Category Archives: Prejudice and discrimination

Racial Profiling in Preschool

Education, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology, ,

Data from the U. S. Department of Justice, Office of Civil Rights, shows that African-American children, especially boys, are suspended or expelled from preschools at a higher rate than White children. For example, while 20% of preschool boys are Black, 45% of the boys suspended are Black. However, this is not proof of racial discrimination, since a skeptic could argue that, even at this young age, Black children are more likely to misbehave.

A new study by Walter Gilliam and his colleagues at the Yale University Child Study Center takes an experimental approach to this issue by holding the behavior of Black and White children constant and observing how teachers respond. Participants were 132 prechool teachers recruited at an annual conference. Sixty-seven percent of the teachers were White and 22% were Black. They took part in two studies.

In the first study, participants were shown a 6-minute video of four preschool children—a Black boy, a Black girl, a White boy and a White girl—seated around a table. The teachers were asked to watch for “challenging behavior,” but in fact the video did not contain any misbehavior. A computerized eye-tracking device was used to measure the amount of time the teachers spent watching each child. At the conclusion, the teachers were asked to report which of the four children required the most attention.

The eye tracking results showed that the participants spent more time looking at boys than girls, and more time looking at Black children than White children. In addition, the time spent gazing at the Black boy was significantly greater than would have been expected on the basis of his combined race and gender. The race of the teacher made no difference in this study.

The title of the paper frames the research as a study of implicit bias, and media reports of the study have followed suit. The authors define implicit bias as the “automatic and unconscious stereotypes that drive people to behave and make decisions in certain ways.” However, the teachers’ conscious appraisal of which child they paid the most attention to appeared to match the eye-tracking results fairly closely, as shown in the chart below. Apparently the teachers were well aware that they were paying more attention to the Black boy.

yale_implicit_bias_infographic_v07

I mention this because the term “implicit bias” is sometimes used to deny personal responsibility for one’s own and others’ discriminatory behavior on the grounds that it is unconscious. By labeling this as a study of implicit bias, the authors may have given their teacher-participants less blame for their behavior than they actually deserved.

In my title, I described these results as similar to racial profiling. Racial profiling targets people based on stereotypes about their race, as when the police stop and frisk Black teenagers having no evidence that they are committing crimes. Like the police, these teachers were scanning for misbehavior, and they responded by giving special attention to African-American boys. (An editorial writer for the New York Times drew this same analogy.)

These same participants also took part in a second experiment. In this study, they were asked to read a vignette describing a preschool child who repeatedly engaged in disruptive behavior. The child’s race and gender were manipulated by changing the child’s name (DeShawn, Jake, Latoya or Emily). Half the participants in each race and gender condition also read background information suggesting that the child lived with a single mother who was under a great deal of stress. The others were not given background information. The teachers were then asked to rate the severity of the child’s behavior and to recommend whether the child should be suspended or expelled.

The following results were found for ratings of the severity of the behavior.

  • The same behavior was rated as more seriously disruptive when the child was White than when he or she was Black.
  • Giving teachers background information increased the ratings of the severity of the behavior.
  • The Black teachers rated the behavior as more serious than the White teachers.
  • The background information increased the perceived severity of the behavior when the teacher was of a different race than the child, but the teachers responded more sympathetically to it when the teacher and the child were of the same race.

With regard to suspension or expulsion, the only finding was that Black teachers were more likely to recommend these options.

The results of the second study are not a good fit with the Department of Justice data, since the teachers appear to be discriminating against the White children. The researchers explain this by suggesting that these teachers expected the Black children to be disruptive, but held the White children to a higher standard. Therefore, the identical behavior was seen as more serious when attributed to a White child.

My guess is that had the same behavior been rated more disruptive when when the child was Black, the results would have been interpreted in a straightforward manner as discrimination against African-Americans. However, since the results were unexpected, a more complex explanation was presented. This explanation may be correct, of course. There is some evidence for “shifting standards” with respect to race. However, the authors could have strengthened their argument with a followup study measuring teachers’ expectations about the misbehavior of Black and White children and the extent to which the behavior described in their vignette violated those expectations.

Since the Black teachers were stricter overall, it appears that increasing the representation of Black teachers will not by itself reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions.

Some additional perspective on this issue is provided by a set of two experiments by Jason Okonofua and Jennifer Eberhardt. Their participants, grade school teachers, read a desription of either a White or Black boy in middle school who committed two infractions—one class disruption and one act of insubordination. After each incident, they were asked how severely the child should be disciplined.

There was no difference in the punishment recommended for Black and White boys after the first infraction. As shown in the table, the recommended disciplinary action increased in severity after the second infraction, but it did so more for the Black boy than for the White boy. (In the table, “feeling troubled” refers to a combined measure the the severity of the misbehavior and the extent to which it would hinder and irritate a teacher.)

Apparently, the teachers were more likely to infer a disposition to misbehave from two bad actions when the child was African-American than when he was White.

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White Prejudice Affects Black Death Rates

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Asian-American Achievement as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

White Prejudice Affects Black Death Rates

Health, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

Dr. Jordan Leitner of the University of California at Berkeley and three colleagues have published a study of the relationship between White racial attitudes and the health outcomes of Black Americans. Here are some things we already know:

  • African-Americans have a higher death rate from cardiovascular diseases (e.g., heart attacks, strokes) than White Americans. (Other diseases as well, of course.)
  • The perception by Blacks (and others) that they are being discriminated against (e.g., being followed by store employees, being pulled over by the police for a minor offense) is associated with physiological stress responses known to cause circulatory problems, and with increased mortality. However, since these studies measure perceived rather than actual discrimination, a skeptic could argue that Blacks only imagined that Whites were biased against them.
  • African-Americans have higher death rates in locations where national surveys show that anti-Black attitudes are greater. But since these surveys include both Black and White respondents, it could be argued that the results were influenced by the attitudes of Black people who hate themselves.

Social psychologists distinguish between two types of prejudice. Implicit bias refers to automatic responses that are unintentional, and of which people may not be aware. Implicit bias was not related to any of the outcomed measured in this study. Explicit bias refers to responses that are deliberate and intentional. In this study, explicit bias was defined as the difference between how warmly (on a 10-point scale) participants said they felt toward White and Black Americans.

Leitner and his colleagues used a data base from Project Implicit consisting of the scores of about 1.4 million White Americans on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure of implicit bias, collected between 2003 and 2013. When filling out the IAT, the participants indicated their race, age and gender, and completed the measure of explicit bias. The county in which their computer was located was determined from their Internet protocol address. Although it is large, this is not a representative sample of Americans, since the participants were younger than the average resident of their county. To correct this bias, the researchers weighted the responses of older participants more heavily. The results were the same with or without this correction.

In Study 1, racial bias was correlated with data from a 2012 telephone survey by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in which both race and county of residence were identified. Two questions were of interest. Access to affordable health care was measured by asking respondents whether they had ever, in the past year, needed to see a doctor but did not because of the cost. Coronary disease diagnosis was indicated by whether they reported being told by a health professional that they had a heart attack or heart disease.

In Study 2, racial bias was related to county-level statistics, also from the CDC, indicating the age-adjusted death rates from circulatory diseases of Blacks and Whites from 2003 through 2013. To control for alternative explanations, the data analyses of both studies statistically eliminated the effects of the following county-level characteristics: population, education, income, residential segregation, housing density and geographical mobility.

Below are scatterplots showing the outcomes of the two studies. Each dot represents a county and the lines indicate the statistical averages.

  1. Blacks overall reported less access to affordable medical care. More importantly, as explicit racial bias among the county’s Whites increased, Blacks had less access to affordable medical care. Explicit bias did not affect Whites’ access to medical care.
  2. However, explicit bias had no significant effect on coronary disease diagnosis among either Blacks or Whites.
  3. In the second study, they found that the higher the explicit racial bias among Whites, the more likely both Blacks and Whites were to die of circulatory diseases. However, this relationship was stronger for Blacks than it was for Whites. For example, among counties in which Whites were high in explicit racial bias, the difference between Blacks’ and Whites’ death rates from circulatory diseases was 62 per 100,000. Among counties low in explicit bias, the difference was 35 deaths per 100,000.

According to the authors, this is the first large-scale study to demonstrate that White prejudice increases the death rate due to coronary disease of African-Americans living in the same counties. However, racial bias did not affect Black death rates due to cancer. Thus, physiological stress due to discrimination and its effects on the cardiovascular system appears to be critical in producing this effect.

The results of Study 1 imply that these increased deaths were also due in part to Blacks’ reduced access to affordable medical care. The failure of prejudice to affect coronary disease diagnosis among Blacks could be related to their difficulties in obtaining health care. Diagnosis and treatment require doctor visits, but death does not.

The fact that explicit racial bias predicted Black outcomes but implicit bias did not suggests that these health outcomes were an result of conscious bias on the part of the White majorities in these counties. Failure to provide adequate health care for poor people and minorities is an outcome of social policy decisions made by politicians and by corporate executives such as the managements of hospitals and clinics. Although the present data were collected prior to the Affordable Care Act, it would not be surprising if many of these same counties were located in states that failed to take advantage of the federal government’s offer to expand Medicaid in 2014.

I suspect that White prejudice at the community level has many other effects on the lives of African-Americans in addition to limiting access to health care. Black-White wage inequality and criminal justice policies affecting Blacks would seem to be obvious topics for future research.

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Outrage

The Implicit Association Test: Racial Bias on Cruise Control

Old-Fashioned Racism

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Foreign policy, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination

When terrorists attacked the Brussels International Airport and a metro station on March 22, killing 31 people and injuring 340, the response in this country was predictable. The corporate media provided blanket coverage of the attack, but failed to address its causes. The presidential candidates called for more of our current policies—on steroids. Donald Trump advocated revising international law to allow waterboarding and other unspecified forms of torture. Ted Cruz suggested “patrol(ing) and secur(ing) Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Hillary Clinton made a vague call for increased cooperation between the technology community and government. While she did not spell out the surveillance implications of this cooperation, it can only mean that she accepts the Obama administration position that there can be no telephone or internet communication between American citizens that can’t be accessed by the federal government.

What do we know about the effects of terrorist actions such as the Brussels bombings on public attitudes?

On July 7, 2005, a small group of terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda carried out an orchestrated set of attacks on the London subway and bus system, killing 52 people and injuring 770. By a fortunate coincidence, a group of researchers headed by Julie van Dyver at the University of Kent had conducted survey measuring intergroup prejudice among a nationally representative sample of about 1000 U. K. residents six weeks before the July 7 attacks. They repeated the survey with an equivalent group of British people four weeks after the attacks.

The two surveys measured negative attitudes toward Muslims and toward immigrants, and political orientation—that is, whether the participant favored the political left (Labour party) or the political right (Conservative party). They predicted that the effect of the bombings would be to increase negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants of all nationalities, but that not everyone would be equally affected. Based on what they called the reactive liberals hypothesis, they expected the shift to be greater among liberals than conserva- tives, since conservatives already held negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants before the bombings.

Here are the results for prejudice toward Muslims.

As predicted, the liberals showed a significant increase in anti-Muslim bias, but the conservatives did not change. In other words, the effect of the terrorist threat was to cause liberals to think more like conservatives. The results for prejudice toward immigrants were nearly identical.

If liberals are more influenced by terrorism than conservatives, can this be explained by changes in their basic values? The moral foundations theory of political ideology proposes that liberals and conservatives hold different values. Liberals place a higher value on harm reduction and fairness, while conservatives place a higher priority on ingroup loyalty and respect for authority. Previous research not only supports these predictions, but it also shows that in-group loyalty and respect for authority are predictive of greater prejudice toward minorities, while harm reduction and fairness are associated with lower prejudice. These results are consistent with the well-established finding that conservatives are more prejudiced than liberals.

The London surveys included items measuring these four values. Liberals showed an increase in in-group loyalty and a decline in concern with fairness as a result of the bombings, while conservatives’ concern for these values was unchanged. (Neither liberals nor conservatives changed their attitudes toward harm reduction or respect for authority.) Finally, the researchers’ statistical analysis showed that these changes in attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants were mediated by the changes in the basic values of in-group loyalty and fairness. (See this previous post for an explanation of how mediational hypotheses are tested.)

Many progressive commentators, beginning with Noam Chomsky in his 2001 book, 9/11 (now in its second edition), warned that the United States and Europe were falling into a trap set by Osama bin Laden. As Tom Engelhardt, Glenn Greenwald, and others have also pointed out, the West is continuing to follow the terrorists’ “playbook.”

The short-term strategy behind 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks was to provoke outrage against Muslims among Western populations, in the hope that their governments would overreact by bombing and invading Middle Eastern countries. Their greatest success was George W. Bush’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq, which destabilized the country and led to the establishment of the Islamic State (ISIS). Since the most important predictor of suicide terrorism is the perception by its perpetrators that their homeland is occupied or threatened by foreign military forces, such actions have the effect of recruiting more terrorists.

In fact, as early as 2004, a secret study commissioned by the Defense Department acknowledged that the primary cause of Muslim terrorism was American foreign policy, but knowing that we had no intention of changing our policies, its authors suggested “transforming our strategic communications”–that is, reframing our propaganda directed at Muslims.

A second reason for terrorism, according to this analysis, is to provoke Americans and Europeans into harassing and discriminating against their domestic Muslim populations. If Muslims living in the West are convinced that they can never be assimilated, they will initiate local acts of terrorism, as in San Bernadino, Paris and Brussels. The combined effect of increased military action abroad and repression of Muslims at home is to create a self-perpetuating military machine which recruits many more terrorists than it is able to kill.

The endgame of al Qaida and ISIS is to convince the U. S. and Europe to withdraw completely from the Middle East by drawing us into a series of long, expensive and ultimately unsuccessful ground wars in the Persian Gulf. In this way, they hope to end the West’s economic exploitation and cultural influence on the region.

The study of the London bombings, which its authors entitled “Boosting Belligerence,” suggests that, when Muslim terrorists attack Western countries, the effect on public opinion is exactly what they are hoping for—increased support for right-wing political candidates, an aggressive foreign policy, and repressive domestic policies. It seems to follow from the political analysis of Chomsky and others that ISIS would prefer a Republican to be elected the next president of the United States. Donald Trump is ideally suited to their purposes. Assuming the election is close, ISIS could easily influence its outcome by scheduling a few small-scale terrorist attacks in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

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Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

Kenneth MacWilliams, a pollster and graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, reports that only two variables predict support for Donald Trump among Republican voters. Gender, age, income, education, religiosity and even ideology failed to predict Trump support. The two significant predictors were authoritarianism and fear of terrorism, and authoritarianism was “far more significant.”

MacWilliams’ article is light on details, but the poll was a national sample of 1800 registered voters conducted by UMass during the last five days of December.

What is authoritarianism? The theory of the authoritarian personality has its origin in the aftermath of World War II when social scientists were attempting to account for anti-Semitism in Europe. It was originally measured using the California F-Scale, in which “F” stands for fascism.

The most extensive research program on authoritarianism was conducted by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba in the 1980s and 1990s. He found that authoritarianism is best described by three attitudinal clusters:

  • Authoritarian submission refers to a high degree of obedience to authorities that are regarded as legitimate in the society in which you live.
  • Authoritarian aggression refers to hostile behavior directed at disliked outgroups, provided that such aggression is sanctioned by authorities.
  • Conventionalism refers to a high degree of conformity to behavioral norms endorsed by religious and political authorities.

Combining the first two clusters, authoritarians are said to have a bicyclist’s personality. They bow to those they perceive to be above them in the social structure, while kicking those they think are below them. Not surprisingly, people high in authoritarianism tend to be politically conservative, religious, and prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities and homosexuals. They favor more punitive sentences for criminals and are more accepting of covert government surveillance such as illegal wiretaps. Their preferences for strong leaders and for the exclusion of outsiders are consistent with their support for Trump. MacWilliams found that high authoritarians were more likely to support deporting immigrants that are in the country illegally, prohibiting Muslims from entering the country, closing mosques, and establishing a national data base to track all Muslims.

MacWilliams measured authoritarianism with four questions about child rearing. Participants were asked whether it is more important for children to be respectful or independent, obedient or self-reliant, well-behaved or considerate, and well-mannered or curious. The first of each pair is the authoritarian option. While these questions may seem remote from politics, I see this as a strength of the current survey, since these items are largely independent of any campaign issues.

Political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler found that, while at one time authoritarianism was unrelated to party affiliation, over the last several decades white authoritarians have gravitated to the Republican party while non-authoritarians have shifted into the Democratic party. This may be a result of the Democrats’ support for civil rights and Republicans’ “Southern strategy” of using coded racial messages to appeal to white Southern voters. In the current survey, 49% of Republican voters scored among the top quarter of authoritarians, over twice as many as the number of Democratics.

In 2008, authoritarianism predicted preference for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama among Democratic voters. However, in the current survey, authoritarianism did not predict Democrats’ candidate preference. (Maybe not enough Democrats are aware that Bernie Sanders is Jewish yet.)

Hetherington and Suhay found that the threat of terrorism is associated with greater support for an aggressive foreign policy and the suspension of civil liberties among low authoritarians, but not among high authoritarians, since they prefer these policies regardless of the threat level. In other words, the threat of terrorism leads low authoritarians to act like high authoritarians. There is a very real danger that terrorist attacks in the U. S. and Europe could influence the 2016 presidential election.

Figure-3-Threat-Decreases-Effect-of-Authoritarianism-on-Preference-for-Military-Strength

Altemeyer reports a small study in which he had two groups of about 65 participants each—one consisting of high authoritarians and the other of low authoritarians—play the Global Change Game, a complex 3-hour simulation of the Earth’s future in which players represent different continents. In the low authoritarian simulation, no wars or threats of wars occurred and there was considerable international cooperation. However, the the high authoritarian game, countries responded to the same crises by increasing their arms and the session ended with a nuclear war in which the total population of the Earth was declared dead.

Of course, it was only a game.

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Racialization and “Student-Athletes”

Education, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

The spillover of racialization hypothesis proposes that white racial attitudes are significant predictors of their opinions about a variety of race-neutral social policies. For example, Martin Gilens found a strong relationship among whites between anti-black prejudice and opposition to welfare, which was explained by the fact that whites greatly overestimated the percentage of welfare benefits going to African-Americans. Racialization has increased during during Barack Obama’s presidency. Michael Tesler found that racial attitudes have become a stronger predictor of attitudes toward health care reform in recent years. In addition, attitudes toward two specific health care plans were more strongly affected by prejudice when the plans were attributed to Obama than when they were attributed to Bill Clinton.

It is difficult to reconcile the conflicting estimates of the amount of money generated by college sports, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reports revenue approaching $1 billion per year. In 2013, the University of Texas athletic program alone generated $166 million, and 13 universities took in over $100 million. The NCAA will receive $7.3 billion to broadcast the College Football Playoffs between 2014 and 2026, and $11 billion for the NCAA Basketball Tournament for 14 years.

On the other hand, the college students who play in these games, whose labor is at least the equivalent of a full-time job, and who risk permanent injury, are only permitted to receive athletic scholarships that cover tuition, books, fees, room and board. Preventing athletes from receiving compensation while everyone else profits so greatly has to qualify as one of the great economic injustices of our time. Yet a 2015 HBO Real Sports/Marist poll found that 65% of Americans are opposed to paying college athletes for their labor.

There are a number of possible explanations for this result. It could be partly a matter of self-interest, since people might reasonably infer that ticket prices, cable television fees and college tuition will increase if the athletes are paid. However, most people, when asked about student athletes, probably think of college football and basketball, and since the majority of college football and basketball players are African-Americans, racial attitudes may also be relevant. In fact, the HBO poll found that 55% of African-Americans favor paying college athletes, compared to 42% of Latinos and only 26% of whites.

This led economist Kevin Wallsten and his colleagues to look into the possible racialization of this issue. (This post is based not on their journal article, which is as yet unpublished, but on an article they wrote about it for the Washington Post.) With the help of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, they conducted a survey in which respondents were asked about paying student athletes and also completed a measure of “racial resentment,” two items from the Modern Racism Scale. In a statistical analysis that controlled for other influences, they found that racial resentment was the most significant predictor of white opposition to pay-for-play.

Nevertheless, these data are correlational. It’s possible that some other variable associated with racial resentment is responsible for this outcome. Therefore, they did a followup experiment in which they manipulated the salience of race prior to asking about paying student athletes. They did this by showing one group pictures of young African-American men identified as student athletes prior to asking the question, while another group was not shown any pictures. This is a priming manipulation, similar to Tesler’s experiment in which he attributed health care plans to either Obama or Bill Clinton. The results are shown below.

Both among all whites, and the subset identified as most racially resentful, opposition to paying college athletes was greater following the priming of race. That is, merely inducing the participants to “think about” black people, either consciously or unconsciously, reduced support for the policy.  While race may not be the only factor affecting attitudes toward pay-for-play, these results clearly imply that it plays a causal role.

It reminds me of a study in which whites were more in favor of voter I. D. laws when primed with a picture of black people voting than when the voters in the photo were white. We seem to be in a historical period in which attitudes toward most domestic political issues, as well as party affiliation, are affected by racialization. Many white people oppose social policies if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the policies primarily benefit blacks, although they may not be aware that this is the reason for their opposition and would probably deny it.

The myth of the “student-athlete” is one of the most embarassing hypocrisies in higher education today. Since most of those who control decisions about possible payment are white, it’s hard to be optimistic about obtaining justice for college athletes through any mechanism other than the courts.

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A Darker Side of Politics

Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in the political decisions—often referred to as Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—that have resulted in an association between racism and membership in the Republican party. During their political campaigns, Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) use “dog whistle politics”—racially coded appeals that automatically activate the negative stereotypes of their increasingly prejudiced audience.

There is now a fairly extensive literature in social psychology demonstrating that white people respond more negatively to images of dark-skinned African-Americans than those with lighter skin. For example, one experiment found that participants assigned more negative traits and fewer positive traits to dark-skinned blacks than to light-skinned blacks. Another study showed that, among blacks convicted of murder, those with darker skins were more likely to receive the death penalty.

There are persistent rumors that Barack Obama’s skin tone has been manipulated in campaign advertisements. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accused of doctoring images of Obama to make him appear blacker, although it’s not clear whether this was deliberate. A new set of studies by Solomon Messig and his colleagues analyzes images of Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign against John McCain.

Working from a complete library of television commercials aired by both candidates, the researchers electronically measured the brightness of the faces in all 534 still images, 259 of Obama and 275 of McCain. The advertisements were independently coded for content by judges who were unaware of the purpose of the study. The researchers looked at whether each image appeared in an attack ad, and whether the ad tried to associate the candidate with criminal activity. Two differences emerged. Obama’s skin tone was darker in commercials linking him with criminal activity—see example below—than in all other images of Obama.

In fact, 86% of the photos in these ads were among the darkest 25% of all Obama photos. Secondly, in attack ads produced by the McCain campaign, images of Obama grew darker toward the end of the campaign, even as their own images of McCain grew lighter.

The authors did two followup studies to determine whether darker images of Obama activated more negative reactions to black people than lighter images of Obama. They wanted to show that darkening the skin of a familiar black man, whom they refer to as “counterstereotypical,” would have the same effect as the darker faces of the unknown persons used in previous studies. In one experiment, participants viewed one of the Obama images below and completed a stereotype activation task in which they were asked to fill in the blanks of incomplete words such as “L A _ _” and “_ _ O R.” The darker image of Obama on the right elicited more stereotypical completions—“lazy” and “poor,” in these cases—than the lighter image.

The second study was more complicated, involving subliminal priming, but it too found that a variety of darker images of Obama yield more negative reactions than lighter images of Obama.

It’s not clear from these studies what the McCain campaign actually did in 2008. Did they deliberately darken some images of Obama, or did they merely select darker images? If the latter, did they select images because of their darkness, or were they merely trying to choose images than made him “look bad,” without thinking about why. The fact that these darker images appeared in ads attempting to link Obama with criminality, however, suggests that whatever they did was not accidental.

These campaign ads appeared on television seven years ago. The pace of social psychological research—including the publication lag—is often quite slow. The two followup studies probably accounted for most of the delay. Although they allowed the authors to tie up some loose ends, it could be argued that they were unnecessary, since they largely replicated previous studies. The delay was unfortunate, since the analysis of the ads didn’t appear in print until Obama was no longer running for office and the corporate media could treat it as old news. Sometimes postponing the release of information is almost as effective as completely suppressing it.

Of course, there will be other black candidates and many more opportunities for dog whistle politics.

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Guarding the Hen House

Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

What role does Fox News play in the recent wave of anti-Muslim attitudes in this country? Fox has a long history of race baiting. This Bill O’Reilly segment, called “The Muslim Invasion,” predates both the Paris and San Bernadino attacks.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has released an analysis by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel of survey data collected by the American National Election Studies (ANES) in 2012. A national sample of respondents was asked, “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most Muslims?” The chart below shows the averages for white Democrats and Republicans who do or do not watch Fox News regularly, while statistically controlling for age, income, education, religiosity and geographical region.

The lower the dot, the more violent Muslims are perceived as being. While you might have guessed that Republicans are more likely to see most Muslims as violent than Democrats, watching Fox News is actually a stronger indicator of bias against Muslims than party affiliation. In fact, if they watch Fox News regularly, Democrats don’t differ significantly from Republicans in their tendency to describe Muslims as violent.

The ANES survey also found Fox News viewing to be a significant predictor of responses to five of ten items measuring prejudice against African-Americans. For example, one item read, “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Researchers found strong effects of both party affiliation and Fox viewership.

Regular Fox viewers (and Republicans) were also more likely to:

  • Agree that blacks should be able to overcome prejudice without any special favors, just as “Irish, Italian, Jewish and other minorites” have done.
  • Disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have made it more difficult for blacks to get ahead.
  • Disagree that over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
  • Agree that blacks have too much political influence in this country.

All of these items were intended to measure modern or symbolic racism, sometimes also called racial resentment, which refers to racism revealed in subtle, indirect ways which allow the respondent to deny being prejudiced. Fox viewers did not differ from non-Fox viewers on indicators of old-fashioned racism, such as labeling blacks as “lazy” or “unintelligent.”

To complete the trifecta, studies also find that Fox viewers are more likely to hold anti-Latino and anti-immigrant attitudes.

These are correlational studies, since people decide for themselves whether to watch Fox News. Correlation does not imply causation. Does watching Fox News lead to greater prejudice, do people who were already prejudiced prefer Fox News, or is some third variable causing some people to both be more prejudiced and to watch Fox News? (Note, however, that some of the more likely third variables, such as age, education and region, are statistically controlled in the ANES analysis.)

Two arguments can be offered in support of the claim that Fox News is causally responsible for at least some of these differences in prejudice.

  1. The mass media are more likely to directly influence attitudes toward current events than to change long-standing beliefs. The “try” question above is probably a long-standing belief. But a 2010 study found that Fox News viewers were also 31% more likely to believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, a view that was heavily promoted by Fox at the time. Fox viewership was also associated with false rumors about the “Ground Zero mosque” in 2010.

  1. Two studies examined the effects of the spread of Fox News into new television markets. They both measured conservatism generally, rather than racial attitudes, but conservatism and prejudice are strongly related. In one study, the introduction of Fox into the area significantly increased the Republican vote share between 1996 and 2000, compared to other locations. Another study found that Congressional representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—became more conservative in their voting patterns following the startup of Fox News in their districts.

Both of these studies are quasi-experiments. They are not true experiments because Fox News does not randomly choose locations in which to broadcast. However, in order to explain away these data, you would have to assume not that Fox chooses more conservative locations, but rather that Fox happens to choose locations that are on the verge of a conservative shift. This is unlikely, though not impossible.

I cringe whenever I walk into a public building and find Fox News playing in the lobby or waiting room, especially when it’s a location, such as an airport or hospital, that is subsidized by government funds.

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Making a Mockery of the Batson Rule

Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology,

Even when a jury pool is selected from the community by a reasonably random method, prospective jurors are questioned in a process known as voir dire, during which both the prosecution and the defense can object to jurors. A potential juror can be eliminated either by a challenge for cause, such as being acquainted with the defendant, or by a limited number of peremptory challenges, in which the attorney does not have to specify a reason. The number of peremptory challenges permitted varies among the states.

Historically, peremptory challenges have been used by prosecutors to create all-white juries in cases involving black defendants. However, in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that using peremptory challenges to exclude jurors based solely on their race violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Batson rule states that whenever the prosecution or defense excludes a minority group member, it must specify a race-neutral reason. However, there is widespread consensus that this procedure has failed to eliminate racial discrimination, since judges accept a wide variety of “race-neutral” excuses for disqualifying black members of the jury pool.

Here are excerpts from a 1996 (post-Batson) training video instructing young prosecutors on how to select a jury. This blatant endorsement of prosecutorial misconduct was produced by former Philadelphia District Attorney Ron Castille, who went on to become Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Racial discrimination in jury selection is arguably more important today than in 1986, given the large differences in attitudes between whites and African-Americans toward the police and the criminal justice system. For example, in a July 2015 New York Times poll, 77% of black respondents, but only 44% of whites, thought that the criminal justice is biased against blacks. Clearly, black and white jurors approach criminal cases from very different perspectives. Laboratory research suggests that racially diverse juries exchange a wider range of information and make fewer errors than all-white juries.

Yesterday, the Supremes heard oral arguments in Foster v. Chatman, a blatant case of racial discrimination in jury selection. Timothy Foster, a black man, was convicted and sentenced to death for killing a white woman in 1987 by an all-white jury in Rome, Georgia. All four black potential jurors were disqualified by the prosecution using peremptory challenges. In notes that recently surfaced, it was found that prosecutors circled the names of the prospective black jurors in green and labeled them B#1, B#2, etc. They were ranked in order of acceptability “in case it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.” It did not come to that. The judge accepted a variety of “race-neutral” reasons, including rejecting one 34-year-old black woman for being too close in age to the defendant, who was 19, even though they did not challenge eight white potential jurors aged 35 or younger (including one man who was 21). In the trial itself, the prosecutor urged the jury to sentence Foster to death in order to send a message to “deter other people out there in the projects.”

There is abundant evidence from field studies conducted after the Batson decision showing that racial discrimination in jury selection still exists. For example, Grosso and O’Brien examined 173 capital cases in North Carolina between 1987 and 2010, involving over 7400 potential jurors. Prosecutors struck 52.6% of potential black jurors and 25.7% of potential white jurors. In cases with a black defendant, the strike rates were 60% for blacks and 21.3% for whites. A black prospective juror was 2.48 times more likely to be excluded than a white even after statistically controlling for the most common race-neutral reasons given for challenging a potential juror.

A laboratory experiment by Norton and Sommers (2007) illustrates the flexibility with which people can rationalize racially discriminatory decisions. Participants (college students, law students and attorneys) were asked to assume the role of prosecutor in a criminal case with a black defendant. They were told they had one peremptory challenge left, and to choose between two prospective jurors—a journalist who had investigated police misconduct and an advertising executive who expressed skepticism about statistical evidence to be used by the prosecution. For half the participants, the journalist was said to be African-American and the advertiser white, while for the remainder of the participants the races were reversed. The black juror candidate was challenged 63% of the time. When participants were asked why they struck the person they did, only 7% mentioned race, while 96% mentioned either the journalist’s investigation of police misconduct or the ad man’s skepticism about statistics. More importantly, both justifications were more likely to be cited as critical when they were associated with the black prospective juror than with the white prospective juror.

Today’s news reports suggest that even the more conservative Supremes were sympathetic the the defense’s arguments in Foster v. Chatman. However, the Court could decide the case very narrowly by simply overturning Foster’s conviction. It would be more interesting if their decision were to establish some new principle to minimize the abuse of peremptory challenges. It’s unlikely that these nine justices will establish a minority “quota” against which the fairness of juries can be assessed. However, an argument could be made for severely limiting peremptory challenges, or dispensing with them altogether, on the grounds that they merely provide opportunities for attorneys to express their conscious or implicit biases. If they have a legitimate reason for challenging a juror, let them present it to the judge for evaluation. Otherwise, let the juror be seated.

A beneficial side effect of eliminating peremptory challenges would be to put out of business those expensive “scientific” jury consultants who help lawyers choose a “friendly” jury. To the extent that they are actually helpful, this is yet another advantage possessed by wealthy defendants.

If the Supremes fail to eliminate peremptory challenges, then this case has implications for the fairness of the death penalty.

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Health, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology,

I run across a new study documenting discrimination against a minority group—usually African-Americans—almost every day. They are so commonplace that I seldom write about them, even though I know the cumulative effect of discrimination is devastating to its victims. However, since most of these studies are not controlled experiments, critics can usually offer alternative explanations that blame the victim. For example, if we find that black kids are expelled from schools at a much higher rate than white kids, a critic can always charge that they misbehave more often or that their misbehavior is more serious. While it’s sometimes possible to collect additional data that makes these explanations unlikely, they are hard to refute definitively.

I don’t think that reservation applies to a recent study by Dr. Monika Goyal and her colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It involves willingness to prescribe pain medication to black and white children suffering with appendicitis.

The data come from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, a national probability survey of visits to hospital emergency departments between 2003 and 2010. The unwitting participants were about 940,000 children (mean age = 13.5) admitted with a diagnosis of appendicitis. The children were categorized as white, black or other. The main outcome measure was whether they received analgesic medication for their pain, and if so whether it was an opiate—generally acknowledged to be more effective—or a nonopiate, such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen. The effects of several control variables were statistically removed before analyzing the data: age, gender, ethnicity, triage acuity level, insurance status, geographic region, type of emergency department, year, and (most importantly) pain score on the 10-point Stanford Pain Scale.

Overall, 56.8% of the children received some type of pain medication and 41.3% received at least one opiate. These percentages are lower than is medically recommended. Not surprisingly, the higher the pain score, the greater the likelihood of receiving an analgesic.

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The table shows the distribution of analgesia by race, holding pain level constant. The black-white difference in receiving any analgesia was not statistically significant; however, whites were more likely to receive a more effective opioid analgesic than blacks reporting the same pain level. (In case you were wondering, the analysis of ethnicity showed no significant discrimination against Hispanics.)

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The data were further analyzed by looking at different levels of pain. Severe pain was defined as between “7” and “10” on the pain scale, while moderate pain was between “4” and “6.” Black and white children in severe pain were equally likely to get some pain medication, but whites were more likely to get opiates. Greater discrimination occurred among children with moderate pain. Black children were not only less likely to get opiates, they were also less likely to get anything at all. In other words, there are higher thresholds for both treating black children for pain, and for treating their pain with opiates.

The authors point out that previous ER studies have found that blacks of all ages and with various medical conditions were less likely to receive analgesics, but these studies can be explained away with victim-blaming rationalizations. For example, it was proposed that, since blacks were less likely to have health insurance, they used the emergency room for less serious conditions. However, all of these children had the same illness its severity was held constant. It has also been proposed that doctors are less willing to trust black patients with opiates due stereotypes about drug misuse. However, the current study did not involve prescriptions, and none of these children were sent home. Presumably, they all received appendectomies as soon as possible.

Since this study was published, it has been suggested that the findings reflect hospital policies rather than decisions by individual doctors. Maybe inner city hospitals that serve a higher percentage of black patients discourage their doctors from prescribing analgesics, especially opiates. It probably doesn’t matter to these kids whether they are denied pain relief by a person with a stethoscope or a person in a suit, although these two hypotheses do suggest different remedies.

In trying to understand this finding, I find myself drawn to some of the most depressing studies in all of social psychology—those involving dehumanization. Dehumanization refers to perceiving and treating another person as non-human—for example, as if he or she were an animal. Dehumanization is sometimes invoked as an explanation for extreme abuses, such as enslavement, torture and genocide. Ordinarily, when you see children in pain, you want to relieve their suffering if possible. Failure to do so suggests dehumanization of the victim. Studies show what appears to be dehumanization of black children (relative to white children) as early as age 10.

Social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and her colleagues have done studies suggesting that among white Americans, there is an unconscious association between black people and apes (called the “Negro-ape metaphor.”) To understand her studies, you must know about subliminal priming. A subliminal stimulus is an image presented very rapidly, below the threshhold of awareness. Studies show that subliminal primes improve the recognition of objects in the same or similar categories. Eberhardt has found that subliminally priming participants with images of black people improves their ability to recognize pictures of apes, and vice versa.

In one of her studies, participants were subliminally primed with images of either apes or large cats (lions, tigers, etc.) and shown a video of a policeman severely beating a suspect who they were informed was either black or white. Participants primed with ape images were more likely to see the beating of the black man as justified. This did not occur when they were primed with images of big cats, or when the suspect was said to be white.

Eberhardt did a content analysis of news articles showing that reporters were more likely to use ape metaphors when referring to convicted black murderers than convicted white murderers. Furthermore, those killers described as apelike were more likely to be executed by the state.

I suspect that dehumanization is one cause of the greater willingness of police to shoot and kill black suspects than white suspects in similar situations. Philip Atiba Goff and his colleagues were able to test police officers from a large urban department. The researchers had anonymous access to their personnel files, including their previous uses of force. The more strongly the officers associated black people with apes, the more frequently they had used force against black children, relative to children of other races, during their careers.

The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, on the body.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (p. 10)

Anonymous e-mail circulated among Florida Republicans
Anonymous e-mail circulated among Florida Republicans

It might also be a good idea to take a closer look at those political cartoons depicting President Obama as an ape.

We can only hope the publication of the Goyal study in such a prominent medical journal shames the profession into correcting this type of discrimination against black children. It is unacceptable.