Scientists at Work

"The brain is a wonderful organ to justify conclusions that the heart already reaches."
-- Zackary Dov Berger, MD PhD

Stanford Professor Jennifer L. Eberhardt
recently won a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant"
for her work on unconscious racial coding.

We can only put so much trust in our brains. For many reasons. One reason is that when we don't know something for sure, and we wonder about it, our brain just goes ahead and makes something up. And we say, "Well, brain, that sounds pretty reasonable, I guess. Let's just go with it!" And our brains have come up with creative explanations for all kinds of phenomena. We tend to accept the conclusions of our brains, and then we tend to spread the falsehoods far and wide. And then when other people's brains come up with similar conclusions, we think, "Hey! You and I both came to the same conclusion! We must both be right!" And we congratulate ourselves. That's just how we human beings roll. I love to believe I'm right.

You already know that for the last hundreds of years of human history (at least), scientists have worked hard to discover truth and expose myth. You also already know that it can take a long time for people to give up myths in favor of scientific realities. I'm just reminding you.

As scientific knowledge on a subject spreads, it can be frustrating and baffling to watch people hold on to old ideas. And it can be frightening. For example, think about climate change deniers. Will enough people come around before conditions on earth become too unbalanced to recover? Foundations are spending tremendous amounts of money to help educate people, but at a societal level, minds change very slowly.

Unlike the efforts to educate people about climate science, efforts to educate people about the science of prejudice has not reached a stride. Not even close. The incentives are lacking. But even though the usual incentives for change are not materializing, I have a hunch that we are on the cusp of a new renaissance. I see people finding their voices. My guess is that scientific knowledge about the nature of prejudice will spread through the end of this decade, and then take off in the twenties. We will look back on this era of police killing unarmed men and schools punishing good-natured children as the suffocating era that it is.

We teach children about slavery and who did what to whom, but leaving it at that, many of our kids are led to a wrong conclusion: That Europeans are superior to Africans and Latin Americans. In so many towns in the US, kids grow up seeing money and power in the hands of European Americans and Asian Americans, and we leave our kids to draw their own conclusions. We expose kids to a non-stop barrage of images of handcuffed African American men and punished African American school children, and we leave them to draw their own conclusions. They do wonder, but their brains answer their own questions, and their brains get it wrong. Our children see a deformed society, and early on they begin to interpret it as a normal society.

Our school systems are not accurately educating our children about the science of prejudice.  Until that changes, it's up to parents to explain these realities to our kids:

• There are absolutely no differences in intellectual ability among the descendants of human beings from different continents. 
• Our society and our brains work in concert to trick us into holding different expectations for people based on their skin color and physical features. 
• That trickery has deformed our society. 
• We must not fall for the trickery ourselves.

But how, as parents, do we get there ourselves? First step: Look at the science.

Perhaps the most important information for you to understand, and it's something I've already written about at least twice on A Woolman's Journey, is that the "colorblind" concept is a fiction.

Professor Helen Neville of University of Illinois and others developed the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) in 2000. Their work suggests that people who endorse colorblind racial attitudes may have higher levels of racial prejudice than those who consciously pay attention to race.

Construction and initial validation of the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS).
"The purpose of this investigation was to develop a conceptually grounded scale to assess cognitive aspects of color-blind racial attitudes. Five studies on the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) with over 1,100 observations provide initial reliability and validity data. Specifically, results from an exploratory factor analysis suggest a 3-factor solution: Unawareness of Racial Privilege, Institutional Discrimination, and Blatant Racial Issues. A confirmatory factor analysis suggests that the 3-factor model is a good fit of the data and is the best of the competing models. The CoBRAS was positively related to other indexes of racial attitudes as well as 2 measures of belief in a just world, indicating that greater endorsement of color-blind racial attitudes was related to greater levels of racial prejudice and a belief that society is just and fair. Self-reported CoBRAS attitudes were sensitive to diversity training."

Professor Robert Rosenthal of the University of California, Riverside and others published their now classic research on teachers' expectancies in 1966. Their research suggests that teachers expectations for individual students have a measurable effect on student learning. Consider the probable outcome when "colorblind" teachers work with children of color.

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains.
From PsychWiki.com:
"This study found out that teachers’ expectancy can be a significant determinant of students’ responses/behaviors. The names of experimental children were given to each teacher who was told that these students would show unusual intellectual gains according to intelligence test. However, the children have been randomly assigned to the experimental condition, therefore, the experimental treatment consisted of nothing more than being identified to their teachers as intelligent children. Eight months later, these experimental students showed significantly greater gains in I.Q. than did the control group. The study found out that the effects of teachers’ expectancies were greater for younger children."

Professor Jennifer Eberhardt of Stanford University recently won a "Genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her work on the ways in which people unconsciously "code" people based on physical characteristics such as skin color and facial features. Her main focus has been on crime-related stereotypes associated with African American males. Her work helps explain why European Americans may misinterpret the behavior of African Americans as criminal or otherwise threatening. That, in turn, helps explain why African Americans are so much more likely to be stopped by police, arrested, convicted of a crime, and sentenced harshly. It also helps explain why African American students are more likely to be punished more frequently and more harshly than the European American students in the same schools and classrooms.

Professor Eberhardt now works with police departments to help officers understand some of the unconscious mental processing that can lead to unjust arrest and use of force on African American males. She discusses her work in this interview for the MacArthur Foundation.

Watch her interview for the MacArthur Foundation here.

By not thinking about and talking about racism, by imagining ourselves to be colorblind, by allowing our children to draw their own conclusions about the racial inequality that they witness every day, we raise "colorblind" children who go on to continue the cycle. We can make a difference by properly educating our children about the science of prejudice.