Welcome to Round 2I direct your attention to the first half,
because I'm not explaining all this again.Now, immediately, when researching methods of reducing racial bias, I ran into a problem. Several, actually. Firstly, a lot of this data is useless and some people should not have gotten grants.
For example, did you know that embodying White people in a Black virtual body is associated with an immediate decrease in their implicit racial bias against Black people, or that
by making white people feel like a black hand belonged to them (through the use of Rubber Hand Illusions) reduced their negative racial attitudes to dark skin Fascinating stuff! We just can't
use any of it to help anyone. Immersive virtual reality is
not widespread technology, (and it's not like every time you played a VR game, you'd pick the black skin anyway) and we can't have every white person in the country stick their hand in a box.
This is not helpful, it is pointless. Other data, like the fact that
actively contemplating others' psychological experiences attenuates automatic expressions of racial bias, is only slightly more helpful. Most people...don't stop and do that, ever.
The second problem, was the limitation of data. A lot of the data on the effectiveness of racial bias awareness was...limited in scope.
NBA referees,
college faculty representation,
ability to differentiate between faces of different racial groups from one's own.
These are not the things on which the country turns.
There was also a secondary problem-the work academics do to try and reduce bias is not the same one being propagated in the wider world, which is
much more complicated and prone to failure, especially when the program is poorly designedBecause of budgetary and time considerations, diversity training is often offered as a one-time opportunity. Yet a company that relies solely on a single training session to combat bias is doomed to fail. One major reason is that bias is multifaceted, born of a combination of an individual’s exposure to stereotypes about and direct or indirect experiences with people from different groups. This complexity makes bias difficult to eradicate. Indeed, an investigation of 17 different bias-reduction interventions found that only eight reduced participants’ implicit preference for White people over Black people. Further, the effects of even the most effective interventions (such as exposing participants to people from another group who behave counter to stereotypes and providing people with strategies they can use to mitigate bias) had worn off just 24 hours later. This analysis and other research suggest that without consistent reinforcement, trainees’ biases will rebound after people return to the environments that reinforce those biases.
In fact, poorly designed programs can even
backfire entirely:
For example, people more readily dismiss claims of workplace discrimination in organizations that explicitly value diversity compared with claims in organizations that do not. Communicating that the solution to bias is simple and can be addressed by just offering a training course can decrease empathy for victims of bias.65 Additionally, referring to bias as ubiquitous may, ironically, produce the perception that bias is acceptable (for instance, “It must be OK if everyone has it”) or that bias-reduction efforts are futile (for instance, “You can’t succeed because bias is too widespread to root out”)
That...is disheartening, but it's important to know that the problem is less one of innate racism, and more of poorly designed programs.
If awareness of bias is the main outcome that persists, should organizations even bother trying to change behavior as well? Based on the data, the short answer is yes. In a separate analysis, Bezrukova and her colleagues asked what works better for changing attitudes and behavior: diversity training that aims to increase attendees’ awareness of their biases and cultural assumptions (awareness-based training), programs that help attendees learn to monitor and change their behavior (behavior-based training), or a combination of the two?31 They found that focusing on awareness is useful but should not be the only focus of training. Awareness-based training produced the smallest changes in attitudes and behavior overall (gs = 0.22 and 0.35, respectively), whereas behavior-based training was significantly more effective at changing both attitudes (g = 0.41) and behavior (g = 0.53). The training programs that incorporated both awareness-based and behavior-based elements were about as effective as behavior-based training at changing attitudes (g = 0.40) and behavior (g = 0.54). In summary, anti-bias training is least effective when it focuses only on raising awareness of bias: the best strategy is either to focus on teaching attendees strategies for changing biased behavior or to do that and also incorporate elements that will raise people’s awareness of their bias and the effects it can have. We favor the combined approach because it can help people to understand why they should want to change their behavior.
So let's look at what makes a
well-designed program.
Well, a lot, but
let's hit the basics.Firstly, don't just focus on implicit bias alone.
In light of the limits of focusing on implicit bias, we encourage organizations to use trainings as an opportunity to educate members about an organization’s diversity metrics, goals, and plans for addressing representation and inclusion. This approach can signal organizations’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and connect the strategy to the organizations’ broader goals. [...] Rather than just hosting trainings about implicit bias, organizations might consider offering activities that focus directly on helping majority-group attendees recognize and address potential defensiveness. In line with this, self-affirmation exercises are useful to combat threatening information—Whites’ ability to perceive racism is heightened after they have affirmed their values. In addition, even when people respond defensively in the short term, they often grow to appreciate greater diversity in the long term, becoming less likely to stereotype different ethnic groups over time. Thus, short-term discomfort is not necessarily a harbinger for a failed intervention
Secondly, prepare for resistance.
Because of staunchly held narratives of meritocracy and fairness, the idea that organizations or American society might be unfair is challenging for many people to accept, especially members of dominant or well-represented groups. One might expect that providing information would help people be more accurate. However, majority group members often resist information about inequality, by justifying or holding onto misperceptions of inequality. One attempt to correct these misperceptions asked White participants to read information about persistent discrimination against Black Americans. Those participants did perceive less progress toward racial economic equality, but only because they perceived more racial economic equality in the past. Information about persistent racial discrimination did not shift perceptions of racial economic equality in the present. These defensives responses also extend to support for policies. When exposed to information documenting stark racial disparities in the prison system, Whites report higher support for punitive crime policies, which produce these disparities. Similarly, after reading about past injustices against women, people are less supportive of policies promoting women. As organizations launch their diversity initiatives, they should be prepared for potential reactance, and expect some defensive responses.
Going beyond basic training for a second:
Establish organizational opportunities for high-quality intergroup contact.[...] Intergroup contact links to improved intergroup attitudes. Interracial interactions help White people perceive racial inequality more readily, and increase the likelihood that they will work to address it. When employees of color engage in rich conversations about their cultural background, White employees were more likely to think highly of, feel closer to, and learn from coworkers of color and as a result, White employees displayed more inclusive behaviors toward minority coworkers.
Tough? Yes,
very. And this was a basic overview. But it's not impossible. That said, there is a
large pitfall here-
for social liberals, learning about White privilege reduces sympathy, increases blame, and decreases external attributions for White people struggling with poverty, which is...
bad, because there are millions of white people in poverty.
Across two highly powered studies, we find that learning about privilege based on race may sometimes lead to reduced sympathy for White people experiencing poverty. In particular, social liberals, who tend to explain inequality through systems of oppression, may be particularly receptive to thinking about systematic privileges experienced by White people. As a result, social liberals who think about White privilege (vs. control) may become more likely to blame poor White people for their poverty. However, we should also note that learning about White privilege did not make liberals feel less sympathetic toward poor Whites than conservatives, but rather less sympathetic than they may have otherwise been.
As far as I know, there is no way to remedy this.
So next up was education. And that was contentious, because we don't know what we teach. See, the US doesn't have an education
system so much as it does a bunch of education
systems. (I'm sticking with public education because there's not much you can really do about private education.) Now thankfully, certain things
have improved across the board. Overt ahistorical nonsense like
"Enslaved people “were allowed all the freedom they seemed to want, and were given the privilege of visiting other plantations when they chose to do so. All that was required of them was to be in place when work time came. At the holiday season they were almost as free as their masters.” "Moreover, most people in North Carolina were really opposed to slavery and were in favor of a gradual emancipation. Slavery was already in existence, however, through no fault of theirs. They had the slaves and had to manage as best they could the problem of what to do with them.”" Doesn't fly.
But not everything is so subtle. The most common complaint is one of omission-things like the
Tulsa Race Massacre (1921), or the
Wilmington Coup (1898), or the
Philadelphia Bombings (1985). If you notice the common thread here, it is that instances where state force was used to prevent black people from advancing are the ones that see less proliferation, whereas individual lynchings-Emmet Till being the pre-eminent example-are much easier to teach. I don't mean to relitigate all of American racial history here, so I won't go into every event. But it is a common complaint that at least a substantial portion of racial history in America is swept under the rug. Though to stave off the inevitable complaints, I'd recommend
this analysis of how slavery is "taught."Unfortunately, research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017 shows that our schools are failing to teach the hard history of African enslavement. We surveyed U.S. high school seniors and social studies teachers, analyzed a selection of state content standards, and reviewed 10 popular U.S. history textbooks. The research indicates that High school seniors struggle on even the most basic questions about American enslavement of Africans.
• Only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed can identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.
• Two-thirds (68 percent) don’t know that it took a constitutional amendment to formally end slavery.
• Fewer than 1 in 4 students (22 percent) can correctly identify how provisions in the Constitution gave advantages to slaveholders.
Teachers are serious about teaching slavery, but there’s a lack of deep coverage of the subject in the classroom.
• Although teachers overwhelmingly (over 90 percent) claim they feel “comfortable” discussing slavery in their classrooms, their responses
to open-ended questions reveal profound unease around the topic.
• Fifty-eight percent of teachers find their textbooks inadequate.
Popular textbooks fail to provide comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved peoples. The best textbook achieved a score of 70 percent against our rubric of what should be included in the study of American slavery; the average score was 46 percent.
States fail to set appropriately high expectations with their content standards. In a word, the standards are timid.
• Of the 15 sets of state standards we analyzed, none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful the lives of the millions of enslaved people, or about how their labor was essential to the American economy.
• Forty percent of teachers believe their state offers insufficient support for teaching about slavery.
Looking behind the statistics, we see seven key problems with current practices.
1. We teach about slavery without context, preferring to present the good news before the bad. In elementary school, students learn about the Underground Railroad, about Harriet Tubman or other “feel good” stories, often before they learn about slavery. In high school, there’s overemphasis on Frederick Douglass, abolitionists, and the Emancipation Proclamation and little understanding of how slave labor built the nation.
2. We tend to subscribe to a progressive view of American history that can acknowledge flaws only to the extent that they have been addressed
and solved. Our vision of growing ever “more perfect” stands in the way of our need to face the continuing legacy of the past.
3. We teach about the American enslavement of Africans as an exclusively southern institution. While it is true that slavery reached its apex in
the South during the years before the Civil War, it is also true that slavery existed in all colonies, and in all states when the Declaration of
Independence was signed, and that it continued to be interwoven with the economic fate of the nation long into the 19th century.
4. We rarely connect slavery to the ideology that grew up to sustain and protect it: white supremacy. Slavery required white supremacy to persist. In fact, the American ideology of white supremacy, along with accompanying racist dogma, developed precisely to justify the perpetuation of slavery.
5. We often rely on pedagogy poorly suited to the topic. When we asked teachers to tell us about their favorite lesson when teaching about
slavery, dozens proudly reported classroom simulations. Simulation of traumatic experiences is not shown to be effective as a learning strategy and can harm vulnerable children.
6. We rarely make connections to the present. How can students develop a meaningful understanding of the rest of American history if they
do not understand the scope and lasting impact of enslavement? Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement do not make sense when so divorced from the arc of American history.
7. We tend to center on the white experience when we teach about slavery. Too often, the varied, lived experience of enslaved people is neglected while educators focus on the broader political and economic impacts of slavery. Politically and socially, we focus on what white people were doing in the time leading up to the Civil War.
(this thing is like 50 pages and I'm not going to quote it all, but it is, I think, Illustrative)
Clearly, that's not working.
And anti-racist curriculum has issues of its own.So let's take a small detour. Because the primary response to this failure-the 1619 Project, is, broadly speaking, bad. It overstates its case, gets several historical facts wrong, and just generally isn't a solution. The "counter" to that, the 1776 Commission, is even worse. But why have there be a counter at all? If it's just bad scholarship, (which it
was), then that could be hammered out and fixed among academics. It's not like the 1619 Project was free of criticism even from the left. There was no need for a
propaganda push. At least, not until you understand that as part of the same problem we're going to be talking about a
lot at the end-backlash.
So far, we've looked at racial attitudes and countermeasures among individuals in small environments. So let's change tracks, and look big. What
policies can be run to try and reduce it nationwide? Enter the media.
Specifically, we're gonna be looking at one group which has seen shifting fortunes in recent years-
Muslims. (And let's not kid ourselves with semantics,
Muslims have been racialized)
Compared to prior years, Americans in 2020 finally became less exclusive.
First, the number of Americans who said they have a somewhat or very favorable attitude toward Muslims rose noticeably. According to data from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey, 49 percent of Americans held a favorable view of Muslims in July 2019. By the week leading up to the 2020 election, the proportion had risen to 56 percent. This change was driven almost exclusively by shifts among Republicans and Independents. Republicans were notably more likely to express a favorable attitude toward Muslims the week before the election (48 percent) than they were in July 2019 (34 percent). A smaller but directionally similar shift occurred among Independents (51 percent vs. 46 percent). There was no notable shift among Democrats (66 percent vs. 68 percent). This trend was not limited to data from the Nationscape survey. In the VOTER Survey, which draws on an established panel of individuals who have been periodically surveyed since December 2011, respondents were asked to rate their feelings about Muslims in both November 2019 and September 2020. In this survey, these attitudes were measured through the use of a “feeling thermometer,” where respondents were asked to classify their feelings on a scale that ranges from 0 (“very cold”) to 100 (“very warm”). The average thermometer rating survey participants gave when asked about Muslims rose from 52 to 57 over this time period, indicating an overall “warming” of their feelings toward this group. Once again, this shift was mostly driven by Republicans (36 to 43) and Independents (50 to 56). There was a smaller shift among Democrats (64 to 68).
(unexpectedly, there was a political element too, predicting vote choice)
These attitudinal shifts coincided with a change in the relationship between attitudes toward Muslims and Americans’ probability of voting for Trump. Using data from the VOTER Survey, we ran two regression models that predicted the probability of voting for the Republican candidate in 2016 and 2020. These regressions include the thermometer rating with regard to Muslims and a number of demographic variables. While the relationship was negative in both years—meaning that “warmer” ratings on the thermometer were correlated to a lower likelihood of voting for Trump—the results suggest that Americans’ feelings toward Muslims were less predictive of their votes in 2020 than in 2016. For example, the data from 2016 would suggest that someone rating their feelings toward Muslims as a 0 (“very cold”) would be 38 percentage points more likely to vote for Trump than someone who rated their feelings as 100 (“very warm”). By contrast, someone with a very cold rating in 2020 would be only 24 percentage points more likely to vote for Trump in 2020 than someone with a very warm rating.
So why is this related to the media?
Simple. The media is-at least normally-
trash to Muslims.
One possible explanation for the rising favorability might be the relative decline in news stories about Muslims during the 2020 election cycle. While the 2016 election was heavily inflected with stories about Muslims—due in no small part to the Trump campaign’s antagonistic focus on immigration and, more specifically, Muslim immigration—the 2020 media landscape was dominated by stories related to COVID-19, the economic recession, and massive protests following the killing of George Floyd.
This decline in coverage matters because stories related to Muslims are disproportionately negative. The Media Portrayals of Minorities Project’s 2019 study of U.S. newspaper coverage from 2014 to 2019 found that Muslims were consistently covered more negatively than any other American minority group, largely due to the association of Muslims with foreign conflict zones, terrorism, immigration, and the broader theme of law and order. These associations are so prevalent in U.S. media that organizations like the Institute for Social and Political Understanding (ISPU) developed resources to help journalists report stories about Muslims more equitably. During the same five-year period, Muslims also received about half as much coverage as other minority groups on cultural topics like art and film, which tend to be perceived more positively as contributions to American society. As a result, Americans who primarily relied on the media to shape their understanding of Muslims may have been offered a different diet of information this last year.
Now, that the media affects national discourse is no surprise. That the media is, generally speaking, garbage, is
also no surprise. But specifically to counter racial resentment, a serious reformatting of the national media ecosystem is needed.
Let's look at some other groups, shall we?It starts poorly, and only goes downhill from there.
This meta-analysis of 49 studies, yielding 88 effect sizes (n = 10,215), examined the effect of negative stereotypes of Blacks in media on consumers’ attitudes. The results from the multilevel model (3-level) indicate that media stereotypes have a significant overall effect on consumers’ attitudes (r = .22,p < .001).
the most powerful section, in particular...was criminal justice, due to the large association in the media of black people with criminality
Multivariate analyses further revealed that negative evaluations of Blacks in subcategory-judgment were harsher than for opinion and policy subcategories (p = .03). Although consumers negatively evaluated Blacks for all three subcategories of attitude, the larger association for the subcategory-judgment provides some evidence that evaluations of Blacks in the criminal justice system are harsher than in the other subcategories of attitude. While these results need to be interpreted with caution due to the high p-value, an assessment of the prevalence of Black male criminal stereotype from media cultivated over time can explain harsher real-life evaluations of Blacks in the criminal justice system and the power of the measures in the subcategory-judgment. Presentations of crime stories in both news and entertainment genre across various media outlets depict a disproportionate reality and misrepresent the Black association with criminality and violence in its frequency and criminal-context. Cultivation suggests that the cultural reinforcement of stereotype in media can distort reality perceptions. In
everyday life, mass media frequently prime categories central to stereotypes of race. These primes are subtle and nonconscious, and they can be activated even without explicit stereotypical portrayal. The findings that White respondents show a significant bias in attitudes in prescribing punishment for Black suspects are also consistent with earlier findings of racial discrimination in defendant treatment in jury trials.
Latinos don't do
any better.
In addition to being underrepresented, media portrayals of Latinos are often stereotypical. On primetime television, Latino characters are more likely than characters of other ethnic groups to be cast as having low-status occupations, including being four times as likely to portray domestic workers than any other ethnic group and having lower job authority than European-American characters. In addition, Latinos are more often represented in stories related to crime and participate in a disproportionate amount of conversations about crime and violence on primetime programming. Latinos are more likely than members of other groups to be portrayed as having an accent, as less articulate, and as less professionally and appropriately dressed. Attributes of Latino characters also differ by gender. In one analysis, Latino men were portrayed as the least intelligent and among the most hot-tempered. Among women, Latina characters were portrayed as the laziest, most verbally aggressive, and as exhibiting the lowest work ethic.
And before I get into solutions...the problem isn't just cable news.
Local news stations are just as guilty.(Though it's not as if "local" stations are truly local, when
72% of the market is owned by two companies, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media
And now, some major-league
solutions.So firstly, I want to make something clear. Fixing racism-the attitude-will require fixing the structures that depended on it, for reasons that will be made clear. But it will
also require several things to be in the right position. Firstly,
you can't do it during an economic downturn, because those make white people more racist (or at least more willing to find racial out-groups to scapegoat) (Which is politically difficult, because doing the sweeping investments needed during an already existing economic expansion will get you divebombed by misguided austerity warriors.) Secondly, you have to market it as
either benefiting whites or universal, or white people will oppose it. (Which means playing with a right-wing media hellbent on
continuing to hammer on the idea that welfare goes to minorities), and politicians trying to further
the racialization of the size of the government.Why? Simple.
Segregation causes prejudice. (and conversely, personal contact seems to reduce it, at
at least to some degree.)
Now, it is true that segregation has shifted since the days of Jim Crow. Black people are no longer segregated into cities.
Instead, they're segregated within cities, while Blacks and Hispanics are segregated in suburbs.Suburban diversity does not mean that neighborhoods within suburbia are diverse. As is true in central cities, minorities are fairly highly segregated among suburban neighborhoods. Figure 3 reports the values of the most widely used measure of segregation, the Index of Dissimilarity (D). D ranges from 0 to 100, and social scientists generally consider values below 30 to be quite modest while values above 60 are very high. The averages shown here are weighted by the size of the minority population in an area; they can be described as the average level of segregation experienced by a minority group member. As Figure 3 shows, black segregation from whites in suburbs averaged above 60 in 1980; it has fallen slowly but steadily since then, and now averages slightly over 50. (By comparison, D in central cities averaged 75.0 in 1980 but has fallen to 59.6 in 2010). Suburban Hispanic segregation from whites is lower (44.0), but it has not changed much since 1980. Suburban Asian segregation is now 39.9, somewhat higher than in 1980.
In fact, we
know this isn't just a class thing.
A standard theory in urban sociology is that a group’s isolation – the degree to which group members live in separate racial/ethnic zones – depends on the income level of individual members. Higher income minorities are expected to live in less segregated settings. Figure 4 offers a test of that expectation, using data from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey that included information on race, income and where people lived. It turns out that the standard theory applies only to Hispanics. Lower income Hispanics (earning below $45,000) lived on average in suburban neighborhoods that were 43% Hispanic. Hispanics’ neighborhoods (those earning above $75,000) were only 35% Hispanic. But there was no such relationship for whites, blacks or Asians. For these groups, their isolation was unrelated to their income. Suburban residential boundaries for them are mostly based on race.
So just how isolated is white America?
Very (Note: The pattern here is unlikely to have changed in the 8 years sense, due to how extreme it is)
Americans’ core social networks tend to be dominated by people of the same race or ethnic background. However, the degree of racial and ethnic diversity in Americans’ social networks varies somewhat according to their particular race or ethnicity. Among white Americans, 91% of people comprising their social networks are also white, while five percent are identified as some other race. Among black Americans, 83% of people in their social networks are composed of people who are also black, while eight percent are white and six percent are some other race. Among Hispanic Americans, approximately two-thirds (64%) of the people who comprise their core social networks are also Hispanic, while nearly 1-in-5 (19%) are white and nine percent are some other race.
[...]
The homogeneity of a particular core social network—that is, the percentage of Americans with social networks that are entirely comprised of people from the same racial or ethnic background—also varied according to race and ethnicity. Fully three-quarters (75%) of white Americans report that the network of people with whom they discuss important matters is entirely white, with no minority presence, while 15% report having a more racially mixed social network. Approximately two-thirds (65%) of black Americans report having a core social network that is composed entirely of people who are also black, while nearly one-quarter (23%) say their network includes a mix of people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds. Less than half (46%) of Hispanics report that their social network includes only other people who also identify as Hispanic, while more than one-third (34%) report having a mixed social network. Notably, nearly one-in-ten (9%) Hispanics report having an all-white core social network.
And that isn't really a surprise, when you consider that minorities are much more likely to live in urban and suburban areas than they are rural ones. But it doesn't help when cities look like this:
This is entirely untenable. This is absolutely toxic for
any society to function.
To sum up: If you want to fix racism, you have to dismantle it's structures (which
will cause backlash, let's be clear), wholly reshape the media eco-system (honestly you'd probably have to kill off Fox News and break up Sinclair, though you should probably do that last one anyway, just on anti-trust grounds), undergo the most expansive economic program since the Great Society,
entirely revamp the highway system within cities so you're not creating ghettos (thanks, Eisenhower).
Good luck!
I'll finish this with a thing on backlash, I suppose, because this is
entirely too long
and i only expect like 4 people to read it anyway
Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:22 pm
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