Academic

Black(s) (?Greeks?) and Implicit Race Bias

By Gregory Parks

One of the readers asked me to talk about the implicit racial attitudes of Blacks. I had intended to do that, and Professor Rachlinski and I do just that in our forthcoming article. But let me discuss it in another context?Black Greek-letter organizations (?BGLOs?).

Probably the most pressing issue facing BGLOs are matters surrounding Membership Intake Process (?MIP?)/pledging/hazing?how these organizations bring new members in and inculcate them with a certain set of values. This issue raises questions about whether: 1) BGLOs will face significant legal/financial sanctions (and possibly ruin due to being sued out of existence); 2) BGLOs will face institutional (university) sanctions (significantly depleting the undergraduate ranks); 3) BGLOs will face public scrutiny and critique (straining goodwill from the communities they serve); 4) members will remain faithful to BGLO ideals of personal excellence, brotherhood/sisterhood, and racial/gender uplift (making them wholly inconsistent with why they were founded).

According to forthcoming work by Matthew W. Hughey and I, there are two modes of thinking about these issues. There are formalists and instrumentalists. The formalists advocate for a mechanical conformity to organizational rules. To the formalists, the organizations have laid down a rule, MIP, which should be followed at all cost and without question.Conversely, the instrumentalist looks at this issue more broadly. Instrumentalists might look at MIP to determine if it has reached it?s policy goals. Instrumentalists might look at the constitutional means by which these promulgate rules to determine if MIP was promulgated under these rules. Instrumentalists might also look behind MIP to the broader organizational aims in an effort to determine if the rule impedes any of them. Furthermore, what may guide their attempt to address these issues is a willingness to utilize empirical data or facts from an array of disciplines. [Brown, Phillips, and I have employed an instrumentalist approach in our prior work; I have in forthcoming work, and Hughey and I are in work under way.]

With this interdisciplinarity in mind, Shanette Porter and I conducted an empirical study of implicit racial bias among BGLO members. What little is known about the racial attitudes of BGLO members suggests that they have stronger explicit racial identities than non-members who are Black. It should be no surprise that BGLO members? racial identities likely provide a collective driving force behind the implementation of the broad principles upon which these organizations were founded and perpetuated. This is particularly so in light of contemporary research on explicit racial identity and behavior.

The pro-White/anti-Black implicit bias is not unique to Whites. In fact, there is much research to suggest that even African-Americans demonstrate a qualitatively similar bias, which amounts to racial ingroup devaluation, racial outgroup preference, or both. Multiple studies estimate that between 50 and 65% of Blacks show a significant preference for Whites over Blacks. This is despite most Blacks showing explicit in-group preferences. System justification theory offers a single explanation for the existence, perpetuation and institutionalization of anti-Black attitudes among Blacks. John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji define system justification as the ?psychological process by which existing social arrangements are legitimized, even at the expense of personal and group interest?.

To explore whether the implicit and explicit intergroup attitudes of BGLO members differed form those of other Blacks, Shanette and I collected data using an internet survey. We sent the survey to BGLO list-serves and BGLO facebook groups. Nearly 23% of the BGLO members reported an implicit preference for Whites over Blacks. And 40% of college-aged members (aged 19-22) demonstrated this preference.

We relate these findings back to the main aims of BGLOs: First, in terms of personal excellence (academic achievement), there is strong evidence to suggest that knowledge of a stereotype?without a congruent explicit attitude?is enough to impact academic performance. Indeed, an effect termed ?stereotype threat??a group?s fear that they will perform poorly and thus reinforce a negative stereotype of their group?appears to rely merely on knowledge of that negative stereotype. Claude Steele?s research on stereotype threat speaks most robustly to this issue.

Second, the research regarding the impact of implicit attitudes on brotherhood/sisterhood and racial uplift is informative, if limited. Indeed, to date, there are only a few studies that measure the impact of Blacks? implicit attitudes on behaviors relevant to one?s commitment to kinship and racial uplift. One study, done by Leslie Ashburn-Nardo employed the IAT and several explicit measures. Ashburn-Nardo found that, among Blacks, IAT scores and work partner preferences were significantly and positively related. That is, increasing implicit ingroup preference scores corresponded to increasing ingroup partner preference, such that those with negative implicit attitudes were less likely to choose a Black versus a White partner. Remarkably, this relationship between implicit attitudes and partner choice held, even when explicit attitudes toward partners were taken into account. It should be noted that this study was placed in an academic setting, and participants were motivated to choose the partner with whom they thought they would perform best.

Third, and though there is no research on implicit attitudes to support this, intuitively, we might argue that a person with a relatively high level of implicit anti-Black bias would be disinclined from engaging in racial uplift activities.

This research on BGLO members? implicit racial attitudes adds nuance to the debate about how members should be brought into the organizations and inculcated with BGLO values. Theoretically, a more substantive MIP or pledge process may be the best context in which to de-bias individuals in order to increase the likelihood of sound, well-informed practices once BGLO membership is attained.

[Much of this blog entry is extracted from a book chapter on this issue. Thus, thanks to Shanette C. Porter for her contribution.]

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Full post as published by BlackProf on February 06, 2008 (boomark / email).