File this under “Things Black People Already Know”: A new study from UCLA has shown that white people judge people’s physical size and aggressiveness based on their names.
The study shows that even folks who self-identified as being politically left-leaning showed a strong implicit bias in favor of white-sounding names. Fictitious individuals with white-sounding names like Connor or Wyatt were viewed as being less physically dominating and aggressive, and of higher social status than those with black-sounding names like DeShawn or Jamal.
The researchers determined that a person with a black-sounding name with a neutral background (few details offered) were seen as trustworthy as people with white-sounding names with a known criminal record. When a person’s business background was described along with the person’s name, participants didn’t see a difference in aggressiveness levels between the white-sounding and black-sounding names.
Hispanic-sounding names faced a similar implicit prejudicial attitude to the black-sounding names.
The results of this study are so abysmal that the lead study author said:
“I’ve never been so disgusted with my own data.”
Many studies have shown that white people experience what is called “implicit bias” — there is an unconscious, racist reaction of which the individual is not aware. Because the racist thought is unconscious, the person assumes that they have perfectly egalitarian views. The discrepancy between what someone thinks about race, and what they think they think, is sometimes a broad gap. This is problematic because a person can act in a racist way based on their unconscious thoughts and still believe that they are not racist. This phenomenon prevents a thoughtful and honest discussion of race and racism.
It is important for white people to keep implicit bias in mind. It may not take it away completely, but awareness of this bias will lessen its effects.
Featured image by Travis Wise, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
