Are You Culpable for Your Implicit Racial Bias?

This topic is a bit heated considering racism is still having consequences on minority groups in the U.S., but conceptualizing exactly what is the problem and ascribing the right amount of blame is important to not starting witch hunts. So lets get into two relevant studies real quick before getting into it.

Fun Research and Stuff!

Elizabeth Phelps of NYU showed that learning fear associations for other-race faces was faster than same-race faces. Implicit-association tests (IAT) seek to find these biases in people and make them aware. The basis for this test seems legitimate, the grounding being however long it takes you to associate black faces with positive and negative words shows out-group bias. There are some conversation of whether or not this is predictive of bias, but the general consensus is yes–whether or not it seeps out into behavior is complicated.

Another staple to implicit bias research; Flash an opposite-race face on a screen faster than is consciously perceptible and the amygdala (fear and aggression center of the brain to be simplistic) actives on the average person. Wait about a second and other parts of the brain activate and inhibit the amygdala and therefore the fear response. So, this kind of racism is typically transient and only concerns quick reaction settings. The brain is amazingly fast at noticing socioeconomic status at a hundred milliseconds or so as well as race.

In one paper, (Stepanikova, I. (2012). Racial-Ethnic Biases, Time Pressure, and Medical Decisions) it was found that black men get refereed less to specialists than white men during a time crunch in a clinic. The frontal lobe associated with downregulating implicit racism is slow, and needs time to come online.

This all makes tragic sense in a evolutionary framework of kin selection. Aiding the in-group instead of the out-group because you are more likely to be related to the in-group and if you help out the in-group that is socially proximal to you, they will be more likely to aid you down the road because you helped them and because they are your neighbor and they have to live next to you.

Of Course We’re Talking About Nazi’s

Perhaps an argument could be made against a Neo-Nazi being culpable for subconsciously harming a black person because his conscious opinions of black people match his subconscious actions. But someone who is a Neo-Nazi is probably painfully aware that he is culpable for his hatred of other races, so worry in this direction seems useless due to the unlikelihood of changing the opinion.

Culpability

In what way can we say a person is culpable for immediate, subconscious decisions? Black males are also more likely to be considered to be armed than white males. This has implications for the shooting of black suspects that are actually unarmed. The effect is so tragic and gut retching we don’t consider whether the blame is worthy, we ascribe it without thinking to officers, but in most cases (of course there are blatant murderers walking around in uniforms, but most are not) they had no conscious say in the matter. Now, in saying someone is not blame worthy for a terrible action due to its immediate and subconscious effect, I am NOT saying this is at all acceptable or should continue. Whether we ascribe implicit bias to biology, culture, or both, we must consider that the implicit bias holder is probably not consciously racist. Dealing with the unconscious racism is more important due to the fact that it is more systemic and is likely to be innate in our biology to a degree, or atleast we are predisposed to be implicitly racist.

The U.S. has a great history of keeping thoughts unregulated by legislation. Obviously we cannot hold the Neo-Nazi legally culpable for having or even spreading his beliefs, but if he should ascend to a seat of power, we can hold him legally culpable for his opinions coming out in provable discriminate behavior, because it infringes on other people’s freedom. That is the line in the sand.

Solutions?

The immediate solution to these types of incidents is obvious: just remove the time sensitive scenarios all together. It seems imperative to do this and incur any financial hit there is in giving clinics more time to decide whether or not a patient needs referral, Instead of standing on a moral hill and wanting to persecute racists, perhaps it would be easier to identify situations where our subconscious gets the best of us and see whether or not we should change a variable. How about mandating a certain amount of time spent with a patient? Or take more time to look at resumes so bias does not slip out there? If we try to solve every problem by yoking people to a set of morals we will see there are decisions that are immune to logic, that old primate brain.

Policing is a different beast, but the policy of “command and control” in America does make a lot of these cases of quick reaction decisions that is not optimal for other-race individuals, and even further makes policing perhaps more aggressive than it need be. Some is innate in the job and cannot be helped. For the sake of argument, say high IAT scores are related to unarmed shootings of that other-race groups. So, if we in fact find a racial group of cops that shoot more of a certain different-race group, then it would be fairly sound to only allow officers who have a low IAT score on the job. You are allowed your opinions until it affects other people, culpability be damned.

Gentle social traction and removal of scenarios that are conducive to implicit racism seems to be the best policy on this kind of implicit racism–the kind that will melt away when awareness is brought to it by the holder. On the bright side there are some methods for reducing implicit racism.

Now, when sufficient evidence for your implicit racism is given, but your opinions affect no one, and you maintain your racism, perhaps we should consider harsh social criticism for this behavior; at a point we must consider inaction as a form of acceptance of the standing behavior. At no point can we think about violence or legal action against these individuals; society will do enough to these individuals on social media alone. However, culpability is not necessary in mitigating racism, we can just see this as mitigating racism and negative consequences in making someone aware of their racism. Holding someone accountable for unconscious decisions they are not aware of that their biology predisposes them towards without reciprocity is no way to make a positive change on behavior.

Originally published at brandondot.wordpress.com on August 26, 2018.