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.

The Way They Look: Phenotypic Prototypicality Shapes the Perceived Intergroup Attitudes of In- and Out-group Members

Even when people hold little prejudice themselves, expectations about how members of other groups perceive them may negatively influence interracial interactions. In four pre-registered experiments each using a full intergroup design with Black and White participants, we show that people infer negative meta-attitudes from out-group members’ whose appearance is phenotypically prototypical, which in turn leads to less favorable orientations towards intergroup contact, independent of personal attitudes. In Experiment 1, Black Americans but not White Americans, perceived phenotypically prototypical out-group members to hold less favorable meta-attitudes and this explained less favorable contact orientations. In Experiment 2, this pattern emerged for both groups of participants and was pronounced among stigma conscious individuals. Experiment 3 replicated and extended Experiment 2 with representative samples, further demonstrating that the effect of phenotypic prototypicality is pronounced among participants who report previous rejection by the out-group. In Experiment 4, direct evidence for the causal effect of the mediator meta-attitudes on orientations toward contact was obtained. In all studies, effects held controlling for participants’ general intergroup attitudes and experiences, demonstrating the unique role of attitudes at the meta-perceptual level in shaping intergroup relations. Participants also perceived phenotypically prototypical in-group members as having less favorable intergroup attitudes, suggesting a general tendency to infer meta-attitudes from phenotypic prototypicality. We discuss our results in light of previous research, highlight social implications, and suggest future directions.