Despite the clear evidence that racism exists, as we saw in the last blog, in survey after survey no-one will admit to being a racist!
In one experiment, people were told they were being asked to apply to be part of a scientific study. They were asked to complete a long and complex questionnaire which included some questions which would indicate whether the person has a racial bias. Months later, the same people were invited back to be part of an actual study, part of which was to compare themselves with a random person who had also completed the questionnaire. The comparison was whether you were more or less racist than the other person as demonstrated by the answers to the questionnaire. In just about every case the person felt they were less racist than the random other. What they didn’t know was that they had been given back their own questionnaire!
The explanation to this, according to research, is a combination of “unconscious bias” but also that people go to incredible lengths to do racist things, but to do them in such a way that proving the racism is next to impossible. Experimenters found that people would go to great lengths to avoid employing ethnic minorities. Lying about people having to sign imaginary forgotten forms, lying about positions being filled, lying about having to check references, lying about hotel rooms being unavailable, ‘randomly’ checking the status of the Black person and only the Black person at a conference.
What this means is that if a person from an ethnic background doesn’t get a job interview for what seems a good reason there is always a doubt that they might be being lied to and discriminated against.
Another way that we can be racist without admitting it is how we interpret information. E.g. We could look at the percentages of people in prison (about 0.13% of the White population of the UK, compared to 0.44% of the Black population) and focus on the fact that Black people are 3.5 times more likely to be in prison. Or we could look at the other side of those numbers. They indicate that 99.87% of White people in the UK are not in prison and a very similar 99.56% of Black people in the UK are not in prison. Looked at that way, the differences between White and Black people seem a lot smaller and less important.
Yet this type of information has been used to justify why black people are stopped and searched far more often than white people. As Professor West says, this is victim blaming at its finest. It ignores instances in which White people are statistically more likely to commit crimes. It uses quippy phrases like ‘Black-on-Black crime’ but ignores the mirrored reality of ‘White-on-White crime’. It uses small but apparently real statistical differences in criminal convictions between groups to justify large, widespread, disproportionate and sometimes deadly forms of discrimination, even when White people who have themselves been convicted of crimes do not face the same level of stigma. If you want to be really racist, but you don’t want to admit it to yourself, this is a great way to start.
Tony Thompson
Leave a Reply