American Denial
By: Randi Hovey

Jenee Desmond-Harris
Vox.com
“Why so many Americans still
deny racism exists when the
evidence is everywhere”

The Inspiration
• An American Dilemma
• Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal
(1944)
• Hypocrisy of Jim Crow South
• “How can a society that is so devoted to
equality, justice, and equal opportunity both
allow and enable a system of laws and
practices that oppress a significant percentage
of the population?”
• Unconscious bias

• Racial profiling –
police violence
• Educational
inequality
• Economic disparity
• Incarceration crisis

American Denial
• Christine Herbes-Sommers and Kelly
Thompson
• Llewellyn Smith
• Implicit bias (unconscious racism)
• Common root of discrimination in
modern society
• Historic and Modern studies
• Objectives
• Raise the questions, “Why do I think
this?/What are the consequences?”
• Open conversation
• Determine solutions for bias

The Research
• Mahzarin R. Banaji (Harvard)
• Implicit and explicit memory applied
to social constructs
• Implicit Association Test (IAT)
• ”a measure within social psychology
designed to detect the strength of a
person's automatic association between
mental representations of objects
(concepts) in memory.”
• Controls for social-desirability bias

The Research
• Implicit Association Test (cont.)
• Computer-based test of subconscious memory
associations
• Seven tasks
• Categorization of stimuli into two categories using Black/White
and various positive and negative words
• Measures implicit memory using response latency
• http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/american-denial/implicit-
association-test.html

The Research
• Kenneth and Mamie Clarke
• Black doll/white doll test (1940s)
• Young children are asked to identify which doll
represents certain adjectives
• Children are then asked what doll they are
• 1/3 of black children identify the white doll with
positive adjectives
• Faced with the question of what doll they are, they
don’t want to identify themselves with all the
negative adjectives they associated with the black
doll.
• Suggests internalized biases that effect racial
minorities as well as dominant groups
• May represent earlier evidence of implicit bias
• Modern replications have found identical
results

Other Research
• Test for implicit bias in medical care
• Patients equal in all respects except skin color
• Black men with identical symptoms are given blood
pressure medicine much less often
• Studies on employment bias
• Identical resumes treated differently after race
identification
• Research on identification by teachers and officers
• Black boys are deemed older and less innocent

Conclusion
• Asking people to think about racism in a way that
is not apportioning blame
• “It’s about how we are all victimized by the destructive
ideas we’ve internalized … and how that affects the
institutions we depend on.”
• There is a significant capacity for denial in our
culture
• “…a lot of it is self-protective, but in the end a lot of the
stuff that is self-protective is destructive to others and to
society as a whole.”