Racial Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Strategies for Educational Professionals

In order to address the racial trauma that teens who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) may face at home, and potentially experience in school, educational professionals must equip themselves with the specialized skills to meet students' academic, emotional, and social needs. School leaders must begin this task by examining their own personal racial biases as they lead their staff in the task of reviewing data, rules, policies, and the school environment to examine practices that support and promote institutional and systemic racism.

The Role of Status in the Emergence of Pro-White Bias in Rural Uganda

Research investigating the early emergence of racial prejudice has been largely limited to contexts in which racial prejudice is most likely to emerge—multiracial societies that have pronounced racial inequality (e.g., United States, South Africa). The present study assessed whether pro-White racial bias is also early emerging in a homogenous Black community that has little exposure to modern media and where children presumably experience less overt discrimination than in past samples (e.g., South Africa). Black African children (N = 214) between 5- and 12-years-old living in rural Uganda exhibited substantial pro-White racial bias, preferring White over Black children 78% of the time. Ugandan children also judged White children as higher status than Black children, and these status judgments predicted their degree of pro-White bias. Our results indicate that pro-White racial biases can emerge even in a homogenous Black community and that, in some contexts, minimal status cues are sufficient for the early development of racial prejudice.

Representations of Racial Minorities in Popular Movies: A Content-Analytic Synergy of Computer Vision and Network Science

In the Hollywood film industry, racial minorities remain underrepresented. Characters from racially underrepresented groups receive less screen time, fewer central story positions, and frequently inherit plotlines, motivations, and actions that are primarily driven by White characters. Currently, there are no clearly defined, standardized, and scalable metrics for taking stock of racial minorities’ cinematographic representation. In this paper, we combine methodological tools from computer vision and network science to develop a content analytic framework for identifying visual and structural racial biases in film productions. We apply our approach on a set of 89 popular, full-length movies, demonstrating that this method provides a scalable examination of racial inclusion in film production and predicts movie performance. We integrate our method into larger theoretical discussions on audiences’ perception of racial minorities and illuminate future research trajectories towards the computational assessment of racial biases in audiovisual narratives.

Do Implicit Racial Biases Have Significant Discriminatory Effects?

This article investigates whether implicit racial biases have significant discriminatory effects. To this end, it evaluates meta-analyses of studies on measures of implicit bias and behavioral effects to which they are correlated. On balance, I maintain, the best interpretation of these meta-analyses and relevant surrounding research supports the conclusion that implicit racial biases are significantly correlated to racially biased behaviors, with effects that are consequential at both the individual and group levels. This conclusion is compatible with, but does not entail, the proposition that implicit racial biases in fact cause such effects. In consequence, I consider the contribution implicit bias research might make to our best accounts of racial discrimination and inequality on both a casual and non-causal construal. I argue it is plausible that research on implicit racial bias, on either construal, will play a substantive role in such accounts.

Applying the Evidence We Have: Support for Having Race Conversations in White U.S. Families

Popular press articles have advocated for parent–child conversations about race and racism to prevent children from developing racial biases, yet empirical investigations of the impact of racial socialization in White U.S. families are scarce. In an article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2020, Scott et al. warned that, given the lack of empirical evidence, parents might actually do more harm than good by talking to their children about race. In this comment, we draw upon the literature on (a) racial socialization, (b) parenting and parent–child discourse, and (c) the role of nonverbal communication in parental socialization to inform our understanding of parents’ ability to engage in race-related conversations in the absence of empirical guidance. We also highlight emerging evidence of the potential benefits of these conversations (even if parents are uncomfortable). In sum, the wealth of existing literature suggests that parents can successfully navigate challenging conversations with their children—which tends to result in better outcomes for children than avoiding those conversations. Thus, although we support Scott et al.’s call for researchers to develop more empirical research, we part with the authors’ assertion that researchers need to wait for more sufficient evidence before providing recommendations to White parents—we believe that the time for White families to begin talking about race and racism is now.

Examining Racism in Psychoanalytic Training: Perspectives from a Psychiatry Resident

The author reviews pervasive racial biases in psychoanalysis, spanning from overt instances of racial judgement to the normalized tendencies of internalized racist societal structures on individuals. A personalized account is given addressing how such issues have led to a hesitancy in the author— a Black and Hispanic psychiatry resident—to pursue psychoanalytic training. Institutes can more appropriately acknowledge how racism has affected their patients and the theories of the mind that are commonly promulgated. Academic institutions need to actively engage in creating awareness of racial bias, microaggressions, and uncovering unconscious negative attitudes. This will aid in the development of educational approaches that strive toward racial equality and inclusiveness.

Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

Positive Exemplar Exposure

In adults, implicit racial bias has been linked to prejudiced and discriminatory behavior. However, implicit racial biases emerge well before adulthood; as young as age six, children have already internalized the racial attitudes of their culture. Thus, it is critical for researchers to understand how to change implicit racial bias early in development, before its negative effects compound across the lifespan. The following chapter highlights one potential method of bias reduction in childhood: exposure to positive exemplars. As this method is both scalable and child-friendly, it has the potential to be used with young children on a broader cultural level. This chapter details child-friendly methods for measuring bias change and provides two examples of studies that have successfully employed positive exemplar exposure to reduce children’s implicit racial bias. I conclude the chapter with recommendations for future use of this intervention cross-culturally, as well as broader cultural applications.