Unconscious Racial Prejudice as Psychological Resistance: A Limitation … · 2018. 7. 19. · call the Resistance Model of unconscious racial prejudice. In sections 1 and 2, I outline

Unconscious Racial Prejudice as Psychological Resistance: A Limitation of the Implicit Bias Model

Lori Gallegos De Castillo

Critical Philosophy of Race, Volume 6, Issue 2, 2018, pp. 262-279 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

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critical philosophy of race, vol. 6, no. 2, 2018Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania

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Abstract

Studies have shown that a person can consciously believe that they value racial equality and desire not to perpetuate racial stigmas, but unwittingly exhibit racist attitudes and beliefs. In order to explain this discrepancy between conscious beliefs and behavior, scholars have turned their attention to unconscious racial prejudice. One approach that is gaining wide acceptance is the Implicit Bias Model, which appeals to distinct implicit and explicit cognitive processes, coupled with an account of the ways in which people unconsciously internalize widespread stereo-types and stigmas. This article claims that although the Implicit Bias Model is in many respects useful, it leaves out a central aspect of unconscious racial prejudice: the underlying motiva-tions and incentives for harboring racist attitudes and beliefs, which generate psychological resistances to knowing about or changing prejudices. A more complete account of unconscious racial prejudice can be developed by turning to theories of active ignorance, which contribute to what this article calls the Resistance Model.

lori gallegos de castilloTexas State University San Marcos

unconscious

racial prejudice

as psychological

resistance

A Limitation of the

Implicit Bias Model

263 ■ lori gallegos de castillo

Keywords: implicit bias, unconscious prejudice, active ignorance, resistance, racism, social epistemology

Introduction

It has become widely accepted among scholars of racism that one need not be consciously or intentionally racist in order to perpetuate racial stigmas, to be complicit in racist social structures, or to behave in ways that are harmful to people of color in particular. Indeed, we know that a person can consciously believe that they value racial equality and desire not to perpetu-ate racial stigmas, but unwittingly exhibit racist attitudes and beliefs. In order to make sense of these discrepancies, scholars in recent decades have focused on the phenomenon of unconscious racial prejudice. In addition to examining racism as structural, they are focusing on how living within a racist society surreptitiously influences a person’s affects, attitudes, percep-tions, habits, judgments, and other cognitive processes, even for those who consciously oppose racism.

Prejudice is defined here as a negative, unfounded assessment of people on the basis of their social identity.1 One model for describing the nature of unconscious racial prejudice2 that is gaining wide acceptance, particularly in Anglo-American philosophy, is the Implicit Bias Model.3 In this article, I intend for us to look at the ways in which this increasingly accepted account is limited. My central claim in this essay is that although the Implicit Bias Model is in many respects useful, it leaves out a central aspect of unconscious racial prejudice. As a result, it is limited in its capacity to explain or challenge unconscious prejudice. I propose that a more com-plete account of unconscious racial prejudice can be developed by turning to theories of active ignorance, particularly those that contribute to what I call the Resistance Model of unconscious racial prejudice. In sections 1 and 2, I outline the key features of the Implicit Bias Model and the Resistance Model of unconscious racial prejudice. Then, in section 3 I describe a cen-tral limitation of the Implicit Bias Model and show how the Resistance Model accounts for the oversight. Ultimately, the more complete account of the psychology of unconscious racial prejudice is important because it makes us better equipped to examine issues of moral responsibility for unconscious racial prejudice, helps to explain why racism is so pernicious,

264 ■ critical philosophy of race

and provides a foundation for examining avenues for individual anti-racist moral growth.

1. The Implicit Bias Model

The Implicit Bias Model is a theory of unconscious prejudice that has devel-oped after decades’ worth of social-psychological and cognitive scientific research on implicit bias. The term “implicit bias” describes a preference for one group over another that is not experienced consciously, but instead operates implicitly, that is, beyond the agent’s full awareness, and automati-cally, or in a way that is difficult or impossible to consciously control. To illustrate, consider the following scenario from the now-foundational work on implicit bias by Tamar Gendler (2008): You are terrified of heights, but you are asked to walk out onto a glass walkway that juts out past the edge of the Grand Canyon. When approaching the glass walkway, you know con-sciously that it is safe—after all, you see other people doing so without problems—but you simultaneously experience fear so real that it manifests in bodily reactions: dread in your stomach, sweaty palms, etc. And yet the fear is not based on reason, as all reasons point to the fact that the glass walkway is safe. To explain what is happening in this case, Gendler distin-guishes between regular beliefs and what she calls “aleifs”—mental states (in this case, the fearful response) with associatively linked content (the idea of falling) that is activated by features of a subject’s environment (642). You believe that you are safe, but you also “alieve” that you will plunge to your death. In spite of telling oneself over and over again that one is safe, the intuition of danger persists.

In some respects, the “alief” is akin to the implicit bias. Like the anxiety about falling, implicit biases occur automatically. They are reac-tionary to the environment, but are not particularly responsive to the reasons, intentions, desires, or conscious beliefs of the agent, and they persist in spite of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps even more than the alief that one is in danger, though, implicit biases exist and often mani-fest unconsciously, hidden beneath the awareness of the individuals who have them. Indeed, research into implicit biases began because studies of racial bias that relied on direct question-asking and self-reporting indi-cated that racial biases in the United States were disappearing, in spite of other evidence to the contrary. Social psychologists thus began to turn


to unobtrusive research methods – that is, methods intended to capture underlying attitudes and their behavioral manifestations, and not con-scious beliefs and values. One of these methods is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is a computer- or paper-based test that measures how quickly and accurately test-takers make positive and negative associations with certain social groups. It is not uncommon for test scores to be at odds with test-takers’ expectations and self-perceptions (46). Furthermore, the behavioral manifestations of bias—such as decreased eye contact with a person from a stereotyped group, failing to show emotional warmth, or sitting further away—are often subtle enough on an individual level, that people who manifest these behaviors may be unaware that they are doing so (48–50).

Researchers who work on implicit bias have theorized that implicit cog-nition is evolutionarily adapted to allow us to accomplish cognitive activi-ties that are important to our survival, like reacting rapidly to avoid danger, or efficiently categorizing and responding to our physical and social envi-ronments (Banaji and Greenwald 2013, 7–93). Learning to closely associate the concept of “snake” and the concept of “danger” is very helpful to our survival, and once we learn this association, it will be easy for us to think of a “dangerous snake,” but more difficult to think of a harmless or adorable snake. Scientists have proposed a model of mind in which there are two systems: System One, which is fast and automatic, and System Two, which is slow and deliberate (Kahneman 2011). System Two is what we usually associate with the activity of thinking. It includes effortful, deliberative pro-cesses, which are reason-responsive. It is through System Two processes that we reflect upon many of our conscious beliefs and values. Implicit bias, meanwhile, is said to pertain to System One processes. Daniel Kahneman (2011) describes the functions of the two systems this way: System Two is required to figure out when we need to leave in order to get to the airport on time, but almost everything else we do to get there—walking to the car, opening the door, starting it, putting on the seatbelt, driving, and all of the things we do “on autopilot”—relies on System One. System One also provides content and fills in the gaps when System Two processes are inex-pedient or inadequate. For example, a police officer who is in a dangerous situation and must quickly respond to a perceived threat might draw from implicit assessments of her surroundings.4 System One processes function by drawing from one’s immediately available resources in order to issue the sorts of snap judgments that we frequently need to make. Very often,


stereotypes provide a convenient set of social categories from which we automatically draw. Drawing from generalizable knowledge about groups can sometimes improve our capacity to better understand and respond to others.5 Other times, however, implicit bias can undermine our best judg-ment. Studies have shown that most people hold some implicit biases that track social hierarchies, and that implicit racial bias is one of the most wide-spread kinds of implicit bias.6

Accumulating empirically established evidence links implicit bias to discriminatory behaviors. As a result, several psychologists (Devine 1989; Fiske 1998; Gaertner and Dovidio 1986) have separately determined that implicit racial biases—not explicitly racist attitudes—are “major contribu-tors to the perpetuation of discrimination” (Devine 2012, 1267).

There are a number of reasons why the Implicit Bias Model of uncon-scious racial prejudice is appealing. The model allows us to explain important moral psychological phenomena. For instance, it explains the psychological mechanisms behind Fricker’s notion of testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when a listener harms a speaker in her capacity as a knower by doubting the speaker’s credibility or sincerity because of the speaker’s race, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, class, nationality, or other social identity marker. A voter with an implicit gender bias might not trust the decision-making capacities of a woman in a leadership position. (For the voter, the concept of “leadership” is more closely associated with the concept of “men” than “women,” and as a result, her System One cognition involves doubts about a female leader’s competency). A police investigator with an implicit racial bias might doubt the account of a crime given by an African American eyewitness. (Implicit associations between “black” and “untrustworthy” leads her to doubt the eyewitness’ sincerity). In these cases, implicit bias operates at the level of perception to influence the way in which a listener relates to a speaker. By emphasizing the role of widely held stereotypes on individual cognition and the material consequences of these cognitive processes on the lives of people of color, the Implicit Bias Model provides a way of bridging racism, a structural phenomenon, with individuals’ racial prejudices.

In addition to its explanatory value, the Implicit Bias Model has another feature that is an apparent plus: It is based primarily on empir-ical evidence, relying largely on the IAT and on studies that track the manifestations of these biases in social encounters. The empirical basis of the model makes findings of implicit bias difficult to deny. As a result,


it may be tempting to treat the Implicit Bias Model as authoritative on the topic of unconscious racial prejudice. One problem with this conclu-sion, as Jeanine Weeks Schroer (2015) has argued, is that the assumption that certain types of empirical findings are needed to support claims of the existence of racism results in the view that first-person testimonial accounts of racism are based on insufficient evidence and we should be skeptical of such accounts until the science is able to back them up. The worry is that the very theory that could be credited with helping us to understand testimonial injustice is grounded on an assumption about epistemic legitimacy that encourages us to treat first-person testimonial accounts of racism as, at the very least, epistemically insufficient. While Weeks Schroer’s concern about the rejection of first-person testimony is insightful, I suggest in sections 2 and 3 that even in cases where substan-tial scientific evidence indicates the presence of racism in social practices and policies, an underlying resistance to these findings on the part of many whites leads them to ignore, misunderstand, discredit, or otherwise remain ignorant of this evidence.

Another problem—the one that I want to focus on here—is that the model does not include an account of the incentives and motivations that those in positions of racial privilege have (consciously or not) for harbor-ing racist attitudes and beliefs. To put the problem differently, the Implicit Bias Model gives us a helpful explanation of why those who are consciously committed to racial justice may nevertheless behave in ways that manifest unconscious racial prejudice: The model holds that we are equally suscepti-ble to the internalization of stereotypes and stigmas, because we are all cog-nitively wired in the same way. We are all vulnerable to becoming conduits for the types of messages that are pervasive in the societies within which we live. For this reason, even members of marginalized groups can have implicit biases against the very groups to which they belong. I argue that this is only part of the story, though. I am proposing that there is an addi-tional dimension to unconscious racial prejudice that goes beyond simple internalization of environmental cues. Namely, I claim that unconscious racial prejudice in whites is supported by unconscious desires and motiva-tions that lead them to be resistant to changing racist attitudes and beliefs. I contend that a Resistance Model of unconscious racial prejudice, which draws from theories of active ignorance, allows us to grasp this dimension more fully.


2. The Resistance Model

One of the central insights of Freudian psychoanalysis is that the mind has certain tricks for handling memories, desires, fears, or other psychic content that is too painful or otherwise difficult for a person to confront directly. In this context, the term “resistance” describes activity aimed at preventing these difficult confrontations.7 Critical race theorists and femi-nist standpoint epistemologists have identified one type of resistance com-mon to those with social privilege as active ignorance. Active ignorance is a form of sometimes-unconscious psychological resistance to knowing about the conditions that allow for one’s own social privilege and to grasping the experiences of those who are oppressed.

Philosophers like Charles Mills (2007), Linda Alcoff (2007), and José Medina (2013), among others, have put forth the view that people occupy-ing privileged social positions with respect to race engage in practices that generate and perpetuate bodies of ignorance surrounding the social and political conditions that afford their privilege. Whites, for example, tend to be ignorant about the fact that power in society is allocated according to a race-based hierarchy that favors whites, and they are ignorant that the qualities of individuals may play only a small role in their likelihood to secure many social and material goods.

A central feature of active ignorance is that the ignorance is not merely the result of a lack of good epistemic practice, but is “a substantive practice in itself” (Alcoff 2007, 39). Dominant groups have a positive interest in practicing ignorance because this ignorance helps to preserve systems of social privilege (46). Alison Baily (2007) contrasts this active ignorance to accidental ignorance, which is a lack of knowledge that could be corrected through the discovery of missing information (81). Active ignorance is not caused by a lack of information. Instead, it is generated in spite of access to information, or in order to avoid certain information. Sometimes this production of ignorance is direct and deliberate. Sometimes active igno-rance is perpetuated by institutions. Baily contends, for example, that active ignorance “can take the form of those in the center either refusing to allow those at the margins to know, or of actively erasing indigenous knowledges” (77). A subtler kind of active ignorance—the one which I am interested in exploring here—involves the existence of “epistemic blank spots that make privileged knowers oblivious to systemic injustices,” even when indications of injustice exist (77).


There are a number of ways in which individuals can contribute to their own epistemic blank spots with respect to racial injustice. One way individuals exhibit active ignorance is through what has been called “fragil-ity.” In the context of social privilege, psychological fragility does not refer to those with privilege being actually susceptible to injury, or vulnerable to harm. Instead, it refers to the ways in which those with privilege are cod-dled by privilege such that any confrontation with the reality of others’ rela-tive disadvantage is perceived by them as a threat. It refers, furthermore, to their corresponding lack of stamina for confronting these ideas.

Robin DiAngelo (2011) defines “white fragility” as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.” (54) These defensive moves are forms of resis-tance to difficult confrontations with racial inequality. Common responses to racial stress include: emotions like anger, fear, or guilt; behaviors of with-drawal or argumentation; and experiences of cognitive dissonance, confu-sion, and the inability to see oneself as implicated in discussions of race. Another resistant response is for whites to position themselves as the vic-tims or punching bags of bullying anti-racist efforts when “forced” to think about race. DiAngelo explains that by shifting the focus to a defense of their moral standing as individuals, whites are able to avoid addressing the ways in which they are beneficiaries of white privilege (64).

A second way that individuals exhibit active ignorance is through the development of what Medina (2013) calls “epistemic vices,” which result from an excessive sense of entitlement (57). One of these vices is epistemic arrogance. Arrogance involves the over-estimation of one’s own knowl-edge, or the attitude that one does not need to learn more, because of the beliefs that the knowledge one has is sufficient or because a given area of knowledge is not seen as worthy of one’s time or attention. Arrogance can inhibit us from learning more about perspectives with which we, because of our social location, are not experientially familiar. The vice of epistemic arrogance constitutes a form of resistance to confronting social injustice when those with privilege permit themselves to be ignorant about the expe-riences of those around them who are oppressed and about “the mecha-nisms of oppression that create marginalization” (33).

An excessive sense of entitlement can also contribute to the vice of closed-mindedness, which, in the case of those with social privilege, can operate as a mechanism for resistance to awareness of social injus-tice. Closed-mindedness, Medina explains, “usually involves the lack of


openness to a whole range . . . of experiences and viewpoints that can destabilize (or create trouble for) one’s own perspective” (35). Bringing this analysis to bear on current events, the refrain “all lives matter” is a refusal to think about the meanings and to hear the demands that are contained in the expression that “Black lives matter.” Closed-mindedness can serve as a defense mechanism that protects a person’s sense of her own moral good-ness, deservingness, or superiority over others. The attitudes and behaviors that produce closed-mindedness do not always occur consciously. Medina writes that closed-mindedness “does not result from a decision or a con-scious effort to ignore, but from a socialization that leads one to be insen-sitive to certain things and immune to certain considerations” (36). The vice of closed-mindedness is, in other words, a form of resistance that is cultivated within a context of social inequality.

Third, active ignorance can manifest as a type of insensitivity to others. Medina describes insensitivity as the “inability to listen and to learn from others, the inability to call into question one’s perspective and to process epistemic friction exerted from significantly different perspectives” (17–18). Elsewhere, Medina explains that insensitivity is not merely a failure to inte-grate evidence into one’s knowledge base, but also a failure to experience the emotional openness and connectedness with others required for prop-erly seeing and interpreting that evidence in the first place. Insensitivity “involves being cognitively and affectively numbed to the lives of others: being inattentive to and unconcerned by their experiences, problems, and aspirations; and being unable to connect with them and to understand their speech and action” (ix). Insensitivity is also straightforward emotional numbness to the suffering of others, “the inability to feel concerned and to have an entire array of emotions such as empathy, sympathy, compassion, and so on” in regards to the experiences of others (210).

Bringing together these various insights from the literature on active ignorance, the Resistance Model proposes that unconscious racial prejudice is supported by psychological resistances – resistances to understanding racial inequality or to changing racist ways of perceiving, relating, feel-ing, behaving, or grasping (or failing to grasp) the experiences of others. That is, prejudice is not merely the result of a trick that the mind plays or merely the result of exposure to pervasive racist messages, but is protected via a motivated, persistent defensiveness that can take the form of fragil-ity, insensitivity, or epistemic vices like arrogance or closed-mindedness. Unlike the Implicit Bias Model, the Resistance Model does not view the


mind as comprised of two distinct systems, one of which is a person who is anti-racist, the other of which is rudely mechanistic and thus susceptible to the influence of external racist influences. Instead, the Resistance Model proposes more of a complex continuity between the domain of unconscious and automatic attitudes and the domain of person-level agency. It proposes that unconscious racial prejudice is preserved and protected through psy-chological mechanisms of resistance, particularly in individuals who stand to benefit from such resistances.

3. The Rationalization of Bias

In order to discern precisely what the Resistance Model captures that the Implicit Bias Model does not, it will help to consider how each of these models explains a psychological activity that frequently occurs when one harbors unconscious racial prejudice: that is, the rationalization of bias. To rationalize bias is to give an account or explanation for a bias that covers over or hides (from others and from oneself) the prejudiced basis of the attitude or belief.

Consider the following example, which occurred at a town hall meeting outside of St. Louis, Missouri, in 2013. The Francis Howell school district—a district with mostly white students—was mandated to take in students from the failed neighboring Normandy school district, where 98 percent of stu-dents were black. Francis Howell parents packed into the school’s gymnasium for the town hall meeting and, one after another, approached the microphone to speak out vehemently against the integration of the new students from Normandy, citing concerns that the students would bring drugs, violent behavior, and low test scores into their high performing district. I suggest that the concerns of Francis Howell parents in the town hall meeting are at least partially influenced by racial prejudice, but the speakers employ defense mechanisms and tactics of evasion that are characteristic of active ignorance so as to avoid directly acknowledging and addressing the issue of race.

An audio recording from the public radio show This American Life (Jones 2015) captures a number of these parents’ speeches. One woman at the microphone suggests the need to closely monitor the new students:

I’m hoping that their discipline records come with them, like their health records come with them.


Another woman decries her community’s lack of choice in the matter.

Years ago, when the MetroLink was being very popular, St. Charles County put to a vote whether or not we wanted the MetroLink to come across into our community. And we said no! And the reason we said no is because we don’t want the different areas [INAUDIBLE] coming across on our side of the bridge, bringing with it everything that we’re fighting today against.

Addressing representatives of the school district, a mother named Beth Cirami, calls for increased security:

This is what I want to know from you. In one month, I send my three small children to you. And I want to know is there going to be metal detectors? Because I want to be clear. I’m no expert. I’m not you guys. I don’t have an accreditation, but I’ve read. I’ve read, and I’ve read, and I’ve read. So we’re not talking about the Normandy School District losing their accreditation because of their buildings, or their structures, or their teachers. We are talking about violent behavior that is coming in with my first grader, my third grader, and my mid-dle schooler that I’m very worried about. You have no choice like me. I want to know where the metal detectors are going to be. And I want to know where your drug sniffing dogs are going to be. And I want – this is what I want – I want the same security that Normandy gets when they walk through their school doors. I want it here. And I want it – and I want that security before my children walk into Francis Howell. [RAISING HER VOICE] Because I shopped for a school dis-trict. I deserve to not have to worry about my children getting stabbed or taking a drug or getting robbed. Because that’s the issue.

After each of these comments, a thunder of applause emerges from the crowd.

Properly interpreting the parents’ resistance to the integration of Normandy students requires that we consider the community’s historical context. St. Louis has a long history of struggle over segregation, was one of the very last places in the United States to officially enact desegregation, and continues to be one of the most segregated cities in the United States, with the quality of education varying with the racial makeup of neighborhoods


in which schools are located. Given this context, it would be reasonable to interpret white parents’ concerns about large numbers of black children coming into their white neighborhoods as at least partially influenced by factors of race. However, open discussions of race were nearly absent from the town hall meeting. One exception was a white woman who insisted that to frame the backlash against integration as motivated by racial prejudice is to engage in anti-white racism:

We have both – my husband and I both have worked and lived in underprivileged areas in our jobs. This is not a race issue. And I just want to say to – if she’s even still here – the first woman who came up here and cried that it was a race issue, I’m sorry. That’s her preju-dice calling me a racist because my skin is white and I’m concerned about my children’s education and safety. This is not a race issue! [APPLAUSE]

The issue, the woman said, is not one of race, but of Francis Howell par-ents’ commitment to their children’s education. Her accusation of reverse racism, however, is a defensive reaction characteristic of white fragility, which in this case manifests as the inability to see oneself as implicated in discussions of race and as positioning oneself as the victim of bullying anti-racist efforts.

In addition to white fragility, several of the parents’ comments demon-strate selective insensitivity to Normandy students, blaming the students for the ways in which the Normandy School District has failed them. The par-ents clearly care about the wellbeing of their own children and the prosper-ity of their communities, but this attitude of concern does not extend to the children who have had no choice but to attend inadequate schools and who must now commute to a district where they are made to feel unwelcome by many people. Treating the students as violent criminals dehumanizes them in order to justify this insensitivity and failure to take the students’ perspectives. Selective insensitivity perpetuates active ignorance in other ways, as well. By covering over the questions of race and exaggerating the problem of violence, the narrative actively cultivates misinformation about the causes of Normandy’s loss of accreditation and foments fears about future violence (“I’ve read. I’ve read, and I’ve read, and I’ve read. So we’re not talking about the Normandy School District losing their accreditation because of their buildings, or their structures, or their teachers. We are


talking about violent behavior”). The framing allows for white parents to assert the power to manage the incoming students through threats of crim-inalization (“I want to know where the metal detectors are going to be. And I want to know where your drug sniffing dogs are going to be”), all while avoiding discussions of race.

The Implicit Bias Model would provide the following explanation of what is happening in this case: Consciously, the protesting Francis Howell parents believe that all students, regardless of race, deserve the same oppor-tunities. Such beliefs are the result of System Two cognitive processes—the rational, deliberate kind. However, the parents have internalized racial ste-reotypes and stigmas, which lead them to implicitly associate black stu-dents with drugs, violence, and crime. This implicit bias, which is a System One cognitive event, may feel like a difficult-to-articulate discomfort, dis-tress, fear, disgust, or anger at the thought of those people entering into one’s own space, sharing the resources of one’s own child.

What the Implicit Bias Model cannot explain is the psychological need to reconcile this divergence between System One and System Two by pro-viding a self-deceptive narrative that resolves the dissonance in a way that both absolves the perceiver of moral blame and supports the persistence of racial inequality. Recall Gendler’s example of the glass walkway jutting out over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Although the alief (the fear of falling) is inconsistent with the person’s belief that she is safe, a person can be made aware that she is experiencing the belief and the contrasting alief without the impulse to resolve the contradiction in any particular way. In the case of racial prejudice, however, the privileged individual is compelled to make the race talk go away by providing an alternate narrative, even when evidence to the contrary persists. If they manage to do so, those with racial prejudice no longer feel compelled or obligated to take the perspective of members of marginalized groups. It may be the case that the parents at the town hall meeting did not believe themselves to have racial prejudice. Furthermore, their concerns about how integration would affect their children, their chil-dren’s schools, and their communities were no doubt sincere. However, quickness to rationalize their negative reaction to integration may have pre-vented parents from recognizing dissonance between their negative biases regarding communities of color and their beliefs about all children’s right to a good education.

The Implicit Bias Model proposes a separation between System One and System Two, where System One is mechanistic and associative while


System Two is rational. The problem with many cases of unconscious racial prejudice is that people rationalize their bias, recruiting System Two to pro-vide highly elaborated and complex reasons and evidence to support their bias. It seems like the Implicit Bias Model is most helpful for explaining split-second decisions and habits of action. What it has trouble explaining is the way that people build up elaborate conceptual apparatuses—full of interconnected reasons, evidence, and philosophical beliefs—to support implicit racist attitudes. The Implicit Bias Model cannot itself explain ratio-nalized prejudice. To be fair, the model is not designed to do so, so this is not necessarily a flaw in the model, but it is a limitation. We need another set of concepts to explain the rationalization of prejudice, and this other theory would provide an important complement to the Implicit Bias Model.

The Resistance Model gives us a way to make sense out of the incentive to rationalize racial prejudice because it is based on the premise that uncon-scious racial prejudice is supported by psychological resistance—defense mechanisms, like those that are characteristic of white fragility, selective insensitivity, and the epistemic vices of arrogance and closed-mindedness, which function to protect the individual from confronting the realities of race relations.

Supplementing the Implicit Bias Model with the Resistance Model per-mits the following explanation of the rationalization of bias: Unconscious prejudices often conflict with conscious values and commitments. Such conflicts can occasionally produce experiences of cognitive dissonance. Practices of active ignorance permit the elimination of these potentially fruitful, but disorienting, experiences of cognitive dissonance through the justification of prejudices, so that they appear to be rational and consistent with the agent’s other beliefs. The rationalization of prejudice allows agents to avoid engaging in potentially uncomfortable self-reflection that might reveal one’s complicity in systems of racism.

Being able to account for the rationalization of bias is important, par-ticularly given the various domains of social and political life in which rea-son-giving practices are central. For instance, it is through public discourse that citizens develop and share knowledge, identify social injustices, and envision more just futures. Furthermore, it is through public discourse that communities develop a collective voice through which to claim and exert power. The foregoing analysis of unconscious prejudice suggests that rea-son-giving practices are not ideal. That is, they are influenced by social and psychological processes in ways that counter the notions that we are simply


aware, autonomous thinkers and that, in the real world, reason could ever be pure or neutral. Identifying psychological resistances may be an impor-tant step towards recognizing and addressing a significant barrier to anti-racist moral growth.

Conclusion

I conclude by suggesting that while the Resistance Model can complement the Implicit Bias Model, perhaps it does so at the price of undermining some of the comforting ideas that spring from the Implicit Bias Model. For one, the Implicit Bias Model is optimistic about the possibility for interven-tion and change of biased responses. Psychologists have identified a num-ber of strategies for reducing bias in laboratory settings. Research shows that implementing bias reduction strategies like stereotype replacement, increased contact with racialized others, individuation, and perspective tak-ing can help to reduce bias over the long term (Devine et al. 2012). One point that the Implicit Bias Model cannot explain, though, is why, when we know how to address implicit biases, we are so slow to take the appropri-ate steps to correct the situation in the real world. The notion of psycho-logical resistance helps to explain this hesitance. The Resistance Model, meanwhile, forces those with racial privilege to confront their own resis-tance to relinquishing their privilege to power, opportunity, resources, and authority.

Another comforting idea that springs from the Implicit Bias Model is that implicit bias is not morally blameworthy.8 According to some accounts, the Implicit Bias Model is “clean” from a moral psychological view: we should not blame people for their biases, since we all have them and we acquire them automatically and through no fault of our own. They run on autopilot, so we are not actively involved in them. For those who teach others about racial bias, this may be somewhat of a relief. It means that we can tell our students that they are not bad people for having biases. We can say, “Our brains make us do it,” or, “Our prejudiced society is the cause. You are not racist—you sincerely hold anti-racist beliefs—but your brain is undermining your best efforts.” In this way, we avoid to some extent trig-gering students’ defensive reactions to having to truly confront their own prejudices.


The Resistance Model shows that resistance to knowing about social inequality and even about one’s own deepest thoughts and beliefs regard-ing race is active, rather than merely the result of how our brains are wired. The work of determining the exact nature and extent of this activity remains to be carried out, but it may require us to reconsider the moral dimensions of unconscious racial prejudice, and the moral work required to confront it.

lori gallegos de castillo is an assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University. Her research focuses on moral psychology and social epistemology, particularly within contexts of social inequality. She was a recipient of the 2015 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for her work on empathy. She also writes about Latinx philosophy, feminist phi-losophy, and decolonial theory. She was the winner of the 2015 American Philosophical Association’s essay prize in Latin American thought for her work “Skillful Coping and the Routine of Surviving: Isasi-Díaz on the Importance of Identity to Everyday Knowledge.”

notes

I wish to thank Francisco Gallegos, participants and audience members at the 2016

California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, and the reviewers of this article for

helpful suggestions, insightful commentaries, and important criticisms in response

to earlier versions of this article.

1. This formulation is drawn from Miranda Fricker’s (2007) notion of identity preju-

dice. This broad definition of prejudice avoids begging the question of what uncon-

scious processes might undergird these assessments.

2. I use the term “racial prejudice” as opposed to “racism” to denote the distinction

between the ways in which individuals experience and manifest their own preju-

dices and broader social-structural processes that transcend individual psychology.

The question of how these two phenomena are connected is an important one, but

one which is beyond the scope of this paper.

3. The label “Implicit Bias Model” includes a variety of widespread and popular

accounts that explain unconscious racial prejudice in terms of a distinction between

implicit social cognition and explicit attitudes or beliefs. See, for instance, Banaji

et al. (1993), Banaji and Greenwald (2013), Devine (1989), Devine and Monteith

(1999), Dovidio and Gaertner (1986, 2004), and Greenwald and Banaji (1995).

Whether Single-Process or Multi-System theoretical models of cognition are sus-

ceptible to each of the challenges I raise in this paper is an open question. See

Brownstein (2015) for an overview of these different models.


4. For studies on the presence of implicit racial bias in policing, see: Correll, et al.

(2007).; Peruche and Plant (2006); and Smith et al. (1984). For an article on public

perceptions of police bias, see Weitzer and Tuch (2002).

5. See Lewis, et al. (2012). The study finds that reliance on stereotypes about new

mothers allowed for more accurate understandings of new mothers’ thoughts.

6. Banaji and Greenwald (2013) have found through over 14 million IATs that there

is ample evidence of implicit biases on the basis of race, sexual orientation, age,

skin color, body weight, disability, and nationality (69). They also show that implicit

biases are largely responsive to stereotypes and, further, that stereotypes are dis-

tributed in accordance with divergence from the default attributes of a given

society (92).

7. See Freud (1990).

8. See Saul (2013) and Levy (2015). Although the view that implicit biases are not mor-

ally blameworthy has not gone unchallenged in the literature (see Holroyd 2012), it

is rarely seen as blameworthy in any traditional kind of way.

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Documents

Unconscious Racial Prejudice as Psychological Resistance: A Limitation … · 2018. 7. 19. · call the Resistance Model of unconscious racial prejudice. In sections 1 and 2, I outline