Biased explores how implicit racial bias affects humans’ unconscious choices and impacts every aspect of their lives, including housing, education, employment, and criminal justice. Eberhardt holds a PhD from Harvard University and is a social psychologist at Stanford University. She acts as a consultant for law enforcement as well.
Part 1: What Meets the Eye
The author describes performing a two-year study to investigate civil rights violations in the Oakland Police Department, and explains to the police department that she found that bias affected their decision making, regardless of their good intentions. She describes implicit bias as s “a kind of distorting lens that’s a product of both the architecture of our brain and the disparities in our society.” She described the crowd as being unreceptive to her at first, until she started sharing personal stories about her own bias. She thinks personal storytelling is an indispensable key for solving the problem of innate racial bias. She also found that by describing bias as innate and a part of natural brain function, rather than a conscious choice, they could examine it objectively without shaming anyone. So she tries to employ both of those techniques in this book.
The author believes this is a very timely book because White people have been experiencing a shift in the culture that will leave them a minority in the US by the middle of this century. That fact has led to a rise in fear and resentment among some White citizens, emotions that have the power to lead to dangerous outlets.
Eberhardt describes the link between neuroplasticity in the brain and how it can be altered by experience. For example, when a person becomes blind, the occipital lobe can redirect its attention to other sensory experiences, such as sound. This study and others led Eberhardt to ask questions about the neuroscience of face recognition, particularly in regard to race. The fusiform face area (FFA) is responsible for helping humans distinguish between the familiar and unfamiliar. She worked with a team at Stanford to explore whether the basic functioning of the FFA could be influenced by race. The researchers found that the FFA of participants had stronger reactions to faces of similar races, thereby revealing that race could influence basic functions of people’s brains.
Eberhardt links this study to a string of robberies which occurred in Chinatown in 2014. Multiple cases of purses being stolen by Black young men were popping up, but the middleaged Asian women whose purses were taken were unable to distinguish the perpetrators in police line-ups. Because the young men knew the women would be unable to identify them, the crowded streets gave them the opportunity to use their own faces as masks.
Stereotypes are a result of categorization, a function of the brain that “allows us to organize and manage the overload of stimuli that constantly bombard us”. The ability of human brains to categorize helps them to make judgments and develop patterns. However, categorization can also negatively affect racial awareness.
Eberhardt explains that bias can infiltrate those in a biased environment. Studies show that biased parents tend to have biased children. In television shows with Black lead actors, researchers found that white actors use more negative non-verbal actions toward their Black counterparts.
So: experience can change the brain, and the brain engages in a natural process of categorization.
Part 2: We Find Ourselves
This chapter details several incidents of wrongful police shootings targeting people of color. The author discusses statistics that show that Black people are more frequently subjected to traffic stops and that police are more likely to use force on them.
Eberhardt discusses some results from her studies that showed that policemen were more likely to treat Black people impolitely during a traffic stop, which led to more aggressive encounters. The participants in the study were more likely to associate Black people with objects connected to crime (such as guns), and policemen were better primed to enact violence on Black citizens.
The author shares a personal story from her time in college in which a police officer stopped her and a Black friend late at night for not having the vehicle registered in the driver’s name (the car was her mother’s) and used excessive force and jailed them. He treated them in a way Eberhardt believes he wouldn’t have if they had been white.
These chapters explore law enforcement initiatives, such as ticket-writing quotas, which lead to racial disparities. Police officers are more likely to search Black drivers and treat them disrespectfully. Black individuals are also four times more likely to be detained pretrial than white individuals, and bail premiums are higher for Black male defendants. For those cases that are settled with plea-bargains, Black defendants’ plea deal offers more often include prison time, and Black defendants are more likely to be given the death penalty.
The author reviews dehumanizing perceptions of Black people over the last several centuries and expresses that even today Black people are often compared to apes.
The author describes a study in which half the participants were primed by exposure to words such as “apprehend,” “arrest,” “capture,” and “shoot”. When then presented with a White face and a Black face, those who were given this primer were more likely to look at Black faces. Those who were not were more likely to look at the White face. The study shows how Black individuals are placed in a situation of both high visibility, revealed in their misdirected association with crime, and invisibility, revealed in a closer attention to the White faces when no primer was given. The author interprets this as “the association between black people and crime is so powerful in the minds of Americans that it can influence what we see and what we ignore.”
Studies show that race distorts people’s perception of body size. In one study, people were asked to rate the physical characteristics of young white and young Black men. When participants perceived the bodies to be of Black men, they were more likely to rate the bodies as taller and heavier. They also believed that the capacity of the Black men’s bodies had a higher potentiality for causing harm.
Part 3: Where We Find Ourselves
Eberhardt reviews the history of segregation and housing discrimination in the United States and makes the case that this history still influences how Black neighborhoods and homes owned by Black families are perceived. In one study, individuals were presented with identical house listings that had only one minor difference: the color of the family that appeared in one of the photographs. Study participants were more likely to see the house in the negative light and assign it a lower value when a Black family appeared in the listing.
She shares examples of people “Whitening the Resume” in order to make themselves more appealing to employers. Some even went so far as to change their name to make it more white-sounding. The author shows how the burden of leveling the playing field should not be on the backs of those applying for jobs but rather on the ones doing the hiring. Eberhardt asserts that addressing bias and believing that it can be addressed are the keys components for combating bias. Though she cautions that bias trainings need to be evidence based, and most have never been evaluated for efficacy. If you undergo an ineffective training, this can actually lead to more bias as people feel they have done their part and will expend less resources in trying to address their bias day to day.
Thought questions:
- Psychedelic therapy is gaining ground as a way to improve many aspects of our lives. One effect many psychedelics seem to have is to dissolve the boundaries we construct (aka categories) based on our experience. Could this be used as part of racial bias training?
- What are some actions you think law enforcement organizations can take to reduce racial bias?
- What components do you hypothesize would make effective racial bias trainings?
- What are some methods you use to combat bias in your daily life?
- Can we change the size of our tribe, or just change the factors we use to group them?
Further reading:
During the meeting, Graeme recommended several books that he has enjoyed on similar topics to those discussed in Biased. He sent me a list, which I’m including below:
White working class
Caste
Notes on a foreign country
The color of law
White fragility
The righteous mind
Between the world and me