RETURN TO THE WORLD SCIENCE HOME PAGE

Newly studied form of racism seems incurable

Many people are willing to give up blatant racism. But researchers say a less obvious variety of it seems so ingrained that people can’t renounce it.

In the face of societal pressures against racist beliefs, the studies suggest, racism has not gone. Instead, a subtler variety of it has come to the fore. Whereas in times past, many people discriminated against Blacks simply for being “black,” now some reserve their negative feelings only for those with facial features considered most “typical” of Blacks. 

In other words, they treat Blacks the same as Whites on average—but treat people of any race worse if they have more “Afrocentric” features, such as darker skin, wide noses and full lips.

And this new form of bias seems more insidious than traditional forms, because the best-intentioned people seem helpless to purge themselves of it.

“We believe that this is not a conscious, deliberate process that, once informed about, people can easily avoid,” wrote Irene V. Blair, the lead researcher in the studies, in a recent email.

Blair and her colleagues have found that this form of prejudice may infect many facets of society, including courtroom sentencing.

Blair, of the University of Colorado, and her colleagues studied records of 216 Florida prison inmates. First, the researchers asked college students to rate each inmate’s photograph based on the degree to which the man’s face had features typical of African Americans. Black and White inmates with equivalent criminal histories received roughly equivalent sentences, they found; yet within each race, inmates with more Afrocentric features received harsher sentences than those with less Afrocentric features.

A paper on the study appeared in the October issue of the research journal Psychological Science.

Florida has spent 20 years pushing for race-neutral sentencing, the authors wrote, and the findings show the effort has had good results. But getting rid of the discrimination based on facial features might be harder. “This form of stereotyping appears to occur without people’s awareness and outside their immediate control,” the authors wrote. “We suspect that...  judges were unaware of the fact that Afrocentric features might be influencing their decisions and were not effectively controlling the impact of such features.”

Another study by Blair’s team backs this up, she wrote. This study examined racial attitudes in college students, most of whom are generally aware and concerned about racism and keep it under control in themselves, Blair said.

But these participants “appeared to be largely unaware of using Afrocentric features to make stereotypic inferences, and they proved unable to avoid doing so,” said a paper describing the findings. This occurred “even when they were given explicit information about the process and they demonstrated that they could easily and reliably identify the relevant features.” The paper appeared in the December 2004 issue of the scientific journal Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This newly studied of racism might not really be new, Blair said. “There are many historical and anecdotal accounts of skin-tone bias among blacks at least since slavery was common in this country,” she wrote in another email. “ What has changed is that people are working to reduce race-based bias, and so that form of bias is less prevalent and less virulent than in the past. Similar efforts and changes for feature-based bias have not occurred.”

“I don’t really have good strategies to offer at this time,” she wrote. “Knowledge is not sufficient, but I believe it is a necessary step to changing this type of stereotyping. …  Ultimately, I think that we have to change the underlying conditions that produced the biases in the first place.  As long as there is racism, I think there will be biases based on Afrocentric features.”

—EJL

* * *