Aversive Racism

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Publisher Summary

This chapter begins by reviewing the nature of aversive racism, including the contributing psychological factors and the potential conflict between whites' conscious endorsement of egalitarian principles and unconscious negative feelings and beliefs about blacks. It considers basic evidence about the operation of aversive racism and its moderating factors. Special emphasis is given on the influence of contemporary racial biases of whites toward blacks because of the central role that racial politics has played in the history of the United States. Within the United States, aversive racism relates to varying degrees to orientations toward women and more recently to homosexuals. The chapter proposes that many of the principles of aversive racism also apply more generally to the responses of the majority group to minority groups in the context in which egalitarian ideals are valued and discrimination is censured. It demonstrates empirically the ways in which aversive racism affect outcomes for blacks and shapes interracial interactions.

Section snippets

The Nature of Aversive Racism

A critical aspect of the aversive racism framework is the conflict between whites' denial of personal prejudice and underlying unconscious negative feelings toward and beliefs about blacks. Because of current cultural values, most whites have strong convictions concerning fairness, justice, and racial equality. However, because of a range of normal cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural processes that promote intergroup biases, most whites also develop some negative feelings toward or

The Operation of Aversive Racism

The aversive racism framework also helps to identify when discrimination against blacks and other minority groups will or will not occur. Whereas old-fashioned racists exhibit a direct and overt pattern of discrimination, aversive racists' actions may appear more variable and inconsistent. Sometimes they discriminate (manifesting their negative feelings), and sometimes they do not (reflecting their egalitarian beliefs). Our research has provided a framework for understanding this pattern of

Emergency Intervention

Another of our early experiments (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1977) demonstrates how aversive racism can operate in fairly dramatic ways. The scenario for the experiment was inspired by an incident in the mid-1960s in which 38 people witnessed the stabbing of a woman, Kitty Genovese, without a single bystander intervening to help. What accounted for this behavior? Feelings of responsibility play a key role (see Darley & Latané, 1968). If a person witnesses an emergency knowing that he or she is the

Dissociated Attitudes

Beginning with our earliest work on the aversive racism framework, we hypothesized that a dissociation commonly exists between whites' conscious and unconscious racial attitudes and beliefs. Recent research in social cognition has yielded new techniques for assessing unconscious, as well as conscious, attitudes and stereotypes. These techniques thus provide direct evidence about the influence of factors previously only assumed to be involved in aversive racism.

Combating Aversive Racism

When we describe our findings formally, in papers and presentations, and informally, a question often arises, “What can we do about subtle biases, particularly when we do not know for sure whether we have them?” Like a mutating virus, racism may have evolved into different forms that are more difficult not only to recognize but also to combat.

Traditional prejudice-reduction techniques have been concerned with changing conscious attitudes—old-fashioned racism—and obvious expressions of bias.

Summary and Conclusions

This chapter has described the concept of aversive racism, considered the factors contributing to aversive racism, demonstrated empirically how it affects outcomes for blacks and shapes interracial interactions, and explored how it can be combated. Despite apparent consistent improvements in expressed racial attitudes over time, aversive racism continues to exert a subtle but pervasive influence on the lives of black Americans. This bias is expressed in indirect and rationalizable ways that

Acknowledgements

Supported by NIMH Grant MH 48721. We are grateful to Adam Pearson for his helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

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