Bias In A Racially Unequal Society Summary

In their article, “Discrimination and Implicit Bias in a Racially Unequal Society,” R. Richard Banks, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, and Lee Rosst take the position that even as a society denounces racism publicly, there are still many practices of racism. That racism in fact evolved into a more potent form. One that is harder to get rid of, and might not even present itself. The authors arguments had three main components. They spoke on racial profiling, citing that people, even the police officers that were tested, are more likely to say a “stereotypical” African-American male is a criminal, as opposed to a “less stereotypical” African-American man, based on a study conducted by Eberhardt and some of his colleagues. The authors also examined a series of …show more content…
This reveals an implicit bias that exists, because they aren’t identifiable, they are more covert. They are even in people that aren’t explicitly racist, or trying to be racist. A way to find these biases is the IAT, or the Implicit Associations Test. The test uses a series of photos and adjectives to categorize them, then flips the associations. It measures how long it takes to execute they keystrokes of the person, to test for a bias on a much smaller scale, such as milliseconds. These biases can be dissected and boiled down to similarity-based, or behavioral based. Similarity based involves comparing the state of mind of the individual to universal racism, and behavioral discusses how the IAT and the compares to real life. The IAT also has some holes in it. Many other factors play into how much a Caucasian person makes eye contact with an African-American. Also, a study was done with the same shooting study, and then had the participants take the Race IAT, and found no correlation between the results. Even in the modern world, where racism is openly denounced, racism can still exist, and it might be harder than ever to stamp