We’ve heard often lately that colleges are afflicted with “structural racism”, and that every white person carries a degree of racism—of “implicit” bias—that is not even accessible to consciousness. These claims, at least those about the deep racism of American colleges, are never accompanied by systematic data, only by anecdotes. Are those claims true? A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UWM, reference at bottom) suggest that they aren’t, at least on that campus.
The authors of the paper, also at UWM, tested predictions from two contrasting theories of bias on college campuses. One, the “dispersed discrimination account”, posits that bias is widespread, with most individuals holding biases against groups like women, blacks and Muslims. This is implicit in the anti-racism work of people like Robin DiAngelo, who accepts that everybody has “implicit or unconscious biases” that cannot be…
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