed in twenty
eight metropolitan areas with no substantial difference across cities or regions.
And it's not just housing. There was a study by
Ian Iris and Peter Siegelman, and they found that more
than three hundred paired audits at new car dealerships revealed
that dealers quoted significantly lower prices to white males than
(23:28):
to black or female test buyers. And they were using
the identical scripted bargaining strategies for the same model of car. Okay,
So there was no variation in here because they were
trying to do the exact, uh replicated scenario over and
over again. The only difference, of course was gender and race.
And the black test buyers were offered initial prices roughly
(23:51):
seven hundred dollars higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
So you know, this sort of bells and whistles that
a dealer might throw in on on a car for you,
you know. And we, of course we also see implicit
bias come into play in the workplace and and and
in whether one gets a job or not, whether one
is paid an appropriate amount and amount that is on
(24:11):
the level with under individuals with the same skill set, expertise, etcetera. UM.
For instance, just to look at us, some quick census
stats from two thousand thirteen US Census Stats, UM, black
men were paid seventy of what white men were paid.
White women, by the way, we're paid seventy eight percent
of what white men were paid. And uh, African American
(24:32):
women were paid sixty percent of what white men were paid.
But that's once the paycheck is actually in play. When
it comes to even just getting a job and having
the chance to have a fair shot at a position, um,
the bias comes into play in some some really startling ways. Uh.
There are a couple of studies that look at this. One.
It's a two thousand three study titled are Emily and
(24:53):
Greg more Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment
on labor market discrimination. This is p in American Economic Review,
and it casts some interesting light on all of this. Now,
what they did. The researchers mailed out thousands of resumes
to employers with job openings and and measured which ones
were selected for callbacks for interviews. Some of these were
(25:14):
randomly tagged with stereotypically African American names, such as the
title suggests Jamal or Lakisha, and some with stereotypically white
names like like Emily or Greg. Okay, So what they
found was that the same resume was roughly fifty percent
more likely to result in a callback for an interview
(25:35):
if they had a white name. And then, in two
thousand nine, another study actually tried this out in person.
They sent in actual people for low wage job interviews,
identical resumes, identical interview training, and yet they found that
African American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs
(25:57):
at the at a rate as low as white applicant
with a criminal record. Now, in terms of discriminating against
African American names, we can also look to healthcare and
we see a study supporting this bias. At two national conferences,
when seven and twenty doctors were shown patient histories and
asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much
(26:21):
less likely to recommend cardiac catholization, which would be a
really helpful procedure to black patients, even when their medical
files were statistically identical to those of white patients. Now,
there's another study about racial bias in healthcare, and this one, though,
takes more of a generational approach, and it's interesting. Um,
(26:45):
there were two hundred two first year medical students at
Johns Hopkins who participated in implicit association tests. All right,
that was the test that we talked about earlier. Six
had an unconscious biased toward whites and fourteen percent innately
favored blacks. They also determined that of the students had
subconsciously favored upper class people. Again, there's that that privileged
(27:09):
bias there, while just three percent showed a preference for
those of a lower cap class. So here's the thing
about the first year med school students. They found that
the unconscious preferences of students did not affect how they
assessed or treated patients of various races and incomes depicted
in the scenarios. And this is good news because what
this is saying is that this generation may have been
(27:33):
exposed to educational curriculum focused on cultural competency and that
helped them to improve their awareness in the management of
their unconscious preferences. So while the racial bias existed, their
behavior stemming from it, uh, we're not affected. Which is
a bit of a bright spot in all of this information. Yeah,
(27:55):
I mean, that's that's definitely a bright spot. But yeah,
when you start breaking down like all the ways that
that that racial bias explicit and implicit um disadvantage an individual,
I mean, it's really staggering because we've talked about studies
that have they have looked into how it affects the
purchase of a vehicle, the renning of an apartment, acquiring
(28:18):
a job, but other studies have looked at the how
it negatively impacts a person of colors ability to get
a response from their legislator. Here back about research opportunities
at a university received fair treatment from a jury. Uh.
One study even found that a white hand holding an
iPod received more offers than a black hand holding the
(28:41):
same iPod on eBay. So yeah, it ends up impacting
like pretty much every area of your life, you know, healthcare, schools,
every and interaction comes with a potential handicap. All the
little things we in in life that we take for granted,
and as well as the big things like dealing with
employment and and UH and and and law enforcement. It's
(29:03):
it's staggering. Well. And the housing thing I thought was
particularly unsettling because not only are people given less choices,
they were sometimes shuttled into different communities and so you know,
the real estate agents or the real estate companies were
actually trying to get you know, the their black clients
(29:23):
to go into black neighborhoods, and so this begins to
affect what your choices are in schools as well. And
so you see that play out as you say, all
these these little um all these little choices combined with
the big choices that are essentially stacked against you, at
the end of the day, that stacked just becomes massive
and overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, I can't help but think
(29:45):
of things like this in Dungeons and Dragons terms. It's
like having a character sheet with all your stats and
then someone says, oh, just go ahead and knock you know,
five off of all your stats. You know, all your
your your your abilities, and your potential. That would be
grossly un air in any micro reality of a game,
but it's the kind of inequality that is everywhere in
(30:07):
the real world. Yeah, it's like that dollar a bill
analogy that we talked about in the school to prison pipeline.
You know, if you're if everybody's at the starting line initially,
and then you have to keep taking steps back because
you you're being handicapped, then you're not going to get
to that dollar bill as fast, right, and that dollar
bill represents your future. And moreover, you have to then shoulder.
(30:27):
If you're a person of color, you have to shoulder
those stereotypes that are put upon you. So there's also
this expectation um that's an albatross psychologically, and then it's
playing itself out in these real world scenarios. So it
would seem that to change this, to have a paradigm
change in racial biases, to try to get to a
(30:50):
place of equality, it would all hinge on empathy again,
the willingness to empathize. And nothing is a greater motivator
of empathy then someone trying to imagine what it would
be like for themselves. And of course we've got a
study for this, and of course it has to do
with a rubber hand. Again, I feel like the rubber
(31:12):
hand study just keeps popping up. Two thousand and thirteen
study conducted by the European Research Council and published in
Cognition used this rubber hand illusion to get participants in
the mindset of one another, and it's really effective. We've
talked about it before. It plays into something called pro
(31:33):
pre aceptive drift, and that's where your mind essentially adopts
the fake limb as its own and then reacts to
it when a fake hand is touched while at the
same time the experimenter is touching the participant's own hand,
which is hidden out of you. So that's how this
set up this illusion works now using Caucasian participants, the
researchers in this case tested the participants implicit attitudes towards
(31:57):
people with dark skin. Then they used a dark skinned
rubber hand to make them feel as if it was
their own hand. Afterward, they tested participants racial attitudes after
the experiment, and the results, well, the more intense the
participants illusion of owning the dark skin rubber hand, the
(32:17):
more positive their racial attitudes came or became afterward. And
it's because this illusion created an empathy overlap, creating less
differences in the mind of the non white participants, getting
them to that place of empathy that they needed to
be in. Yeah, I mean, so much of what we're
talking about here just brings me back to the the
(32:38):
admittedly tired and worn out analogy. Uh, don't judge a
book book by its cover, right, But yet, as we discussed,
that's that's what our brain does. Our brain has a
certain economy to it. It has to process all of
the stimuli at at a pretty fast rate. So it
ends up judging books on covers because that isn't sometimes
(32:59):
an effective way of figuring out what's inside of a book.
But uh, but if we can actually stop to consider
what's behind the book, to consider to at least flip
it over to read the back right, Uh, you have
a lot more empathy. You I'll have a lot more
understanding of what's going on, and you have even a
potentially a better ability to just distinguish. Um. We see
(33:19):
a lot of this in law enforcement. Um and and granted,
the whole it's the whole discussion of law enforcement and
race is an entire topic onto itself, but you do
see a lot of research coming out of that area.
Two thousand nine, Brown University and University of Victoria researchers
developed a new measurement system and protocol, which they call
it Effective Lexical Priming Scores or ALPS, to train Caucasian
(33:42):
subjects to recognize different African American faces. Um And it's uh,
it's has a certain amount of common with the I
that we we already discussed. It's a lot of looking
at faces and then teaching the individual to sort of
stop and look beyond Uh. Their initial judgment call of
that face, essentially, in other words, teaching people to notice
(34:03):
the difference between the beneath or behind the all too
easy classification of race, which is again, yes, looking beyond
the cover of that book, and it's as you said,
there there is a kind of pattern recognition that works
behind the scenes. Again, it's that fast, slow thinking that
we can't necessarily help because that's that's how our brains work.
(34:25):
But we can help it in slowing down and recognizing
that our racial biases exists, so that the next time
that we go through that process, we've tagged it and
there's there's an awareness there. Yeah, I feel like this
is a common theme that comes up in the in
the podcast. Is that so a mere awareness of how
you're thinking and why you're thinking is not, you know,
(34:47):
a cure all, but it's so often the first step
in addressing the situation. Just realizing how you're dealing with
the situation, how you're judging a situation, how you're processing
the information and it's coming into your brain. Well, especially
if you consider it as a behavior, because we can
change our behaviors, right, if you think that you're just
(35:08):
inherently going to be uh, racially biased. Then you're probably
not going to change your behaviors, right, because you think
that's a part of who you are. But if you
realize that some of it is just this uh background
noise that you've absorbed culturally, maybe within your family, then
you understand that to be a sort of behavioral loop
in the brain that can be changed. Um. We or
(35:30):
did everybody go and test your hidden bias? Uh? You
can do this at tolerance dot org. They're actually a
bunch of different kinds of biases that you can test
against gender, race, religion. It's fascinating, um, and it will
help you to come to a better understanding of how
(35:50):
you operate in the world. Yeah. Plus, just the process
of taking the test is just kind of it's a
little mind blowing. Um. It's an interesting experience. So I
recommend it even if you're just into tests. Yeah. On
a meta level, right, you can see it because you're like,
I see the pattern, I see you messing with my
brain and then they mess with your brain and you're
not quite sure if it happened. It's a it's nice
(36:11):
trickery and test taking. Also, um, check out the excellent
Radio and Love podcast episode called silver Dollar. It's really
fine storytelling. It is first person narrative about what it
is to be a subject of racial bias and how
one man dealt with it. So I can't recommend that enough.
(36:35):
It's great And if you want to check that out,
if you want to go to that tolerance dot orga
link that we mentioned. Both of those will be included
on the landing page for this podcast episode at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's also where you
will find all of our blog posts, all of our videos,
all of our stuff that we've done. That's the mothership
(36:56):
and want to reiterate to that. Again, we did not
cover law enforcement or the legal system when it comes
to racial bias. This is a topic unto itself. Um So,
if you have any thoughts on this topic or any
future ones that you would like to recommend to us,
you could do that by emailing us at below the Mind.
How staff works dot com for more ONNS and thousands
(37:21):
of other topics. Does it have stuff works dot com
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