thesis about discrimination

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5 examples of thesis statements about racism for your next paper.

By Evans Apr 28 2021

Racism is a hot topic worldwide. It is one of the topics that never lack an audience. As expected, racism is also one of the most loved topics by teachers and even students. Therefore, it is not a surprise to be told to write an essay or a  research paper  on racism. You need to come up with several things within an incredible paper on racism, the most important one being a thesis statement. The term thesis statement sends shivers down the spine of many students. Most do not understand its importance or how to come up with a good thesis statement. Lucky for you, you have come to the right place. Here, you will learn all about  thesis statement  and get to sample a few racist thesis statements.

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Tips to writing a strong racism thesis statement

Keep it short.

A thesis statement is supposed to appear in the first paragraph of your essay. However, this does not mean that it should be the entire paragraph! A strong thesis statement should be one sentence (not an annoyingly long sentence), usually placed as the last sentence in the first paragraph.

Have a stand

A thesis statement should show what you aim to do with your paper. It should show that you are aware of what you are talking about. The thesis statement prepares the reader for what he or she is about to read. A wrong thesis statement will leave the reader of your paper unsure about your topic choice and your arguments.

Answer your research question

If you have been tasked with writing a  research paper  on why the Black Lives Matter movement has successfully dealt with racism, do not write a thesis statement giving the movement's history. Your thesis statement should respond to the research question, not any story you feel like telling. Additionally, the thesis statement is the summary of your sand and answer to the question at hand.

Express the main idea

A confused thesis statement expresses too many ideas while a strong, suitable one expresses the main idea. The thesis statement should tell the reader what your paper is all about. It should not leave the reader confused about whether you are talking about one thing or the other.

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Thesis Statements About Racism Samples

Racism in workplace thesis statement examples.

Racism is so rampant in the workplace. Thousands face discrimination daily in their workplaces. While this is definitely bad news, it gives us more data to choose from when working on an essay or research paper on racism in the workplace. Here are a few examples of thesis statements about racism in the workplace:

1.       Despite being in the The 21st century, racial discrimination is still rampant in the workplace. The efforts made by governments and world organizations have not helped to do away with this discrimination completely.

2.       Even with the unity that comes with digitalism, colour remains the one aspect of life that has continually caused a rift in this life. A lot of efforts have turned futile in the war against racism. The workplace is no exception. It is infiltrated with racial ideologies that remain within man's scope despite the professionalism within the workplace.

3.       Systemic racism is no new concept. It remains the favoured term with the tongues of many after food and rent. This is an indicator of how rooted the world is when it comes to the issue of racism. The now world has been configured to recognize racial differences and be blind to human similarity. Organizations have been established upon this social construct, and more often than it has led them into a ditch of failure. The loot that comes with racism is of great magnitude to bear.

Thesis statement about Racism in schools

Many academic institutions have been recognized for producing students who have passed with distinctions. Unfortunately, behind these overwhelming results lies a trail of many students who have suffered racism and have missed the honors board because of the color differences. Let's look at some of the examples of thesis statements on racism in schools:

1.       Merit should be the S.I unit upon which humanity is graded. Unfortunately, this is not the case, especially in schools, for the new merit score is the person's color. Many have found their way to the honour's board not because of merit but because they of the same color affiliation as the teacher.

2.       Enlightenment and civilization have found their way to the world through one important institution called schools. We owe that to it. Unfortunately, even with the height to which the world has reached civilization and enlightenment, one area has been left out and remains unaddressed- the world view of color. Despite the light and glamour, we see globally, one predominant view is called race. We continue to paint the world based on human color, even in schools.

3.       Bullying falls among the vices that have dire consequences to the victim. One of the spheres to which bullying exists is the sphere of color and race within the context of schools. Many student's confidence and esteem have been shuttered only because they are black or white. Many have receded to depression because they feel unwanted in the schools. One of the prominent times within American History is the Jim Crow Era, where racial segregation in schools within North Carolina was rampant. We saw schools have a section for white students and a separate section for black students within this era. The prevailing flag was black and white, and racism was the order of the day.

Final Thought

Coming up with a thesis statement does not have to difficult. No, not at all. Evaluate the topic or question and express yourself through the thesis statement from your stance or the answer. Mastering this one key in writing exams or assignments is one of the keys to scaling up the ladder of lucrative grades. However, practice is a discipline that will see you become a pro in writing a prolific strong, and catchy thesis statement. Henceforth, regard yourself as a pro, regard yourself as the best in thesis statement writing. If you are still having trouble with coming up with an excellent thesis statement, do not beat yourself up because of it.  Paper per hour  has the  best writers  who can help you with all your racism thesis statement needs.

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Essays About Discrimination: Top 5 Examples and 8 Prompts

You must know how to connect with your readers to write essays about discrimination effectively; read on for our top essay examples, including prompts that will help you write.

Discrimination comes in many forms and still happens to many individuals or groups today. It occurs when there’s a distinction or bias against someone because of their age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.

Discrimination can happen to anyone wherever and whenever they are. Unfortunately, it’s a problem that society is yet to solve entirely. Here are five in-depth examples of this theme’s subcategories to guide you in creating your essays about discrimination.

1. Essay On Discrimination For Students In Easy Words by Prateek

2. personal discrimination experience by naomi nakatani, 3. prejudice and discrimination by william anderson, 4. socioeconomic class discrimination in luca by krystal ibarra, 5. the new way of discrimination by writer bill, 1. my discrimination experience, 2. what can i do to stop discrimination, 3. discrimination in my community, 4. the cost of discrimination, 5. examples of discrimination, 6. discrimination in sports: segregating men and women, 7. how to stop my discrimination against others, 8. what should groups do to fight discrimination.

“In the current education system, the condition of education and its promotion of equality is very important. The education system should be a good place for each and every student. It must be on the basis of equal opportunities for each student in every country. It must be free of discrimination.”

Prateek starts his essay by telling the story of a student having difficulty getting admitted to a college because of high fees. He then poses the question of how the student will be able to get an education when he can’t have the opportunity to do so in the first place. He goes on to discuss UNESCO’s objectives against discrimination. 

Further in the essay, the author defines discrimination and cites instances when it happens. Prateek also compares past and present discrimination, ending the piece by saying it should stop and everyone deserves to be treated fairly.

“I thought that there is no discrimination before I actually had discrimination… I think we must treat everyone equally even though people speak different languages or have different colors of skin.”

In her short essay, Nakatani shares the experiences that made her feel discriminated against when she visited the US. She includes a fellow guest saying she and her mother can’t use the shared pool in a hotel they stay in because they are Japanese and getting cheated of her money when she bought from a small shop because she can’t speak English very well.

“Whether intentional or not, prejudice and discrimination ensure the continuance of inequality in the United States. Even subconsciously, we are furthering inequality through our actions and reactions to others… Because these forces are universally present in our daily lives, the way we use them or reject them will determine how they affect us.”

Anderson explains the direct relationship between prejudice and discrimination. He also gives examples of these occurrences in the past (blacks and whites segregation) and modern times (sexism, racism, etc.)

He delves into society’s fault for playing the “blame game” and choosing to ignore each other’s perspectives, leading to stereotypes. He also talks about affirmative action committees that serve to protect minorities.

“Something important to point out is that there is prejudice when it comes to people of lower class or economic standing, there are stereotypes that label them as untrustworthy, lazy, and even dangerous. This thought is fed by the just-world phenomenon, that of low economic status are uneducated, lazy, and are more likely to be substance abusers, and thus get what they deserve.”

Ibarra recounts how she discovered Pixar’s Luca and shares what she thought of the animation, focusing on how the film encapsulates socioeconomic discrimination in its settings. She then discusses the characters and their relationships with the protagonist. Finally, Ibarra notes how the movie alluded to flawed characters, such as having a smaller boat, mismatched or recycled kitchen furniture, and no shoes. 

The other cast even taunts Luca, saying he smells and gets his clothes from a dead person. These are typical things marginalized communities experience in real life. At the end of her essay, Ibarra points out how society is dogmatic against the lower class, thinking they are abusers. In Luca, the wealthy antagonist is shown to be violent and lazy.

“Even though the problem of discrimination has calmed down, it still happens… From these past experiences, we can realize that solutions to tough problems come in tough ways.”

The author introduces people who called out discrimination, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Barbara Henry – the only teacher who decided to teach Ruby Bridges, despite her skin color. 

He then moves on to mention the variations of present-day discrimination. He uses Donald Trump and the border he wants to build to keep the Hispanics out as an example. Finally, Bill ends the essay by telling the readers those who discriminate against others are bullies who want to get a reaction out of their victims. 

Do you get intimidated when you need to write an essay? Don’t be! If writing an essay makes you nervous, do it step by step. To start, write a simple 5 paragraph essay .

Prompts on Essays About Discrimination

Below are writing prompts that can inspire you on what to focus on when writing your discrimination essay:

Have you had to go through an aggressor who disliked you because you’re you? Write an essay about this incident, how it happened, what you felt during the episode, and what you did afterward. You can also include how it affected the way you interact with people. For example, did you try to tone down a part of yourself or change how you speak to avoid conflict?

List ways on how you can participate in lessening incidents of discrimination. Your list can include calling out biases, reporting to proper authorities, or spreading awareness of what discrimination is.

Is there an ongoing prejudice you observe in your school, subdivision, etc.? If other people in your community go through this unjust treatment, you can interview them and incorporate their thoughts on the matter.

Tackle what victims of discrimination have to go through daily. You can also talk about how it affected their life in the long run, such as having low self-esteem that limited their potential and opportunities and being frightened of getting involved with other individuals who may be bigots.

For this prompt, you can choose a subtopic to zero in on, like Workplace Discrimination, Disability Discrimination, and others. Then, add sample situations to demonstrate the unfairness better.

What are your thoughts on the different game rules for men and women? Do you believe these rules are just? Cite news incidents to make your essay more credible. For example, you can mention the incident where the Norwegian women’s beach handball team got fined for wearing tops and shorts instead of bikinis.

Since we learn to discriminate because of the society we grew up in, it’s only normal to be biased unintentionally. When you catch yourself having these partialities, what do you do? How do you train yourself not to discriminate against others?

Focus on an area of discrimination and suggest methods to lessen its instances. To give you an idea, you can concentrate on Workplace Discrimination, starting from its hiring process. You can propose that applicants are chosen based on their skills, so the company can implement a hiring procedure where applicants should go through written tests first before personal interviews.

If you instead want to focus on topics that include people from all walks of life, talk about diversity. Here’s an excellent guide on how to write an essay about diversity .

The harmful effects of discrimination : a meta-analysis of research

Downloadable content.

• Fent, Randa.
• Duder, Sydney (Supervisor)
• This thesis is designed to examine the effects of discrimination on its target. It aims to investigate the psychological, physical, perceptual and behavioral responses that individuals exhibit when faced with racist, sexist and heterosexist as well as other types of discriminatory acts. Through meta-analytic procedures, findings from existing studies investigating the impact of discrimination on the target were gathered and their average effect sizes calculated. A total of 50 empirical studies were identified, from which 84 effect sizes were derived. Using homogeneity analysis techniques, the studies' effect sizes were compared and analyzed. The results show significant heterogeneity in the overall mean effect size (0.38) of discrimination. Subsequent moderator variable investigations indicated that among discrimination acts, sexism had the highest mean effect size (0.64), while among the responses to discrimination, the perceptual factor showed the highest mean effect size (0.65). Additional moderator variables' investigations resulted in significant differences between Canadian and American settings in terms of discrimination acts and responses.
• Discrimination -- Psychological aspects.
• Sexism -- Psychological aspects.
• McGill University
•  https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/8w32r738t
• All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
• School of Social Work
• Master of Social Work
• Theses & Dissertations

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Home > Honors > 649

Honors College Theses

The effects of racial discrimination on black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) students’ mental health.

Alana M. Hall Ms. , Georgia Southern University Follow

Publication Date

Psychology (B.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Faculty Mentor

Dr. Jessica Brooks

Racial discrimination and its relationship with mental health outcomes in BIPOC students, specifically psychological distress, the focus of this study. This was deemed important because these students may have responded by using certain coping strategies that could be harmful to their mental health and overall health, in the long term. It is already known that racism has been a problem in the world, but has morphed over the years to that of subtle, and often more harmful, forms of racism (e.g. microaggressions). The goal of this study was to examine the discriminatory experiences of BIPOC students at a predominantly white institution. Data was collected on coping mechanisms students use in relation to racial discrimination and psychological distress. A cross-sectional methodology consisting of administration of an online survey via Qualtrics (including Racism and Life Experiences Scale, Racism-Related Coping Scale, and Mental Health Inventory) was employed. It was hypothesized that the frequency and distress associated with the experienced discrimination would be predictive of overall psychological distress, and that avoidant coping mechanisms would add predictive validity to this model. It was found that the more racial discrimination that is experienced, the more consequences that can be expected in the future as far as mental health is concerned. Through the coping mechanisms used, it was also found that active coping can actually increase microstress.

Thesis Summary

This thesis is about examining the effects of racial discrimination on minority students. The purpose of this thesis was to examine racial experiences of minority students at predominantly white institutions. The methods used for this research included a cross-sectional methodology consisting of an online survey via Qualtrics (including measures such as a coping scale, mental health inventory, and a life experiences scale). It was found that the more racial discrimination experienced by someone, the more psychological consequences one would have. With the coping measures used, it was also found that some active coping mechanisms can actually cause microstress.

Recommended Citation

Hall, Alana M. Ms., "The Effects of Racial Discrimination on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Students’ Mental Health" (2021). Honors College Theses . 649. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/honors-theses/649

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618 Thought-provoking Discrimination Essay Ideas & Examples

📜 history of discrimination & essay writing tips, 🏆 best discrimination topic ideas & essay examples, 🥇 most interesting discrimination topics to write about, ⚡ shocking discrimination essay examples, 🎓 good discrimination research topic ideas, 📌 discrimination speech topics and prompts, 📝 simple & easy discrimination topics for essay, ❓discrimination research paper question.

Discrimination essays are an essential part of historical and social sciences because of the influence of the practice on past and current humanity. In this article we will reveal the brief lookback to the history of discrimination and its causes, and provide a list of discrimination topics for essay, as well as paper examples on gender, disability, and racial inequality.

Past practices such as slavery were a result of discriminatory racist beliefs, and it took a long time for African Americans to be acknowledged as equal under law to other races.

Even then, the school of thought was not eradicated, and ethnic minorities as well as women would be oppressed by segregation and unequal opportunities until the emergence of the civil rights movement in the second half of the 20th century.

Even today, discriminatory practices arguably continue, and the debate around their existence draws considerable attention. You can use any of these topics to write an outstanding essay by following the guidelines below.

Discussions of slavery as a form of discrimination will usually be historic in nature, as they will discuss the practice as applied in the United States and other countries in the same region, but the notion offers discrimination essay topics for periods including modernity.

Before the Civil War, many people believed that black people were inferior to whites in some way, possibly due to the disparity between the advancement of African and European civilizations.

As such, even free black people would undergo harassment and risk being enslaved again if they did not leave for a territory that did not have the practice. The topic has been well researched, and so you can and should the wealth of information available to paint an accurate picture.

Even after the abolition of slavery, discriminatory views and practices persisted in many places. Examples included segregation practices where black people would be confined to ghettos and not allowed to visit various institutions.

The civil rights movement arose in the 1960s aimed to right that injustice, but eventually expanded to encompass more marginalized groups, such as women. Gender bias was prevalent at the time, with women being seen as housewives who could not work as well as men.

The success of the feminist message changed that perception and enabled women to choose their life freely. The various efforts and successes of the movement can provide you with ideas for an interesting work.

Ultimately, discrimination is being called out to this day, though many people hold the opinion that it has been mostly or completely eliminated in most advanced countries.

Nevertheless, many modern industries are affected by claims of faults such as gender discrimination, expressed as phenomena such as disproportionate hiring of males or a disparity in earnings between the sexes.

Other instances of modern discrimination are more concrete, such as the severe punishments for homosexuality practiced in some Muslim countries to this day. Humanity is still not entirely equal, and to progress towards that goal, we must identify and address issues.

Here are some additional tips that will improve the general quality of your essay:

• Surround your discrimination essay body with an introduction and a conclusion. The former describes the topic and provides the reader with a thesis that names the central idea of the essay. The latter sums up the essay and provides some closing words.
• Separate different sections of your paper with titles that identify their topics. This practice improves the essay’s structure and appearance, making it easier for the reader to navigate it, especially if you use well-designed discrimination essay titles.

Find excellent discrimination essay examples and other useful samples for your work on IvyPanda!

• A Personal Experience of Discrimination It was then that I experience ostracism and discrimination in the hands of the joyous Parisians. My friends had always praised the shopping district in Paris and I finally had a chance to witness the […]
• Causes of Discrimination in Society The main causes of discrimination are racial prejudices, gender, national and religious stereotypes, social categorization, and sexual orientation. Racial profiling is one of the vivid examples of racial discrimination and racial prejudices.
• Bipolar Disorder in the Muslim and Discrimination of People With This Mental Illness However, the largest proportion of Muslims believes that there is a significant association of mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and evil spirits.
• The Problem of Racism in Brazilian Football Skidmore describes it as the relationships that could result into conflict and consciousness and determination of the people’s status in a community or a particular group. In football, racism damages pride of the players and […]
• Gender Discrimination in the Workplace Essay This essay will document gender bias and gender discrimination in the context of social and physical and the social confines of the work place that is experienced at work in the context of United States […]
• Was Ernest Hemingway a Misogynist? A Sexism Hemingway does not hide the uselessness of Wilson in the eyes of Margot; she only uses him as a toy, and even after they have sex Hemingway still questions it.
• BMW Group’s Pricing Strategy and Discrimination Therefore, the company makes use of this strategy to leverage its products in the market. This strategy is commonly used before the launch of a new product.
• Social Class Discrimination In this paper, I analyze three articles on social class and inequality to find out whether the authors’ views agree with mine on the negative attitudes towards the poor by the middle class and the […]
• Discrimination Causes, Effects and Types As shown in the above definition, discrimination is unjust because it involves classifying a given group of people based on characteristics that make them look unfit to be part of the rest of the group.
• Age Discrimination at the Workplace The first step to preventing age discrimination in a company is for the management to understand the meaning of age discrimination and its effects on the company.
• Sociology: Prejudice and Discrimination in India The Dalits and the Adivasis and other classes of Indian Society are pursuing the erasure of the age old caste system with the new Indian socialist revolution.
• Racism and Motherhood Themes in Grimke’s “Rachel” In addition, her mother kept the cause of the deaths of Rachel’s father and brother secret. In essence, the play Rachel is educative and addresses some of the challenges people face in society.
• Discrimination. Unequal or Unfair Treatment of Individuals Discrimination is a social determinant of health and is a form of stressor experienced by communities of color and minorities in different parts of the world.
• Racism and Discrimination as Social Constructs This is because the concept of race has a negative connotation in the society. For example in some societies, especially the western society; the concept of race implies un-fair treatment and discrimination of a particular […]
• Racial Discrimination Effects in Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody The vivid description of events from the beginning gives the reader a clear picture of a girl who was born in problems and in spite of her intelligence she always became a victim of circumstances.
• When Men Experience Sexism Article by Berlatsky From the article, we note how the author provides concrete instances of how the male population had suffered sexism by themselves and societal stereotypes from the beginning of history, partially implying that the culprits of […]
• Discrimination as Part of Society Thus, the authors focus on the analytical analysis of any phenomenon of discrimination: the study of social, historical, political, and other aspects that have an impact on the growth of oppression of certain groups.
• Sex Workers: Discrimination and Criminalization The essay looks at the problem of discrimination against sex workers and the criminalization of sex work and highlights efforts that have been made towards decriminalization of the activity.
• Discrimination and Prejudice Comparison Discrimination is the negative behavior or action toward a person on the accounts of their sexual orientation, race, or social class; it is the expression of prejudice and may lead to harming an individual.
• Racism and Gender in Beyoncé’s Lemonade The album Lemonade by an American singer Beyonce is one of the brightest examples when an artist portrays the elements of her culture in her music. Along with music videos, the album features a number […]
• Prejudice and Discrimination Among Students The goal of this study is to investigate the peculiarities of prejudicial and discriminatory treatment among students and explain their correlation with anxiety and depression.
• Prejudice and Discrimination What I can say about myself is that being in a group while studying the nature of bias and discrimination was a useful experience.
• Accent Discrimination and the Harmful Effects The learners of English as a second language have been greatly affected because of the discrimination faced from other individuals because of the difference in pronunciation.
• Discrimination at Publix Incorporation Despite the claim by the management of Publix Incorporation that the firm is committed to ensuring non-discrimination; the firm has not effectively implemented policies aimed at abating discrimination.
• Workplace Discrimination: Impact of Family-Friendly Policies There is a reduction in the number of compulsory working hours, allowing employees more time to spend with their families and children.
• Systemic Racism and Discrimination Thus, exploring the concept of race from a sociological perspective emphasizes the initial aspect of inequality in the foundation of the concept and provides valuable insight into the reasons of racial discrimination in modern society.
• The Fashion Industry: Discrimination Case To conclude, although the fashion industry seeks to contribute to cultural and ethnic sustainability, there are some issues that require discussion.
• Racism and Sexism as a Threat Women suffer from sexism, people of color are affected by racism, and women of color are victims of both phenomena. Prejudices spread in families, communities, and are difficult to break down as they become part […]
• Social Construction of Race and Racism Although ‘race’ as a description of the physical condition probably dates back to the dawn of the human species, most scholars agree that it was primarily through European expansion in the 16th to the 19th […]
• Anthem by Ayn Rand: Discrimination Theme In the book, the theme of liberty is presented as the opposite of discrimination, and there is a category representing liberty in this book.
• Racial Discrimination at the Workplace The main change that is discussed in this essay is the introduction of legislation that will see the creation of a special authority that is aimed at guaranteeing the freedom of all workers at the […]
• The Challenges of Racism Influential for the Life of Frederick Douglass and Barack Obama However, Douglass became an influential anti-slavery and human rights activist because in the early childhood he learnt the power of education to fight inequality with the help of his literary and public speaking skills to […]
• Discrimination in School Based on the data in this case, describe the behaviour of the students in this class The children’s behaviour displays racial discrimination owing to their treatment of the new coloured student in class.
• Discrimination: Chalmers v. Tulon Company of Richmond Chalmers, a devoted Christian, saw it her duty to share her Lord’s gospel, and thought it her duty to inform her coworkers of their “improper conduct” in the face of God.
• Ableism: Bias Against People With Disabilities People concerned with rights advocacy ought to ensure a facilitated awareness of the distressing impacts of ableism through the inclusion of the subject in private and public discussions.
• Sexism: Gender, Class and Power In the workplace, women often complain of the general assumption that men are more qualified and knowledgeable compared to women. In some societies, the fact that women are made to change their surname when they […]
• AIDS Discrimination in “Philadelphia” (1993) by Jonathan Demme “Philadelphia” is the film that appeared on the screens at the end of the 20th century. He is a lawyer, who copes with his duties easily and is known as one of the best professionals.
• Discrimination and Affirmative Action This fact explains why every society should use affirmative action in order to support the rights of its people. In conclusion, affirmative action is a reliable program that can deal with the dangers of discrimination.
• Is Troy Maxson (Wilson’s Fences) a Victim of Racism? As a black American, Troy’s childhood experiences have been passed on to his children, making him a victim of an oppressive culture. Therefore, this makes Troy a victim of racism and culture, contributing to his […]
• Racism and Intolerance: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Crafting a Legacy by Messer elaborates on the legacy of the event and its repercussions and offers a profound analysis of the issue, which strengthened my focus of the research.
• Discussion of Language Discrimination Moreover, while Kina preferred to be silent in front of lawyers and solicitors, Daisy Li could speak up on the matter even with her “broken” English.
• Racial Discrimination in “A Raisin in the Sun” Racial discrimination is the main theme of the book, strongly reflecting the situation that prevailed during the 1950s in the United States, a time when the story’s Younger family lived in Chicago’s South Side ghetto.
• Discrimination in Education and Unfair Admission The significance of equality in education is due to the natural development of society and the transition to a civilized order, where any manifestations of bias for various reasons are unacceptable.
• Sexism, Racism, Ableism, Ageism, Classism The absurdity and blatant sexism of this issue made me angry at how the United States is unable to resolve and overcome the lack of gender equality.
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Policing For instance, racial profiling often results in misjudging the level of danger of encounter based on the race of the perpetrator.
• Bias and Discrimination in Early Childhood Care Centers One of the white children in John’s classroom asks one of the black children why his skin is so dirty for the whole class to hear.
• Religious Discrimination in the Workplace It is necessary for the organization’s management to make decisions that are rational and logical so as to ensure that some members of a group do not feel excluded just because they do not belong […]
• Sexism in the English Language Issue The degree of sexism in the attitude of the speaker while using English is also indicative of the cultural differences in attitude towards sexism in language.
• Sexism in the English Language The significance of Piercey’s discussion is the attempts to prove the idea that the English language is sexist in the nature, thus, the topic of the gender inequality is discussed with references to the linguistic […]
• Coca-Cola Discrimination Issues Therefore, the essay discusses the discrimination issues raised by four African-Americans that led to a lawsuit, examines actions that would have prevented or minimized the lawsuit, and considers the company’s structural and human resource perspectives […]
• Gender-Based Discrimination in the Workplace In order to give a good account of the effects of gender-based discrimination against women, this paper examines the space of women in the automotive engineering industry.
• The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement Miller is of the view that it is the white scholars that are responsible for impeding the success of black athletes and performers.
• Contrast Between Tituba and John Indian and Countering Racism The declaration suggests that Conde believed the story of Tituba’s maltreatment needed to be told to expose the truth she had been denied due to her skin color and gender.
• Gender Discrimination and Shared Responsibility Therefore, it is of great importance to address the mentioned challenge, and one of the solutions lays in the education of women.
• Gender Discrimination in History and Nowadays In literature, especially in the works of Greek philosophers, there is a striking discrepancy in the perceptions of women’s place and homosexuality. Women were regarded as the devil’s seed, and the criteria to classify a […]
• Racism: De Brahm’s Map and the Casta Paintings However, De Brahm’s map is one of the most striking pieces of evidence of the conquest of space and the entrenchment of the idea of land and people as titular property.
• Racism and Inequality in Society The idea of race as a social construct is examined in the first episode of the documentary series “The Power of an Illusion”.
• Anti-Racism: Marginalization and Exclusion in Healthcare This essay examines the course’s impact and the concepts of marginalization and exclusion in healthcare. Marginalization is a concept that has profoundly influenced the understanding of race and racism in healthcare.
• Workplace Discrimination: Types and Regulations In the 1970s and the 1990s, disability rights evolved with the introduction of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• The Issue of Racism in the United States The entire history of the United States is permeated with the evolution of the ideas of racism. Turning to history, we can see that the U.S.moved from slavery to using the Black population to solve […]
• History of Racial Discrimination in Haiti and America The choice of topic, racial discrimination in Haiti and America, was influenced by beliefs, values, and assumptions emphasizing the importance of equality and justice for all races.
• Racism and History of Discrimination As a result, advocacy should be aimed at creating new models in criminal justice that will ensure the protection of all minority groups and due process.
• Racial Discrimination and Color Blindness Of the three ideologies, racial harmony is considered the most appropriate for coping with problems of racism and racial injustice due to various reasons.
• Race, Racism, and Dangers of Race Thinking While it is true that some forms of race thinking can be used to justify and perpetuate racism, it is not necessarily the case that all forms of race thinking are inherently racist. Race thinking […]
• LGBTQ+ (Queer) Military Discrimination in Healthcare Furthermore, the subject is relevant to the field of psychology as the current phenomenon examines discrimination in healthcare both from the psychological outcomes experienced by veterans as well as the perception of LGBTQ+ patients through […]
• Racial Discrimination in American Literature In this way, the author denies the difference between people of color and whites and, therefore, the concept of racism in general.
• Discrimination at Work and Persistent Poverty While discrimination remains contributing to persistent poverty, organizations may benefit from blind hiring, an inclusive and accepting culture, and visible leadership to ensure efficient diversity management on a long-term basis. In conclusion, discrimination remains a […]
• Racism in the US: Settler Imperialism They prove that colonial imperialism is a structure, not a contextual phenomenon and that, as such, it propagates the marginalization of native people.
• Why Empathy in Racism Should Be Avoided Empathy is the capacity to comprehend and experience the emotions and ideas of others. Moreover, empathic emotions are essential to social and interpersonal life since they allow individuals to adapt their cognitive processes to their […]
• Discrimination Against African-American Patients The study results are inconsistent due to the selected approach and limited sample size. The study focused on the personal experiences of a small local group of African-American patients, primarily elderly females, not allowing for […]
• Racial Discrimination in High Education This peer-reviewed scholar article was found in the JSTOR database through entering key words “race affirmative action” and marking the publication period between 2017 and 2022.
• Discrimination Against Survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools According to Schwetizer, such institutions were characterized by poor conditions, heavy workloads, and the oppression of cultural attributes, through the use of which the government expected to adapt the aboriginal people to society’s standards.
• Social Sciences: Racism Through Different Lenses A thorough analysis of diversity adds value to social interactions by informing human behavior through a deeper understanding of racism and its impacts on society. Using the humanities lens leads to a better understanding of […]
• Successful Bias Lawsuits: Texas Company in Employment Discrimination Case The allegation was filed by the Department of Labor’s office in 2020, after the evidence indicated a shortfall of black and Asian employees at the company.
• Racial Discrimination in Dormitory Discrimination is considered to be behavior that restricts the rights and freedoms of the individual. Therefore, it is essential to investigate discrimination in dormitories and propose solutions to this problem, such as disseminating knowledge about […]
• Racism and Its Impact on Populations and Society The ignorance of many individuals about other people’s cultures and ethnicities is one of the causes of racism. One can examine the various components of society and how they relate to the issue of racism […]
• Eliminating Discrimination: Poems From “Counting Descent” by Clint Smith The poems illustrated how the world is passed, what the ocean said to the black boy, and what the cicada said to the black boy.
• Institutionalized Racism and Individualistic Racism Excellent examples of individualistic racism include the belief in white supremacy, racial jokes, employment discrimination, and personal prejudices against black people. Overall, institutionalized and individualistic racism is a perversive issue that affects racial relations in […]
• Community Engagement with Racism To enhance the population’s degree of involvement in racism, the study calls for collaboration; this can be seen as a community effort to foster a sense of teamwork.
• LGBT Discrimination Research Prospects: An Analysis The aim of this assignment is to summarize the research that has been done on LGBT discrimination, particularly in the workplace and during the recruiting process.
• Discrimination Against the Elderly Population in the Medical Field The first week I was preoccupied, being my first time interacting with the older patients and also the fact that it was my first week and I was just getting used to the environment.
• The Pricing Policy of Price Discrimination The equilibrium price of a commodity from the point of view of a free market is formed at the intersection of supply and demand, which fluctuates depending on many factors.
• Racism Detection with Implicit Association Test Racial bias is deeply rooted in human society and propelled by norms and stereotypic ideologies that lead to implicit bias and the unfair treatment of minority groups.
• The Age Discrimination in Employment Act The law ADEA, which stands for The Age Discrimination in Employment Act, exhausts assumptions or beliefs that age affects a person’s ability to work.
• Identity and Belonging: Racism and Ethnicity In the documentary Afro Germany – Being Black and German, several individuals share their stories of feeling mistreated and excluded because of their skin color.
• Policies to Eliminate Racial Disparities and Discrimination The solution to exclusion is to build social inclusion in the classroom and within the school by encouraging peer acceptance, cross-group friendships, and built-in prevention.
• Living With HIV: Stigma and Discrimination The mental health and emotional well-being of the population living with this virus are affected due to the humiliation and judgment they face from their fellows around them.
• Causes, Facilitators, and Solutions to Racism These theories suggest that racism serves a particular function in society, occurs due to the interactions of individuals from dominant groups, and results from a human culture of prejudice and discrimination.
• Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education An example is the complaint of the parents of one of the black students that, during the passage of civilizations, the Greeks, Romans, and Incas were discussed in the lessons, but nothing was said about […]
• Empathy and Racism in Stockett’s The Help and Li’s To Kill a Mockingbird To start with, the first approach to racism and promoting empathy is to confront prevalent discrimination and racism, which was often shown in The Help. Another solution to racism and the possibility of promoting empathy […]
• Discrimination in the US Healthcare Sector More than 70% of those who buy insurance plans via the exchanges are also estimated to be entitled to tax credits, which will further lower their rates in addition to the lower premiums.
• Racism in the Healthcare Sector In 2020, the cases and instances of racism in healthcare rose by 16% from 2018; there were notable instances of racism in various spheres of health. 9% of blacks have been protected from discrimination and […]
• The Airline Industry: Sex Discrimination Although some females and males are fighting these stereotypes, there has been a culture in the airline industry to give females the flight attendant jobs and males the piloting jobs. Similarly, the roles of male […]
• Individual and Structural Discrimination Toward LGBT (Queer) Military Personnel Consequently, LGBT military personnel are potentially even more vulnerable to mental health issues due to the combined stress of being LGBT and being in the military.
• Racism in Healthcare and Education The mission should emphasize that it promotes diversity and equality of all students and seeks to eliminate racial bias. It is necessary to modify the mission to include the concept of inclusiveness and equality.
• Equal Opportunity and Discrimination Thus, if a female individual feels denied a job opportunity due to the employer’s attitude to her possible pregnancy, she can apply to the Equal employment opportunity commission and ask for an investigation. EO serves […]
• Institutional Racism in the Workplace Despite countless efforts to offer African-Americans the same rights and opportunities as Whites, the situation cannot be resolved due to the emergence of new factors and challenges.
• Racism in Education in the United States Such racial disparities in the educational workforce confirm the problem of structural racism and barrier to implementing diversity in higher medical education. Structural racism has a long history and continues to affect the growth of […]
• Individuals With Disabilities: Prejudice and Discrimination I researched that people with persistent medical or physical disorders, such as cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis, who have speech, articulation, or communication impairments, for example, are sometimes seen as having an intellectual deficiency. Corey […]
• Rhetoric in Obama’s 2008 Speech on Racism When the audience became excited, it was Obama’s responsibility to convey his message in a more accessible form. To conclude, Obama’s speech in 2008 facilitated his election as the first African American President in history.
• How to Talk to Children About Racism The text begins by referring to recent events that were related to race-based discrimination and hatred, such as the murder of George Floyd and the protests dedicated to the matter.
• Care for Real: Racism and Food Insecurity Care for Real relies on the generosity of residents, donation campaigns, and business owners to collect and deliver these supplies. The research article discusses some of the factors that contribute to the creation of racism […]
• Racism Towards Just and Holistic Health Therefore, the critical content of the event was to determine the steps covered so far in the fight for racial equality in the provision of care and what can be done to improve the status […]
• Discrimination Culture in Saudi Oil and Gas Sector The purpose of this paper is to inspect the interrelationship between the organizational culture and discrimination in the O&G sector in Saudi Arabia.
• LGBTQ+ Families: Discrimination and Challenges The family model directly affects the social status of family members and the well-being of children. LGBTQ+ families’ wealth level is lower than that of families in the neighborhood due to labor discrimination.
• Public Discrimination Based on the Status of Vaccination from COVID-19 It should be noted that COVID-19 is not a rare or exotic disease, but the rapid spread of this infection from the Chinese city of Wuhan led to the dramatic assignment of pandemic status to […]
• LGBTQ Members: Discrimination and Stigmatization What remains unclear from the reading is the notion that before the 1990s, people from the middle class expressed abiding and strong desires to be acknowledged as “the other sex”.
• The Racism Problem and Its Relevance The images demonstrate how deeply racism is rooted in our society and the role the media plays in spreading and combating racism.
• Gender Discrimination in Public Administration The subject of the dispute and the statement of claim was the vacancy of a traffic controller, which was initially offered to Johnson, but then, as part of the program, the place was given to […]
• How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination As such, to give a chance to the “defeated” children and save their lives, as Alexie puts it, society itself must change the rules so that everyone can have access to this ticket to success. […]
• Aspects of Socio-Economic Sides of Racism And the answer is given in Dorothy Brown’s article for CNN “Whites who escape the attention of the police benefit because of slavery’s long reach”.. This shows that the problem of racism is actual in […]
• Misogyny and Sexism in Policing A solution to solving sexism and misogyny in policing is increasing the number of female police officers and educating on gender bias.
• Sexism and Internal Discrimination at Google The recommendation in the case is that the organization should provide justice to all the employees who are victims of discrimination and sexual harassment, irrespective of the perpetrator.
• Tackling Racism in the Workplace It means that reporting racism to HR does not have the expected positive effect on workplace relations, and employees may not feel secure to notify HR about the incidences of racism.
• Issue of Racism Around the World One of the instances of racism around the world is the manifestations of violence against indigenous women, which threatens the safety of this vulnerable group and should be mitigated.
• Discrimination in the United States The paper’s authors see systemic racism as a consequence of segregation in World War I migration, which resulted in distinct communities that were not understandable to white Americans.
• Causes of Discrimination Towards Immigrants Discrimination and intolerance against immigrants, and the implications of these inflammatory convictions and conduct, determine the sociocultural and economic destiny of welcoming nations and those who aspire to make these communities their new residence.
• Environmental Racism: The Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan The situation is a manifestation of environmental racism and classism since most of the city’s population is people of color and poor. Thus, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is a manifestation of environmental racism […]
• The “Racism and Discrimination” Documentary The documentary “Racism and Discrimination” is about an anti-racist teacher Jane Elliot who attempts to show the white people the feeling of discrimination. The central argument of the documentary is diversity training to seize the […]
• Abortion-Related Racial Discrimination in the US In spite of being a numerical minority, Black women in the U.S.resort to abortion services rather often compared to the White population.
• Canadian Society: Sexism and the Persistent Woman Question Equality of work, payments, and respect for women is on the agenda of this party, but they lack a modern look that refers to the problems of harassment and bullying in social networks.
• Social Problems Surrounding Racism, Prejudice and Discrimination This kind of discrimination makes the students lose their self-esteem and the traumas experienced affects the mental health of these students in the long term.
• Discussion of Gender Discrimination in Modern Society In the professional field, women are constantly in discriminatory positions of jeopardy due to their gender. However, women still need to compete in the work environment.
• Gender Roles, Expectations, and Discrimination Despite Isaac being the calmest boy in the school, he had a crush on Grace, a beautiful girl in the school who was from a wealthy family.
• The Unethical Practice of Racism in a Doctor’s Case The involvement of Barrett in the protest is both unethical for the university’s image and immoral for the community. However, the school would likely face tougher court fines and a direct order to reinstate Barrett’s […]
• The Problem of Racism in America One explanation of racism by feminist thinkers is that racism is a manifestation of the agency and power of people of a particular racial identity over others.
• Racism: “The Sum of Us” Article by McGhee The economic analysis and sociological findings in America have drawn a detailed picture of the cost of racism in America and how to overcome it together.
• Contemporary Sociological Theories and American Racism The central intention of this theory paper is to apply modern theoretical concepts from the humanities discipline of sociology to the topic of racism in the United States.
• A Cause-and-Effect Analysis of Racism and Discrimination As a result, it is vital to conduct a cause-and-effect analysis to determine the key immediate and hidden causes of racism to be able to address them in a proper manner.
• The Issue of Obesity in the Workplace: Discrimination and Its Prevention The critical detail is that the spread of the negative attitude to obesity in the workplace leads to the segregation of overweight people, stereotypical perceptions of their abilities, and prejudged attitudes toward them.
• Employment Discrimination Based on Religion In other words, although both elementary teachers had no formal title of a minister and limited religious training, the religious education and formation of students were the basic reason for the existence of the majority […]
• Discrimination Cases and Their Outcomes In the US, noticeable and influential cases tend to occur, and they remind the nation of the existing problem and reduce the effect of discrimination.
• Cause and Effect of Racial Discrimination Irrespective of massive efforts to emphasize the role of diversity and equality in society, it is still impossible to state that the United States is free from racial discrimination.
• Institutional Racism Through the Lenses of Housing Policy While not being allowed to buy property because of the racial covenants, the discriminated people had to house in other areas.
• Social Inequality and Discrimination Gender discrimination is when a person or a group of people is treated unfairly or unfairly because of their gender. Moreover, there is a classification of the thinking model in which a person exalts his […]
• Job Discrimination and Harassment Secondly, the strengths of the discrimination suit include the fact that he is the only white employee in his unit and one of the few men, suggesting a certain bias within the hiring department.
• Role of Racism in Contemporary US Public Opinion This source is useful because it defines racism, describes its forms, and presents the survey results about the prevalence of five types of racial bias.
• The Amazon Warehouse Employee Sexual Orientation Discrimination With the mismatch between the aspects of the work at the Amazon warehouse, the demand for the job, the ability to work successfully, and the wants and desires of the employees, it is worth noting […]
• The Mutation of Racism into New Subtle Forms The trend reflects the ability of racism to respond to the rising sensitivity of the people and the widespread rejection of prejudice.
• Racism: Healthcare Crisis and the Nurses Role The diminished admittance to mind is because of the impacts of fundamental bigotry, going from doubt of the medical care framework to coordinate racial segregation by medical care suppliers.
• Origins of Racial Discrimination Despite such limitations as statistical data being left out, I will use this article to support the historical evaluation of racism in the United States and add ineffective policing to the origins of racism.
• Language Discrimination in Modern Society It is necessary to let go of the fear of talking and writing on social networks in a language that is not native to you.
• Anti-discrimination Legislation and Supporting Case Law The response to this was the abolition of the quota system and the adoption in 1995 of the Act on Non-Discrimination of the Disabled and a package of additional regulations, in particular, on the education […]
• Beverly Greene Life and View of Racism The plot of the biography, identified and formed by the Ackerman Institute for the Family in the life of the heroine, consists of dynamics, personality development and its patterns.
• Historical Racism in South Africa and the US One of the major differences between the US and South Africa is the fact that in the case of the former, an African American minority was brought to the continent to serve the White majority.
• Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Discrimination In this Ted Talk, Sandberg also raises a question regarding the changes that are needed to alter the current disbalance in the number of men and women that achieve professional excellence.
• Capitalism and Racism in Past and Present Racism includes social and economic inequalities due to racial identity and is represented through dispossession, colonialism, and slavery in the past and lynching, criminalization, and incarceration in the present.
• Minstrels’ Influence on the Spread of Racism The negative caricatures and disturbing artifacts developed to portray Black people within the museum were crucial in raising awareness on the existence of racism.
• How Parents of Color Transcend Nightmare of Racism Even after President Abraham Lincoln outlawed enslavement and won the American Civil War in 1965, prejudice toward black people remained engrained in both the northern and southern cultural structures of the United States.
• Bias and Discrimination: Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotyping The bias may be automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent depending on its characteristics and how it manifests in terms of people’s opinions on certain groups of individuals.
• A Problem of Racial Discrimination in the Modern World This minor case suggests the greater problem that is unjustly treating people in the context of the criminal justice system. In the book, Stevenson writes about groups of people who are vulnerable to being victimized […]
• Beverly Tatum’s Monolog About Injustice of Racism Furthermore, the author’s point is to define the state of discrimination in the country and the world nowadays and explore what steps need to be taken to develop identity.
• Discrimination: Trans World Airlines, Inc. vs. Hardison However, the court concluded that TWA made a reasonable effort at accommodating Hardison and granting him the request to work four days a week would detriment the function of his department due to them being […]
• Discrimination in the Bostock v. Clayton County Case The examination of the issue by relying on the example of Gerald Bostock was advantageous for establishing proper employment practices in this respect.
• Issue of Institutional Racism Systemic and structural racisms are a form of prejudice that is prevalent and deeply ingrained in structures, legislation, documented or unpublished guidelines, and entrenched customs and rituals.
• Discrimination: Peterson v. Wilmur Communications The case concerns Christopher Lee Peterson, at the time of events an employee of Wilmur Communications and a follower of the World Church of the Creator.
• Racism in America Today: Problems of Today Even though racism and practices of racial discrimination had been banned in the 1960s after the mass protests and the changes to the laws that banned racial discrimination institutionally.
• Evidence of Existence of Modern Racism It would be wrong to claim that currently, the prevalence and extent of manifestations of racism are at the same level as in the middle of the last century.
• Culture Play in Prejudices, Stereotyping, and Racism However, cognitive and social aspects are significant dimensions that determine in-group members and the constituents of a threat in a global religious view hence the relationship between religion and prejudices.
• Latin-African Philosophical Wars on Racism in US Hooker juxtaposition Vasconcelos’ ‘Cosmic Race’ theory to Douglass’s account of ethnicity-based segregation in the U.S.as a way of showing the similarities between the racial versions of the two Americas.
• Confronting Stereotypes, Racism and Microaggression
• Racial Discrimination in Dallas-Fort Worth Region
• Healthcare Call to Action: Racism in Medicine
• White Counselors Broaching Race and Racism Study
• US Federal Anti-Discrimination Laws Response
• British Colonial Racism for Aboriginal Australians
• Discrimination Against African American Nurses
• “Ocean Acidification Impairs Olfactory Discrimination…” by Munday
• The Black People: Sexuality and Racial Discrimination Interview Review
• Racial Discrimination Through the Cosmetics Industry
• Racism Evolution: Experience of African Diaspora
• Discrimination Against Hispanics in America
• Racial Discrimination and Residential Segregation
• Significance of Perceived Racism:Ethnic Group Disparities in Health
• Religious Practices and Business Discrimination
• Discrimination in Canadian Society
• The Sexism Behind HB16 Bill
• Social Justice, Diversity and Workplace Discrimination
• Racism as Origin of Enslavement
• Colorblind Racism and Its Minimization
• The Bill H.R.666 Anti-Racism in Public Health Act of 2021
• Summary of the Issue About Racism
• Non-White Experience: Stereotyping and Discrimination
• How the Prison Industrial Complex Perpetuate Racism
• Social Change Project: Religious Discrimination in the Workplace
• Battling Racism in the Modern World
• Indian Youth Against Racism: Photo Analysis
• Racism: Do We Need More Stringent Laws?
• Free Speech vs. Anti-Discrimination Practices Conflict
• Problem of Racism in Schools Overview
• US Immigration Policy and Its Correlation to Structural Racism
• America: Racism, Terrorism, and Ethno-Culturalism
• The Pink Tax Issue: Economic Discrimination Against Women
• Discrimination and Substance Use Disorders among Latinos’ Article Review
• Issue of Racism in Healthcare
• Workplace Discrimination Based on Attractiveness
• Solving Racial Discrimination in the US: The Best Strategies
• Popular Music at the Times of Racism and Segregation
• Religious Discrimination Against a Muslim Employee
• Temporary Aid Program: Racism in Child Welfare
• Wearing Headscarves and Workplace Discrimination
• The Discrimination of African Americans
• The Issue of Discrimination Within American Ethnicity by Aguirre and Turner
• Western Scientific Approach as a Cause of Racism
• How Does Racism Affect Health?
• Investigating the Discrimination in the Workplace
• Citizen: An American Lyric and Systemic Racism
• The Reflection of Twain’s Views on Racism in Huck Finn
• Black as a Label: Racial Discrimination
• Urban Regime Theory in Anti-Black Discrimination
• Nike: Workplace Writing and Discrimination
• Environmental Discrimination in Canada
• The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Racial Discrimination
• Flint Water Crisis: Environmental Racism and Racial Capitalism
• Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism
• Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism in the US
• American Healthcare in the Context of Racism
• Discrimination and Politics of Gender and Sexuality
• Discussion of COVID-19 and Discrimination
• Origins of Modern Racism and Ancient Slavery
• Discrimination of Employees With Physical and Cognitive Impairments in the Workplace
• Root Causes and Solutions to Racism
• Contribution of Racism to Economic Recession Due to COVID-19
• What Stories Can Teach Us About Racism
• Racism in Canadian Medical System
• Profit and Racism in the Prisons of the United States
• Everyday Sexism in Relation to Everyday Disablism
• Discrimination and Health of Immigrants in Canada
• Life History Interview: Discrimination as an African American
• Rio Tinto: Case Study About Racism and Discrimination
• Discrimination of Black Women During Pregnancy
• Racism: US v. The Amistad and Dred Scott v. Sandford
• Discrimination in the Workplace: How to Solve It
• Race and Color Discrimination Against US Employees
• Discrimination Against People of Color and Queer Community
• Critical Social Problems Research: Racism and Racial Domination
• Discrimination as an External Manifestation of Societal Ills
• The Discrimination Disparity Continuum. Bill Macumber
• Business and Corporate Law: Discrimination Case Analysis
• Harassment Law – Tennie Pierce Discrimination
• Discrimination Against Women and Protecting Laws
• Criminal Justice: Racial Prejudice and Racial Discrimination
• The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA)
• Manifestations of Gender Discrimination in Insurance
• Anti-discrimination Legislation
• Work Place Discrimination
• The History of Racial Discrimination and Its Effects on the American Races
• Protections Against Employment Discrimination
• Discrimination Complaint on a Civil Litigation Processes
• Racial Discrimination in the US Criminal Justice System
• Policing in America: The Issue of Violence and Racism
• LGBTQ Rights: Sexual Minority Members Discrimination
• Institutional and Interpersonal Racism, White Privilege
• The Aspects of Discrimination
• The Development of a Measure to Assess Symbolic Racism
• Syrian Conflict and Women Rights: Way to Equality or Another Discrimination
• Racism and Tokenism in Bon Appetit: Leadership and Ethical Perspective
• Ethnic Stratification, Prejudice & Discrimination
• From “Scientific” Racism to Local Histories of Lynching
• Equal Pay Act: Pay Discrimination
• Sexism Against Women in the Military
• Subjective Assumptions and Medicine: Racism
• Anti-Discrimination Laws in the U.S.
• Discrimination Against Muslim in the USA
• Racism Experiences in the Workplace in the UK
• Race and Ethnicity, Other Minorities and Discrimination
• The History of Immigration to the United States and the Nature of Racism
• Gender and the Problem of Discrimination
• Discrimination and the Hiring Process
• Legal Process About Discrimination
• Race and Racism in the USA: The Origins and the Future
• The Life of Muslims in the USA and Discrimination
• Genetics of Sexual Orientation: Privacy, Discrimination, and Social Engineering
• Environmental Racism in the United States: Concept, Solution to the Problem
• Discrimination in Puerto Rico
• Protecting George Wallace’s Organized Racism
• How Can the World Unite to Fight Racism?
• Fighting Anti-Muslim Sentiments
• Female Workers Discrimination and Affirmative Action
• Ideological Support Arab Muslim Discrimination
• The Most Prominent Forms of Discrimination
• Discrimination of Women in IT Sphere
• Gender Discrimination in the Workplace and Better Management Skills
• Racism in America and Its Literature
• Race, Class and Gender. Racism on Practice
• Racism: Term Definition and History of Display of Racism Remarks
• Institutional Discrimination, Prejudice and Racism
• Racism in Contemporary North America
• Racial and Gender Discrimination in the Workplace and Housing
• Racism Without Racists in Patriarchal Society
• Discrimination in the United States of America
• The Problem of Racism in Canada
• Exploring and Comparing Racism and Ethnocentrism
• Discrimination Against Black People
• Intraracial Discrimination: Grace Hsiang’s Article’s Analysis
• Ethics of Gender Identity Discrimination at Work
• Racism Cannot Be Unlearned Through Education
• Racism in Movies: Stereotypes and Prejudices
• Intersectionality Oppression and Discrimination in Latin America
• Facing Racism: A Short Story
• Astra Way: Sexual Discrimination Scandal
• White Supremacy as an Extreme Racism Group
• American Racism: So Why Isn’t Obama White?
• Literature on Latina Women and Sexism
• Discrimination in Recruiting & Promotional Aspects: Tanglewood Company
• Disability Discrimination Laws: Workers’ Compensation
• Human Resource Management: US Age Discrimination Act
• “Red Lining” – A Type of Discrimination
• Canada: Discrimination in British North America
• Racism Issues: Looking and Stereotype
• The Problem of Gender Discrimination
• Muslim Society, Life Meaning, and Discrimination
• Affirmative Action and Reverse Discrimination
• Anti-Racism Policy Statement in Australian Schools
• Racism, Minorities and Majorities Analysis
• Chicano Discrimination in Higher Education
• Racism and Ethnicity in Latin America
• Racial Discrimination in Song ‘Strange Fruit’
• Racism Effects on the Premier League Players
• Social Psychology: Racism in Jury Behaviour
• Sexism in Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Works
• Racism in the United States of the 21st Century
• A Conduct Parameter Model of Price Discrimination
• Appiah’s Ideas of Racism, Equality, and Justice
• Consumer Welfare and Price Discrimination
• Racism in Media: Positive and Negative Impact
• Racism: Once Overt, but Now Covert
• How Racism Makes Us Sick: Public Talk That Matters
• Institutions and Gender Discrimination Issues
• Environmental Racism and Indigenous Knowledge
• Organizational Behavior: Group Size and Discrimination
• Rights, Equity and the State: Sexual Orientation and Discrimination
• Gender Discrimination on Birth Stage
• Scientific Racism: the Eugenics of Social Darwinism
• Islam and Racism: Malcolm X’s Letter From Mecca
• Racism vs. “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself”
• Racism in Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders
• Price Discrimination and Psychological Techniques
• Robert Senske vs Sybase Inc: Labor Discrimination Case
• Evian and Aquafina Waters: Stimulus Discrimination Concept
• Employment Discrimination and Law Amendment
• Sexism and Presidential Elections in the USA
• Legal and Ethical Issues: Discrimination Remedy
• Racism in Australian Football League Sporting Clubs
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Diverse Organizations
• Thomas Jefferson on Civil Rights, Slavery, Racism
• Heterosexism and Its Explanation
• Racial Discrimination Forms Against Afro-Americas
• The Equal Opportunities Approach and Discrimination
• Positive Discrimination of Women in Hiring and Promotion
• Fair Treatment and Discrimination in the Workplace
• White Privilege and Racism in American Society
• Racism, Privilege and Stereotyping Concepts
• Kansas State University Community’s Racism Issues
• Australian Anti-Discrimination Acts and Their Provision
• Classism as a Complex Issue of Discrimination
• Gender, Size Discrimination and Fatphobia
• Racism in the United States: Before and After World War II
• Race-Norming and Discrimination Issues
• Baldwin’s and Coates’ Anti-Racism Communication
• The Problem of Racism and Injustice
• Racism as the Epitome of Moral Bankruptcy
• Sports: Discrimination, Match-Fixing and Doping
• Discrimination Against Refugees in a New Country
• Weight Discrimination and Beauty Prejudice in the HRM
• Hate Groups as Drivers of Discrimination
• Racism in Trump’s and Clinton’s Campaigns
• Colin Powell and the Fight Against Structural Racism
• Workplace Discrimination and Legislation in the US
• Discrimination During the Recruitment Process
• Direct, Intentional, Institutional Discrimination
• Age Discrimination and Workplace Segregation
• Hate Crimes and Anti-Discrimination Laws
• Sexism and the Founding Fathers
• Discrimination in Lending Practices
• California Real Estate Discrimination
• Diversity and Discrimination in Hiring Process
• Racism Elimination and Sociological Strategies
• Discrimination and Profiling in “Crash” Movie
• Employment Discrimination and Equal Opportunities
• Ableism in Education, Workplace and Community
• Social and Cultural Diversity and Racism
• Stereotyping and Discrimination in Advertising
• Sexual Orientation Discrimination Issue at the Workplace
• Racism and Discrimination in Religion Context
• Women’s Difference: Sex Discrimination
• Workplace Discrimination: Data Collection Methods
• US Teachers’ Rights, Dismissal, and Discrimination
• Colorblindness as a Reason for Workplace Discrimination
• Discrimination in the USA: Cases and Policies
• Racism: Theoretical Perspectives and Research Methods
• Racism in the Setting the Rising Sun Postcard
• Darwin’s and Galton’s Scientific Racism
• Eli Lilly & Company’s Discrimination Class Action
• Does Racism and Discrimination Still Exist Today?
• The Voting Rights Act and Racial Discrimination
• English Literature Impact on Racism Among Africans
• Discrimination Complaint and the Litigation Process
• Price Discrimination Concept in Economics
• Jerrell Shofner’s Views on the Racial Discrimination
• Prejudice and Discrimination Reduction Prospects
• People with Disabilities: The Systemic Ableism
• The US Government and Discrimination With Muslims
• Asian American Communities and Racism in the USA
• Racial Discrimination and Its Effects on Employees
• Discrimination of Women and Minorities in Firms
• Negative Aspects of Discrimination at the Workplace
• Racial Discrimination in Social Institutions
• Effects of Discrimination in the Workplace
• King’s and Obama’s Views on Racism in America
• Lanning v. SEPTA: Employment Discrimination and Testing Practices
• Girls Discrimination in the Modern Educational System
• Racism in USA: Virginia Laws on Slavery
• Racism as a Reality of Modern American Society
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• Tutorial Review
• Open access
• Published: 20 December 2021

Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

• Mahzarin R. Banaji 1 ,
• Susan T. Fiske   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1693-3425 2 &
• Douglas S. Massey 2  

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications volume  6 , Article number:  82 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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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.

Introduction

Significance.

American racial biases persist over time and permeate (a) institutional structures, (b) societal structures, (c) individual mental structures, (d) everyday interaction patterns. Systemic racism operates with or without intention and with or without awareness. But because these responses are based on socially defined racial categories, they are racialized, and because they are negative, they reveal the roots of racism. At the level of most behavior, they are also controllable, even if many non-Black people rarely notice these relentless patterns. Systemic racism is a unified arrangement of racial differentiation and discrimination across generations. Understanding these formidable challenges is necessary to understand and then dismantle them. Cognitive science can illuminate the fine-grained levels of inbuilt racial bias because it has the methods and the theories to do so. Moreover, studying racial bias is interesting; it will improve the science; and it is the obvious path to ensuring a mutually respectful, peaceful society that flourishes economically, politically, and socially.

At the Editor’s invitation, this article presents the social and behavioral science of systemic racism to a cognitive science audience. The tutorial defines systemic racism, describes its origins in US history, shows how the resulting racialized societal structures have become built-in cognitive structures that propagate in social interactions, resisting change. But these very societal-cognitive-social features can also be agents for change.

Systemic racism is said to occur when racially unequal opportunities and outcomes are inbuilt or intrinsic to the operation of a society’s structures. Simply put, systemic racism refers to the processes and outcomes of racial inequality and inequity in life opportunities and treatment. Systemic racism permeates a society’s (a) institutional structures (practices, policies, climate), (b) social structures (state/federal programs, laws, culture), (c) individual mental structures (e.g., learning, memory, attitudes, beliefs, values), and (d) everyday interaction patterns (norms, scripts, habits). Systemic racism not only operates at multiple levels, it can emerge with or without animus or intention to harm and with or without awareness of its existence. Its power derives from its being integrated into a unified system of racial differentiation and discrimination that creates, governs, and adjudicates opportunities and outcomes across generations. Racism represents the biases of the powerful (Jones, 1971 ), as the biases of the powerless have little consequence (Fiske, 1993 ). Footnote 1

We highlight the “inbuilt” aspect of systemic racism to be its signature feature and the touchstone necessary to understand the nature of systemic racism and its resistance to awareness and change. We begin with the concept’s more traditional domains: institutional and societal systems. Then, given the current venue, we expand the levels of analysis to include individual mental systems that have built in those systems of inequalities. We close with the interaction of those minds in social behavior, which can either maintain or change racial systems.

Institutions and Society . As the first section explains, the term systemic racism has traditionally referred to systems that uphold racism via institutional power (Feagin, 2006 ), with stark examples of what is also called institutional racism (Jones, 1972 ) visible in inequities in housing and lending, as well as more broadly in access to finance, education, healthcare, and justice. This section focuses on the institutional level in depth, as it provides the strongest evidence of systemic racism. At an even more macro s ocietal level, however, the inbuilt aspect of systemic racism is evident in race-based demarcations created by large-scale state and federal programs, which offer levers either to increase or decrease systemic racism. To remain within the scope of the paper, we consider the structures of institutional and societal racism in a single section.

Individuals and Interactions . In tandem with the previous section, this section focuses on individual bias and interactional racism, together bringing into view the inbuilt nature of systemic racism. To expand on this inclusive view of systemic racism, we end by reviewing what we know about the individual human being, alone and interacting with others. Individuals are agentic entities, the primary actors within all systems of life and living. Their attitudes (preferences, prejudices), beliefs (stereotypes), and behaviors (discrimination) are inbuilt or intrinsically enmeshed into the foundation of the mental systems that feed systemic racism. At the individual level, “inbuilt” refers to the common psychological processes that represent race in the minds of individuals. This evidence reveals systemic race bias.

Note that, here, we use slightly different terms: Systemic Racism refers to much of the sociological, demographic, and historic material as well as anything in the psychological section that is explicit and conscious racism. Systemic Race Bias is about implicit cognition—people who may not be aware of the harm they may cause. Implicit race bias does not mean a person is a racist. In this view, keeping racism and bias separate as terms seems advisable. Others view even unexamined racism as systemic racism in its individual manifestation. Each section elaborates on the meaning of racism in that context.

Individual racial bias propagates through both face-to-face and virtual interactions within families, classrooms, playfields, and workplaces, both verbally and non-verbally. Individual minds create and consume racial representations in books, social media, and entertainment. Footnote 2 We focus here on everyday interactions that convey disrespect and distrust of Black Americans.

Why? Role for psychological science in studying systemic racism

Individual humans are the creators and consumers of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but also the policies and practices that lie at the heart of systemic racism. Psychology as a field has historically remained silent on the topic of systemic racism, per se (e.g., Guthrie, 2004 , “Even the rat was white”; for exceptions, see: Jones, 1971 ; DuBois, 1925 ). Perhaps psychologists have regarded systemic racism to be a form of institutional racism and hence in the bailiwick of social scientists who study institutions and society, not individuals. Nonetheless, we attempt here to include individual minds and face-to-face interaction as playing a role. This goal has precedents: Early scholars who straddled disciplines, such as George Herbert Mead ( 1934 , p. 174), would likely find our attempt to be quite compatible with his stance that mind and society must be considered in intertwined fashion.

Today, psychologists are increasingly attempting to bridge the divide between the individual mind and society. Cultural psychology, for example, has attempted to analyze racism as the “budding product of psychological subjectivity and the structural foundation for dynamic reproduction of racist action” (Salter, Adams & Perez, 2018 , p. 151). This dynamic can emerge in individual racist actions (with or without awareness) that are fitted into the structure of everyday life and perpetuate systemic racism. Interpersonal interactions bridge individual and collective representations of race. Individual minds, sharing some notions about each other’s salient identities (e.g., probable race, gender, age) treat each other according to social norms, cultural habits, and cultural scripts. In the case of race, these individual mental representations and social interaction patterns rarely benefit Black participants facing Whites.

“Inbuilt”: A useful metaphor guiding the essay

There are these two fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ’Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’ Wallace, 2009

The fable highlights a simple idea—that the most fundamental feature of any system may be so completely pervasive that it ceases to be perceptible or when perceptible, fails to be recognized in its true form. This paradox creates a challenge for social and behavioral scientists, who must not only generate evidence about the complexities of systemic racism, but we must also confront unthinking rejection of that evidence. Other scientists face similar challenges in documenting their own complex phenomena, such as the resistance faced by the theory of evolution or the denial of evidence about climate change.

In most cases, evidence eventually reaches a tipping point, after which it ceases to be denied and even becomes sufficiently commonplace that its previous denial itself is puzzling. An easy example is the denial of scientific evidence about the position of the earth in the solar system and its shape, with few arguments today (but not zero!) about a flat earth. However, we are far from that tipping point of knowledge and acceptance when it comes to the idea of systemic racism. This paper, then, is yet another attempt, by connecting across the individual, interactional, and institutional/societal levels, to shed light on its existence.

The obvious allegorical lesson from the fable about the fish is of course the ease of being ignorant of that which is pervasive. However, the fable also points out that not all the fish are ignorant of their surroundings. The older fish, swimming the same ocean as the young fish, seems to have figured out the truth about the substance that suffuses its environment so fully that it is imperceptible to its peers. Ignorance then, need not be the only guaranteed outcome, even when perception and awareness are hard. Hence, one section uses the term “unexamined” to describe controllable attention to or willful neglect of one’s own biases (see also Fiske, 1998 ). Social scientists commenting on resistance to socioeconomic inequality have used the term “clueless” (Williams, 2019 ), which is admittedly harsh but suggests that learning some facts would permit more evidence-based understanding. Regardless, the evidence for systemic racism, at the level of institutions and society or at the level of individuals and interactions, requires re-examining the taken-for-granted, whether the water we swim or the air we breathe.

Systemic racism: the role of institutional and societal structures

Contemporary societal racism rests on Black–White segregation, historical and current. This first substantive section presents evidence that systemic racism has long pervaded US institutional and societal systems—creating a context for the minds of individuals within these systems, enabling an omnipresent neglect. First, this section shows that continued housing segregation by race obstructs Black opportunity and mobility, perpetuating racial disparities, challenging many Black Americans in ways White Americans never experience (Massey, 2020 ). At a societal level, Black disadvantage and White advantage come in part from residential hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ). More than any other racial group, Whites live in racially isolated neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ); and in the US neighborhood segregation translates directly into school segregation (Massey & Tannen, 2016 ; Owens, 2020 ). Both segregation and local funding undermine the quality of predominantly Black schools.

To elaborate these points, this section describes the historical context for US racism, territory likely to be less familiar to cognitive scientists. Our takeaway: Systemic racism pervades US social institutions, policies, and practices; later sections show how the societal structures make into the minds of the humans within these systems.

History: segregation and systemic racism

To explain systemic racism, we start with the historical origins of race in the US—that is, the social/political/economic mechanisms that have maintained it over time. Race is baked into the history of the US going back to colonial times (Higginbotham, 1998 ; Jones, 1972 , 1997 ) and continuing through early independence when slavery was quietly written into the nation’s Constitution (Waldstreicher, 2009 ). Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ended slavery and granted due process, equal protection, and voting rights to the formerly enslaved, efforts to combat systemic racism in the US faltered when Reconstruction collapsed in the disputed election of 1876, which triggered the withdrawal of federal troops from the South (Foner, 1990 ).

The absence of federal troops to enforce Black civil rights enabled states in the former Confederacy to construct a new system of racial subordination known as Jim Crow (Packard, 2003 ). It rested on a simple principle: in any social encounter, the lowest status White person was superior to the highest status Black person. By law and custom, Black voting rights were suppressed, and Black Americans were socially segregated from Whites, relegated to menial occupations, inferior schools, dilapidated housing, and deficient facilities throughout Southern society. Any challenges to the Jim Crow system, perceived or real, were met with violence, often lethal, both within and outside the legal system (Tolnay & Beck, 1995 ).

From 1876 to 1900, 90% of all African Americans lived in the South and were subject to the dictates of the repressive Jim Crow system; 83% lived in poor rural areas, occupying ramshackle dwellings clustered in small settlements in or near the plantations where they worked. Although conditions were somewhat better for the 10% of African Americans who lived outside the South (68% in cities), anti-Black prejudice was widespread, racial discrimination was common and, as in the South, the prospect of racial violence was never far away (Sugrue, 2008 ).

Before, 1900, few African Americans lived in cities, and levels of urban racial residential segregation were modest. Black workers and servants generally lived within walking distance of their workplaces, and social contact between the races was common (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). At that time, the share of Blacks among city residents was small, and they were not perceived to be a threat to White hegemony, obviating the need for spatial segregation. The Great Black Migration of the twentieth century changed this status quo and transformed race relations in the US, making race truly a national rather than regional issue (Lemann, 1991 ). This transformation also created a new system of racial subordination based on Black residential segregation.

Between 1900 and 1970, millions of African Americans left the rural South in search of better lives in industrializing cities throughout the nation. As a result of this migration, by 1970 nearly half of all African Americans had come to live outside the South, 90% in urban areas (Farley & Allen, 1987 ). It was during this period of Black urbanization that the ghetto emerged as a structural feature of American urbanism, making Black residential segregation into the linchpin of a new system of racial stratification that prevailed throughout the US irrespective of region (Pettigrew, 1979 ).

Black out-migration from the South began slowly at first, but accelerated after 1914, when the onset of the First World War curtailed the arrival of workers from Europe. It accelerated again after 1917, when the US entered the war, boosting labor demand as conscription drew workers out of the labor force. The imposition of strict immigration restrictions in 1921 and 1924 guaranteed that Black workers and their families would continue to pour into cities during the economic boom of the 1920s (Wilkerson, 2010 ). The entry of ever-larger cohorts of impoverished Black laborers and sharecroppers into the nation’s cities unnerved White urbanites, prompting them to organize collectively by creating “neighborhood improvement associations.” These organizations pressured landlords not to rent to Black tenants and tried to convince Black home seekers that it was in their best interest to locate elsewhere, using persuasion and payoffs when possible but resorting to violence when these blandishments failed (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

As the number of incoming Black migrants continued to rise despite these efforts, White city residents demanded that politicians act to “do something” about the perceived “Black invasion.” Officials in smaller towns and cities responded by enacting “sundown laws” that required all Blacks to leave town by sunset (Loewen, 2018 ). In large cities, legislators passed municipal ordinances that confined Black residents to a specific set of already disadvantaged neighborhoods and excluded them from all others. These ordinances were the functional equivalent of South Africa’s Group Areas Act, which underlay the establishment of that country’s apartheid system in, 1948. These ordinances were widely copied and were spreading rapidly from city to city when, in 1917, the Supreme Court declared them to be unconstitutional (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Sundown laws, however, were never challenged in court and remained in force well into the Civil Rights Era.

The end of legally mandated neighborhood segregation in cities occurred just as Black migration surged in the aftermath of America’s entry into the First World War. The sudden influx of workers caused existing areas of Black settlement to fill up rapidly and eventually overflow into adjacent White areas, where the arrivals met with increasingly violent resistance. The violence peaked in the late teens as anti-Black race riots swept through the nation’s cities, culminating in the Great Chicago Race Riot of 1919 (Tuttle, 1970 ). Even established Black neighborhoods were not safe, as evidenced by the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood was systematically attacked and razed by mobs of White vigilantes, leaving thousands homeless and dozens, perhaps hundreds, killed (Madigan, 2001 ).

Shocked by the wanton destruction of property, the real estate industry moved to institutionalize racial discrimination in housing markets and assert control over the process of racial change in cities (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). In 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers adopted a code of ethics stating that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood” (Helper, 1969 , p. 201). In 1927, the Chicago Real Estate Board devised a model racial covenant to block the entry of Blacks into White neighborhoods and offered it to other cities for adoption throughout the country (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). A racial covenant is a private contract in which property owners within a defined geographic area collectively agree not to rent or sell to African Americans. Once approved by a majority of property owners, the contract became enforceable, and violators could be sued in civil court.

As the real estate industry gradually assumed control of racial change in urban areas, racial violence abated and neighborhood transitions from White to Black came to be managed professionally by realtors who sought to minimize confrontation and maximize profits. As Black migration continued throughout the 1920s, recognized Black neighborhoods steadily increased in density as housing units were divided and subdivided. Basements, garages, attics, and even closets were converted into rental units. Eventually, however, no more living space could be squeezed into the confines of the existing ghetto. Realtors then conspired to move the residential color line, selecting an adjacent neighborhood for racial transition and initiating an institutionalized process known as “block busting” (Philpott, 1978 ).

Realtors began the process by choosing a few poor Black families just arrived from the rural South and obviously unused to city ways to be placed strategically into selected units within the targeted neighborhood. Agents then moved through the neighborhood block by block warning residents of a pending Black “invasion.” Panic selling ensued, enabling realtors to purchase homes cheaply for subdivision into smaller apartments, which were then leased at inflated rents to African Americans desperate for living space. Owing to these institutionalized practices, Black segregation levels steadily climbed through the 1920s and ghetto areas gradually expanded their boundaries through the profitable management of neighborhood racial turnover by realtors (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

The exclusively private auspices of Black residential segregation ended with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. When Franklin Roosevelt came to power with his New Deal in 1933, the nation was in the midst of a catastrophic banking crisis. Millions of middle-class homeowners had lost jobs and were in danger of defaulting on their mortgages, putting both their homes and their bankers at financial risk. In response, the Roosevelt Administration created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to help middle class homeowners refinance their mortgages using long-term, federally insured, low-interest loans (Jackson, 1985 ). Together the federal guarantees and extended amortization periods reduced monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, saving both the banks and the homeowners from financial losses through foreclosure.

To qualify for the federal guarantees, however, HOLC loans had to meet certain government-mandated criteria. In addition to low interest rates, minimal down payments, and long amortization periods, lenders were obliged to consider the riskiness of the neighborhoods in which properties were located. To this end, HOLC officials worked with local realtors and bankers to create a series of Residential Security Maps for use in cities throughout the nation. These maps color-coded neighborhoods according to their creditworthiness. Green indicated a safe investment, yellow indicated caution, and red indicated excessive risk and hence ineligibility for HOLC lending. Black neighborhoods were invariably coded red, along with adjacent neighborhoods perceived to be at risk of Black settlement (Rothstein, 2017 ).

The HOLC lending program only helped the minority of families that already owned homes, however, and in order to spread housing wealth to a wider population and create jobs in the real estate and construction industries, in 1934 the Roosevelt Administration created a much larger loan program under the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA offered long-term loans to prospective home buyers , not just owners. As before, federally guaranteed loans had to meet federally mandated criteria, which evinced a strong anti-urban bias. Specifically, they excluded from eligibility all multiunit buildings, attached dwellings, row houses, and structures containing a business. These provisions effectively restricted FHA loans to single family houses on large lots, thus channeling housing investment away from central cities toward vacant land on the urban fringes (Jackson, 1985 ).

Reflecting the prejudices of the realtors, bankers, and builders who helped to design the program, FHA underwriters were also required to make use of the HOLC’s Residential Security Maps, formally institutionalizing the practice of redlining in real estate and banking and systematically cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods for decades to come. The FHA Underwriter’s Manual explicitly stated that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” In addition to requiring the use of Residential Security Maps, the manual went on to advocate the use of racial covenants to protect FHA-insured properties. When a parallel loan program was created in the Veterans Administration by the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, it adopted the FHA’s racialized practices and procedures (Katznelson, 2006 ).

The anti-urban biases and discriminatory practices built into federal loan programs had little effect on housing patterns during the 1930s and 1940s owing to the tiny amount of new residential construction that occurred during the Great Depression and Second World War. In the postwar period, however, FHA and VA lending drove forward a massive wave of suburban home construction that made new homes widely accessible to White but not Black households. Given high rents and home prices in central cities owing to the influx of workers during the war years, in the late 1940s and early 1950s it was cheaper to buy a brand-new house in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in the city (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

The end result was a government-subsidized mass exodus of middle and working class White families from central cities to suburbs, creating a distinctly American urban configuration of Black cities surrounded by White suburbs. The homes left behind by the departing Whites seeking their piece of the American Dream in the suburbs were quickly occupied by Black in-movers coming to the city to take jobs in the still-vibrant urban manufacturing sector. Neighborhood turnover accelerated, and the nation’s urban Black ghettos rapidly expanded, both demographically and geographically (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

Although neighborhood transitions in the 1950s and 1960s improved Black access to housing in the short term, in the long term the neighborhoods turned into poverty traps. Because of redlining and racial discrimination built into housing and credit markets by federal policies and private practices, once a neighborhood became Black, it was cut off from investment, ensuring that its housing stock and business infrastructure would progressively deteriorate. It also left the Black middle class without a means to finance the purchase of homes, and predatory lenders stepped into the resulting void.

Drawing on their own capital, these lenders purchased homes and then offered to “sell” them to middle class Black families by means of Loan Installment Contracts (Satter, 2009 ). LICs were essentially rent-to-own schemes with high interest rates, bloated monthly payments, and no property rights or transfer of title until the final contract payment was made. Any missed payment could bring about immediate eviction by the property owner, no matter how long the aspiring family had been making payments under the contract.

Other predatory investors also purchased ghetto properties to become landlords, subdividing them into ever-smaller units and leasing them to poor and working class Black tenants at inflated rents (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Whether city housing was being sold under an installment contract or rented on usurious terms, however, the absentee owners could not themselves get loans to offset depreciation or purchase insurance policies to protect their properties, creating a strong financial incentive for landlords to defer maintenance, minimize capital investment, and extract high rents as long as possible until the properties deteriorated to the point of becoming uninhabitable.

As Black ghettos expanded geographically during the 1950s and 1960s in cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, they ultimately came to encroach on zones in which White elites had place-bound investments in universities, hospitals, museums, and business districts. In desperation, local politicians and civic leaders turned to state and federal agencies for help. Drawing on funding from the National Housing Act, they created locally controlled Urban Renewal Authorities with the power of eminent domain, thereby enabling White interests to gain control of the Black neighborhoods threatening their place-bound investments (Bauman, 1987 ; Hirsch, 1983 ). Once in control of the land, they evicted the residents, razed their homes, and demolished neighborhood businesses, replacing them either with large-scale middle-class housing projects or institutional developments that strategically blocked the expansion of the ghetto toward the threatened White properties, prompting James Baldwin to quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal” (Dickinson, 1963 ).

Because of a “one-for-one rule” embedded within the National Housing Act, for every unit of housing torn down in the name of renewal, planners had to identify another unit into which the displaced tenants could theoretically move. To satisfy this rule, local elites once again turned to the federal government, garnering additional funds authorized by the National Housing Act to construct large public housing projects for families displaced by renewal. Given that the displaced families were Black, it was politically impossible to build the housing project in a White district, so another Black neighborhood was targeted for renewal and torn down to build dense collections of high-rise projects that now had to house two neighborhood’s worth of displaced families (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

This pairing of urban renewal and public housing did not itself increase the level of Black residential segregation (Bickford & Massey, 1991 ). Segregation levels were already high in the cities where this pairing occurred; but it did dramatically increase the spatial concentration of poverty within the ghetto by replacing relatively class-diverse Black neighborhoods and business districts with tightly packed blocks of high-rise projects in which being poor was a criterion for entry, yielding neighborhood poverty rates of 90% or more (Massey & Kanaiaupuni, 1993 ).

By 1970, high levels of Black residential segregation were universal throughout metropolitan America (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Footnote 3 As of 1970, 61% of Black Americans living in US metropolitan areas lived under a regime of hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ), a circumstance unique to Americans. Although in theory, segregation should have withered away after the Civil Rights Era, it has not. In 2010, the average index of Black–White segregation remained high and a third of all Black metropolitan residents continued to live in hypersegregated areas (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ). This reality prevails despite the outlawing of racial discrimination in housing (the 1968 Fair Housing Act) and lending (the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act).

Why does modern segregation persist, despite Whites’ reported racial attitudes improving?

Accompanying these legislative changes was a pronounced shift in White racial attitudes. In the early 1960s, more than 60% of White Americans agreed that Whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods. By the 1980s, however, the percentage had dropped to 13% (Schuman et al., 1998 ). The fact that discrimination is illegal, and White support for segregation has plummeted, begs the question of why segregation persists. The reasons are multiple.

First, although the Fair Housing Act banned discrimination in the rental and sale of housing, enforcement mechanisms in the original legislation were eliminated as part of a compromise to secure the bill’s passage (Metcalf, 1988 ). Federal authorities were likewise granted only limited powers to enforce the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Community Reinvestment Act (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

Although overt discrimination in housing and lending has clearly declined in response to legislation, covert discrimination continues. Rental and sales agents today are less likely to respond to emails from people with stereotypically Black names (Carpusor & Loges, 2006 ; Hanson & Hawley, 2011 ) or to reply to phone messages left by speakers who “sound Black” (Massey & Fischer, 2004 ; Massey & Lundy, 2001 ). A recent meta-analysis of 16 experimental housing audit studies and 19 lending analyses conducted since 1970 revealed that sharp racial differentials in the number of units recommended by realtors and inspected by clients have persisted and that racial gaps in loan denial rates and borrowing cost have barely changed in 40 years (Quillian, Lee, & Honoré, 2020 ).

Audit studies, conducted across the social and behavioral sciences, include a subset of resume studies in which researchers send the same resume out to apply for jobs, but change just one item: the candidate’s name is Lisa Smith or Lakisha Smith. Then, they wait to see who gets the callback. The bias is clear: employers avoid “Black-sounding” names (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004 ). In fact, in both Milwaukee’s and New York City’s low-wage job market, Black applicants with no criminal background were called back with the same frequency or less as White applicants just released from prison (Pager, 2003 ; Pager, Western & Bonikowski, 2009 ).

That is, in the minds of hiring managers whose mental make-up is expected to be no different than the readers of this article, a White felon is equivalent to a Black non-felon. The same housing application, the same bank loan application, the same health data, the same behavior, lead to different outcomes depending on the race of the applicant, even though the decision-makers believe they are paying attention to the merits of the case and explicitly not to race, which most decision makers in these studies regard to be irrelevant to the decision.

What makes the problem of systemic racism so perverse is that “good people” with no explicit expression of we would call “racism” are the contributors to such decisions that produce widespread and unnoticed bias, resulting in systemic racism (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013 ). Racial discrimination continues because, although White support for Black segregation may have declined in principle, Whites nonetheless continue to harbor negative racial stereotypes about Black people , which limit their tolerance for integration in practice. Indeed, the willingness of Whites to enter or remain in a neighborhood declines steadily as the percentage of Black neighbors rises (Charles, 2003 ; Emerson, Chai & Yancey, 2001 ). And negative racial stereotyping of Black Americans strongly predicts White opposition to government efforts to enforce Black civil rights (Bobo, Charles, Krysan & Simmons, 2012 ).

In White American social cognition, as later sections elaborate, racial biases remain entrenched both explicitly (Moberg, Krysan & Christianson, 2019 ) and implicitly (Eberhardt, 2019 ). This extends to preferred neighborhoods : Residential searches are inevitably embedded within racialized expectations about neighborhoods and homes that reflect the racially segregated world that most Americans inhabit (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ). The “correlated characteristics heuristic” relies on a single salient neighborhood trait—in this case racial composition—to represent an area’s acceptability. In White social cognition, the mere presence of Blacks denotes lower property values, higher crime rates, and struggling schools, irrespective of what the objective neighborhood conditions are (Krysan, Couper, Farley & Forman, 2009 ; Quillian & Pager, 2001 , 2010 ). Although Whites in surveys and interviews say they welcome the presence of Black neighbors, in practice Whites avoid neighborhoods containing more than a few Blacks and confine their searches to overwhelmingly White residential areas exhibiting White percentages well above those they report in describing their “ideal” neighborhood on surveys (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ).

Although rarely admitted, explicit prejudice against Black Americans has hardly disappeared. Google search frequencies on the epithet “nigger” for different metropolitan areas strongly predicted an area’s level of Black residential segregation (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). This index of explicit racism also strongly predicts the degree to which a city’s suburbs are covered by restrictive density zoning regimes (Massey and Rugh ( 2018 ), a key proximate cause of both racial and class segregation (Rothwell & Massey, 2009 , 2010 ). Owing to the persistence of discrimination, Black Americans are far less able that other Americans to translate their income attainments into residential mobility, greatly compromising their ability to access more integrated and favored neighborhoods (Massey & Denton, 1985 ). As of 2010, the most affluent Black Americans were still more segregated from Whites than the poorest Hispanics (Intrator, Tannen & Massey, 2016 ).

No other group in the history of the US has ever experienced such intense residential segregation in so many areas and over such a long period of time (Massey & Denton, 1993 ; Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). Systemic racism in federal housing policies (Katznelson, 2006 ), real estate (Helper, 1969 ), banking (Ross & Yinger, 2002 ), and insurance (Orren, 1974 ) has ensured a vicious cycle of racial turnover and neighborhood deterioration for most of the past century. As a result, many Black Americans have been compelled to live in societally isolated, economically disadvantaged, physically deteriorated neighborhoods produced and sustained by powerful external forces beyond their ability to control, the precise embodiment of systemic racism.

Because of racial residential segregation and the blocked mobility and spatial concentration of poverty it produces, neighborhoods have become the key nexus for the transmission of Black socioeconomic disadvantage over the life course and across the generations (Sharkey, 2013 ). Half of all Black Americans have lived in the poorest quartile of urban neighborhoods for two consecutive generations, compared with just 7% of Whites, a gap that cannot be explained by individual or family characteristics.

Whereas in the 1960s Black poverty was transmitted across generations by the inheritance of race and the discrimination and exclusion that came with it (Duncan, 1969 ), in the twenty-first century Black poverty is transmitted by the inheritance of place and the concentrated poverty it entails (Massey, 2013 ; Massey & Brodmann, 2014 ; Peterson & Krivo, 2010 ; Sampson, 2012 ; Sharkey, 2013 ). Black disadvantage with respect to income and social mobility is explained almost entirely by the poor neighborhood circumstances they experience (Chetty, Hendren, Jones & Porter, 2020 ; Massey & Brodmann, 2014 ). Racial residential segregation has become linchpin for systemic racism in the US in the twenty-first century (Massey, 2016 , 2020 ).

Discussions of segregation typically highlight how it operates to increase the social isolation of Blacks, but in fact it does more to isolate Whites, who are by far the most spatially isolated group in the US. In 2010, the average Black metropolitan resident lived in a neighborhood that was 45% Black, but the average White metropolitan resident occupied a neighborhood that was 74% White (Massey, 2018 ), and in suburbs the figure rose to 80% (Massey & Tannen, 2017 ). As a result, the advantages of segregation to Whites and the disadvantages to Blacks are invisible to most White Americans.

Feagin ( 1999 , p. 79), put this paradox into perspective by relating the experience of a British immigrant’s confrontation with the realities of race in the US:

Some time after English writer Henry Fairlie emigrated to the USA in the mid-1960s, he visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation and took the standard tour. When the White guide asked for questions, Fairlie inquired, “Where did he keep his slaves?” Fairlie reports that the other tourists looked at him in disturbed silence, while the guide “swallowed hard” and said firmly that “the slaves’ quarters are not included in the official tour.” (Fairlie, 1985 .) Housing segregation, and the systemic racism it reveals, are still not on the official tour.”

Two decades later, the question we must answer is whether we are willing, as scientists and citizens, to put housing segregation—and all the other institutions that do so much to dictate the vicissitudes of Black life—on the official tour of the USA.

Systemic racial bias: the role of mental structures and resulting social interactions

We began with institutions and society. Now, we move to individual minds surrounded and shaped by these societal structures. Next, we then move to interacting minds, which further perpetuate societal and individual racial distinctions. Racial bias at each level supports bias at the other levels, creating a racist system.

To understand individual mental structures, we start with unconscious inference, identified by Helmholtz, and its heir, implicit bias, most relevantly as expressed by Whites associating Black racial cues with negative concepts. Socially motivated (mis)perception goes one stage earlier to bias information seeking and interpretation. More specific links among racial bias in perceiving physiognomy, linked to dehumanizing associations, and aggressive behavior close this first section on the individual.

Unconscious inference

Among the intellectuals who contributed to the emergence of experimental psychology as an independent discipline in the nineteenth century was the German polymath, Herman von Helmholtz, whose numerous contributions to science include the concept of “ Unbewuste Schluss ” or “ unconscious inference .” Helmholtz’s concept was simple, but its implications are profound, even more so today with recent advances in the mind and brain sciences. Given the complexity of just the visual world, how are humans to represent it based on their individual-level, meager sensory and perceptual system, which entails the shunting of packets of data from the world outside, through the eyes and into the brain? Helmholtz offered two ideas. First, perception is not veridical, given the complexity of the world and the rudimentary nature of the minds attempting to make sense of it. Second, as implied by the word inference , what one deduces from the evidence provided by the senses is not a replica of what is out there. Rather, mental representations of the physical world are mere approximations.

Whittling the self-esteem of Homo sapiens down further, Helmholtz went on to say that perception is not controllable, but rather that it unfolds automatically. He used a commonplace example to make this point. We know that it is not the Sun that rises, but rather that the Earth revolves around it. But when we sit on our porch at sunrise, and look toward the horizon, we incontrovertibly experience ourselves as being fixed, and the Sun, however bulky, pushing itself up to meet us. To say about the Sun that “it rises” is completely inaccurate yet completely compelling. That incorrect perception is not something over which we have choice. To think otherwise is to delude ourselves.

Helmholtz’s two ideas contained in the phrase “unconscious inference,” with many additional levels of social complexity, summarizes the challenge when we confront systemic racism. On the one hand, we “know” the facts about an economy purportedly mounted on free labor for 250 years, the undelivered promise of 40 acres and a mule, the failure of Reconstruction, the resistance to desegregation, the history of redlining and gerrymandering, a history of unequal access to education, jobs, housing, finance, healthcare, and a lack of equal protection under the law. On the other hand, the limited sensory, perceptual, learning, and memory systems of humans set up a built-in blindness and automatic inferences that generate the illusions that, for instance, White people experience more discrimination than Black people (Norton & Sommers, 2011 ). Or, if Black Americans have any challenges, they have created their own situation in America today (Pettigrew, 1979 ) and therefore are responsible for getting themselves out of that situation. Not that minorities have no illusions, but the illusions of the higher-status group have more consequences because they usually also have more power.

The features of human minds that feed into the production of systemic racism come in two forms: ordinary errors of perception, attention, learning, memory, and reasoning that are the hallmarks of all thinking systems with human-like intelligence. In addition, we add another level of theorizing familiar to psychologists, that of motivated reasoning , the idea that our preferences, goals, and desires can bias our reasoning and lead to prejudicial decisions and outcomes (Fiske & Taylor, 2021 ; Kunda, 1990 ).

Another hallmark of human cognition is the phenomenon of loss aversion , the finding human beings much prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 ). Even as White Americans resist and deny the reality of systemic racism, they nonetheless feel the loss of White privilege and social status quite keenly, creating powerful resentments that motivate them to reason away the potential existence of systemic racism (Craig & Richeson, 2014 ; Parker, 2021 ).

Implicit racial bias

Beginning in the 1980s, psychologists began to document a puzzling result. Individuals who claimed to have no racial animus showed evidence of negative attitudes and stereotypes toward Black Americans (Devine, 1989 ; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986 ). Soon, the hunt for methods to better access “implicit bias” (as contrasted with standard, explicit bias measured in surveys) was underway, with specific calls for the invention of better technologies that could bypass conscious awareness or conscious control (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ).

One such measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has demonstrated a wide array of group evaluative associations. Typically, people can pair own-group cues faster with positive concepts, and other-group cues faster with negative ones—compared with vice versa. For example, White and other non-Black Americans show robust race bias in their inability to associate “good” and “bad” equally rapidly with the social categories Black and White. The IAT has attracted considerable attention (see Greenwald et al., 2020 , for best practices, reliable effects, and ongoing investigations). A public online location, since 1998, has provided data from millions of tests taken by volunteer participants at http://www.implicit.harvard.edu . Several signature results have replicated multiple times with large samples over time:

Race bias is consistently visible in the data.

A small positive correlation between stated and implicit race attitudes exists, but the two are largely dissociated, i.e., many of those who report being neutral (no negative explicit attitudes toward Black or White Americans), do carry implicit associations of Black + bad and White + good to a larger extent than White + bad and Black + good. This result prompts us to yet again note that the term “racism” has been used by contemporary psychologists to refer to conscious forms of race prejudice and to emphasize its semi-independence from less conscious or implicit forms of race bias. To make this distinction clear, researchers who study implicit race bias have gone to great lengths to reserve the term racism to only refer to conscious expressions of racial animus. Our usage of the term systemic racism in this article is undertaken is in the interest of including all levels of analysis (individual, institutional, societal) and all forms, from the most explicit to the most implicit. The result of a low correlation between explicit racism and implicit race bias makes the point empirically that the two are not the same. Of course, implicit race bias feeds into what may become racism, and for this reason it is best to think about implicit race bias as the roots of racism, not the above ground, visible structure. Implicit race bias also results from systemic racism.

Asian Americans show the same pattern as White Americans, even though as a third-party group in response to a Black–White test, they might be assumed to have neutrality. From the point of view of systemic racism, this is an example of what it means to live in a system of inequity at all levels. Even third-party groups will acquire negative and positive attitudes toward groups that are not their own.

Black Americans express strong positive feelings toward their own group but on the measure of implicit cognition, they show no preference for their own group, with scores of almost any sample of Black Americans showing relative neutrality, i.e., equal association of good and bad for Black and White Americans. This absence of ingroup-favoring attitudes—juxtaposed with the ingroup-favoring lack of neutrality in all other groups in the same society—is open to various interpretations, from moral balance to internalized racism to astute pragmatism; all await other data.

Tests of anti-gay bias revealed it to be quite high in 2007 but steadily dropping off (by 64% since 2013) to be at an all-time low today. By comparison, anti-Black bias has dropped, but to a much lesser extent, by about 25% (Charlesworth & Banaji, in press). A 25% drop-off in race bias is not insignificant, and although the genders differ in magnitude of bias, both men and women are losing bias at equal speed. Although all demographic groups are changing, young Americans are changing faster than older Americans, suggesting that the world they inhabit is signaling a less biased set of attitudes.

Together, these data point to the individual manifestation of systemic racial bias, hidden from view but robustly present. However, psychologists have also gone beyond such demonstrations of basic cognitive associations as markers of implicit mental content to show that individual and institutional change is possible if the will to create change exists.

Socially motivated (mis)perception

The idea of motivated reasoning or motivated cognition gathers several useful ideas to understand how individual humans shape and even distort perception to deal with real or perceived threats to self. Kunda ( 1990 ), for example, posited that the individual need for accuracy is thwarted by the demand to reach a conclusion prior to the evidence being satisfactorily in place and that one’s goals and motives often drive decisions. These decisions reveal many identifiable biases that emerge to weaken the orientation toward accuracy (see Fiske & Taylor, 2021 ).

With more direct focus on motivated reasoning as it concerns social change, Kay et al., ( 2009 ) presented empirical evidence for a motivated tendency to view things as they are and conclude that such a state of affairs exists because it is reasonable and even representative of how things ought to be. The connection to systemic racism is quite clear, as the authors further demonstrate that motivated cognition exists in the interest of justifying sociopolitical systems that maintain inequality and resist change. People justify the status quo, preferring stability especially if they are privileged, but even if not (Jost & Banaji, 1994 ). Groups in a secure position show the cultural equivalent of inertia, seeking stability, but groups on the move express inertia as continuing to move (e.g., acquiring mainstream standing) (Zárate et al., 2019 ).

Two substantive theoretical accounts undergird these ideas as they concern complex interactions of within-person and across-person phenomena such as systemic racism. First, Sidanius and Pratto’s ( 1999 ) Theory of Social Dominance offers evolutionary and cultural evidence to support the idea that hierarchies are an almost obligatory feature of human social groups. A related but independent idea may be found in Jost’s System Justification Theory (Jost, 2020 ), which explicitly makes the case that individuals will sacrifice self and group interest in order to maintain larger “systems” of social arrangements and work to keep them in place. The reason, Jost argues, is that such a motivation serves to meet deep psychological needs for certainty, security, and acceptance by others. The overarching social structure is important to protect because if it is stable, then all within it will be safe, including those disadvantaged by established hierarchies.

Perception of phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior

With regard to perceptions of race, the mere categorization of someone as Black shifts perceptions of their phenotype. For example, a series of experiments documented that people’s knowledge about race phenotypes drives perception of lightness of the skin tone (Levin & Banaji, 2006 ). In other words, experiments held skin-tone constant and varied only the features, from Afrocentric to Eurocentric; this variation in features shifts perception of skin tone, such that Afrocentric faces are viewed to be darker skinned than Eurocentric ones, despite the same gray-scale tone.

Skin tone and features are critical cues to make life and death decisions, especially in ambiguous situations that are often present in so many interactions between police and Black citizens. In simulations of police-citizen encounters, people are more likely to “shoot” unarmed Black men than otherwise equally unarmed White men (Correll, Wittenbrink, Park, Judd, & Goyle, 2010 ). Black men with more phenotypically Black features are more likely to receive the death penalty for murdering a White person, holding constant the features of the crime (Eberhardt, 2019 ). The phenotypicality effect extends even to Whites with Afrocentric features (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004 ). Judgments of criminality can be primed by a Black face (Eberhardt, 2019 ).

And there’s more: the race–crime association overlaps the dehumanizing association of Black faces with great ape faces, that Staples ( 2018 ) called the “racist trope that won’t die”; Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson ( 2008 ) provide evidence from policing that links apes and Black people, from the first moments of perception to the radio dispatch and other media, with systemic implications. In more recent work, Morehouse et al., ( 2021 ) have shown that White Americans associate White with human and Black, Asian, and Latinx with animal with greater ease than the opposite pairing (White with animal), regardless of the category of animal (generic or specific). Implicit racial biases (Whites favoring Whites) are consequential, correlating with judged trustworthiness and economic investment (Stanley, Sokol-Hessner, Banaji & Phelps, 2011 ).

More recently, Kurdi et al., ( 2021 ) measured attitudes toward a phenotypic feature that happens to be a dominant perceptual marker of race, Afrocentric and Eurocentric types of hair. First participants took an IAT measuring their implicit attitude toward Black women with natural or straightened hair. Then, subjects read a summary of a real legal case involving a corporation that fired a Black employee for refusing to change her natural hair ( Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Catastrophe Management Solutions , 2016). The more negative the implicit attitude toward Afrocentric hair, the greater the sympathy with the corporation’s position rather than the plaintiff’s position in the legal case.

A relatively new approach to racial associations comes with the promise of epitomizing the term “systemic” in systemic racism. These are studies of large language corpora that are now possible using machine learning approaches to natural language. With the increasing availability of trained datasets—including large samples of the language of the Internet (content archives continuously collected by the nonprofit Common Crawl) or specific trained datasets of media such as books, TV shows, etc.—allow measuring the extent to which language contains attitudes and beliefs about Black and White Americans across time. Charlesworth and Banaji (in preparation) analyzed data from Google Books from 1800 to 1990. Setting aside the data from older books to focus on whether bias is present in the language today, these are the traits most associated with Black Americans (and not with White Americans) in the late twentieth century: earthy, lonely, sensual, cruel, lifeless, deceitful, meek, rebellious, headstrong, lazy . By contrast, these are the traits associated with White Americans (and not with Black Americans): critical, decisive, hostile, friendly, polite, able, diplomatic, belligerent, understanding, confident . Other work in natural language processing (NLP) sorts adjectives into 13 stereotype-content dictionaries (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, 2021 ). The above adjectives convey ambivalent reactions to Black Americans on several dimensions, but notably neglect competence; Whites in contrast feature several competence adjectives. NLP allows efficient analysis of language in the culture or in spontaneous, open-ended descriptions (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review). Footnote 4

Words have an important role to play. People often express surprise about implicit biases in the minds of individuals who have no intent to harbor them. Considering how and why it occurs—plausible mechanisms—may prove convincing. One causal candidate is language , the predominant way humans communicate and express themselves. Words undertake much of the labor of creating racism in thoughts and feelings that are reflected in speech. Machine learning approaches to understanding racial bias in language will likely be a critical method to objectively uncover how words, spoken and written, create systemic racism. That is, linguistic patterns connect groups with valenced concepts, and the repeated pairings create associations. Without awareness, language produces the inbuilt in the architecture of social cognition (as an example, the NLP stereotype-dimensions dictionaries capture more than 80% of spontaneous stereotype content; Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review).

From cognitive racial bias to aggregate racialized behavior

Individual implicit attitudes have been repeatedly shown to predict behavior; Kurdi et al. ( 2019 ) offer the largest number of studies included in a meta-analysis to date. However, as the authors note, the actual attitude–behavior relationship is marred by the poor quality of many studies, especially given the lack of psychometric control over the predicted behavior. Among the controversies that have marked this work is an intriguing idea put forth by Payne, Vuletich and Lundberg ( 2017 ), who proposed that the small correlations between individual attitude and behavior must be acknowledged as a function of what they call the “bias of crowds,” the idea that an individual’s behavior is determined by the larger social context in which that individual exists. A number of studies have appeared recently to challenge the idea that individual attitude–behavior correlations is the right place to be looking. That the actual correlation between implicit attitude and behavior is larger than it may have appeared has been revealed in a series of studies that predict behavior at the aggregate level by using aggregate IAT scores by region, such as metropolitan areas, counties, and states. Charlesworth and Banaji ( 2021 ) reviewed these studies to demonstrate more substantive relationships between IAT racial bias and consequential social outcomes.

For example, the studies reviewed reveal that the greater the implicit bias against Blacks in a region (using average IAT scores of a region) the greater is the lethal use of force by police, the greater the Black American deaths from circulatory diseases, the lower is spending on Medicaid disability programs (more likely to assist Black Americans), the greater the Black–White gap in infant low birth weight and preterm births, the greater the Black–White gap in school disciplining (suspension, law enforcement referrals, expulsions, in-school arrests), the Black–White gap in standardized testing scores (3rd–8th grade for math and English), and lower upward mobility.

To grasp the meaning of systemic racism as it exists at the individual level within larger society, not just in a single moment by across time, a study by Payne, Vuletich and Brown-Iannuzzi ( 2019 ) is illustrative. Their analysis of IAT data today yields strong correlations with the ratio of enslaved to free people in the southern US in 1860. States with a larger ratio in 1860 are the states with greater race bias today, 160 years later (r = 0.64). This correlation is much larger in magnitude than even the correlation between regional IAT race bias and Black American representation across the US (r = 0.32). As Charlesworth and Banaji ( 2021 ) note, “the result also suggests that today’s Americans who live in regions with greater historical legacies of slavery must be acquiring the particles of race bias embedded in the social atmosphere. Systemic discrimination is a useful term in this case as it helps capture the pervasiveness of race bias as it extends across both space and time.”

Summary. As explicit bias decreased, measured forms of implicit bias have persisted, potentially attributable to racial segregation. White Americans have limited direct experience with Black Americans, so cultural associations substitute for more individuated impressions. Implicit associations of “Black-bad” and “White-good” are weakening, but far from neutral. Meanwhile, socially motivated (mis)perception favors these system-justifying biases. Together, they support a syndrome linking racial phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior. Further, cognitive racial biases underpin aggregate racialized behavior. These are some cognitive-motivational mechanisms of systemic racism. Other mechanisms involve everyday interactions that perpetuate bias. In particular, predictable patterns of disrespect and distrust maintain the interpersonal racial divide.

Racialized social interactions

Face-to-face behavior propagates bias. Individuals carry racial biases into their social settings largely by interacting with others. Repeated patterns of behavior that differ by race are, at a minimum, racialized (defined by race) and often experienced as racist. Individual racial biases, enacted in daily life, perpetuate bias, which then links the individual to the norms, scripts, and habits that constitute the social system. Interpersonal interaction conveys bias, intentionally or not. In scores of studies, White Americans distance themselves from Black interaction partners, express non-verbal discomfort, and avoid them (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami & Gaertner, 2002 ; Richeson & Shelton, 2007 ; Word, Zanna & Cooper, 1974 ). In the aggregate, these patterns constitute the concrete manifestations of a racially biased social system.

We have already seen White people’s generically negative default associations with Black Americans, linking them to crime (untrustworthy) and to animals (incompetent). These reflect the two key stereotype dimensions in intergroup perception (Fiske, 2018 ): warmth and competence. These dimensions organize people’s perceptions of social systems: perceived competence reflects groups’ stereotypic status in society. The hierarchy supposedly reflects merit, so rank predicts their supposed competence and evokes respect—or supposed incompetence and disrespect. Besides groups’ status (competence), the other aspect of social structure is groups’ apparent cooperative or competitive goals, interdependencies that stereotypically predict warmth and trustworthiness. Cooperators on our side are nice; competitors are not. Stereotypes derive from social structural perceptions (status and interdependence), especially when people learn about others they might encounter (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002 ; Nicolas et al., 2021 ). Black Americans do not get a break on either dimension. And because these racialized perceptions derive from social structure, they pave the way for systemic racism. Consider the evidence for these two dimensions: competence and warmth in racialized perceptions and behavior.

Disrespect communicates Whites’ view of Blacks as low status and incompetent

The default representation of Black Americans is low status (Dupree, Torrez, Obioha & Fiske, 2021 ). Whites spontaneously associate Black faces with low-status jobs, compared to Whites. The structural belief that Blacks are low status appears in associating them with jobs such as janitor, dishwasher, garbage collector, taxi driver, cashier, maid, prostitute. This race–status association correlates with endorsing social dominance (believing that some groups inevitably dominate others, and it is better that way) and with meritocracy (group get what they deserve). All these judgments share a common element of disrespect and assumed incompetence.

Race–status associations emerge in behavior that maintains Black people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Respondents endorsed Black applicants for lower status jobs and withheld support for organizations and government policies aiding minorities. Thus, racialized associations, assumptions, and preferences all identify a view of Black people's structural position as low status, on average. Behavior communicates these attitudes, whether examined or not. Thus, race–status associations imply Black incompetence, covarying with feeling-thermometer (0–100) ratings of interracial bias, social dominance orientation, meritocracy beliefs, as well as hierarchy-maintaining hiring and policy preferences.

Disrespectful behavior that presumes incompetence of Blacks appears in another series of studies. Well-meaning liberals, expected to introduce themselves to a Black partner, dumbed-down their speech, as they did in vocabulary for a task assignment (Dupree & Fiske, 2019 ). Similarly, White Democratic presidential candidates also showed a competence downshift in speeches to minority audiences only (Dupree & Fiske, 2019 ).

This pattern reproduces itself when respondents imagine introducing themselves to a lower-status person (race unspecified) at work (Swencionis & Fiske, 2016 ). They claim their goal is to communicate their own warmth (as they downplay their competence), but this rests on the presumption of the other’s incompetence. Trying to be folksy does not communicate respect.

The presumption that structural status predicts competence is widespread (averaging r > 0.80 across US and international samples; Fiske & Durante, 2016 ). The implication is that for most White Americans, the association that pops into their minds will link a Black person with incompetence. People communicate such disrespect by failing to bet on or invest in the other’s performance (Walsh, Vaida, & Fiske, under review).

Structurally, this amounts to racism. Black people are widely perceived as inferior in these ways, which are baked into the social hierarchy, reflecting disrespectful patterns of interpersonal behavior. All of this perpetuates the social hierarchy and the image of Blacks as incompetent.

Worse yet, disrespect surfaces in police encountering Black drivers. From the first moment (“Hey” instead of “Sir” or “Ma’am”), police officer language shows computationally derived, measurably lower respect (Voigt et al., 2017 ). Given the already fraught relationships between police and Black community members, this worsens an already dangerous encounter and undermines the chances to create trust.

Distrust communicates Whites’ views of Blacks as uncooperative and not warm

Besides incompetence, the other major dimension of social cognition is warmth (trustworthy, friendly), as noted. The default stereotype of a Black person is probably also untrustworthy, but the data on this point are surprisingly indirect. Whites can be expected to distrust Blacks as part of the larger principle that, categorically, people mistrust outgroups. More specifically, as noted, Whites associate Blacks with crime, which certainly undermines trust. Footnote 5 This configuration fits survey data showing that ratings of poor (i.e., explicitly low-status) Black people allege incompetence (disrespecting them) but also lack of warmth (distrusting them).

Plotting these ratings in a warmth x competence space, poor Blacks are frequently judged as low on both. Because White Americans link race and status, the low-income Black person is the default Black person, allegedly incompetent, but also untrustworthy. Mistrust is indicated by excessive surveillance of Black Americans (driving while Black, shopping while Black, false accusations of theft or assault, police shootings…). Footnote 6

Distrust can be operationalized as behavior: In the economic Trust Game, a player must decide how much of their starting endowment to share, on the knowledge that it will be tripled, and on the hope that their partner will share back, generously. Incentivized trust-game behavior closely tracks warmth ratings; that is, societal groups rated as low warmth and untrustworthy receive less shared endowment, presumably because they are not trusted to share it back. In nationally representative samples, people of color do not fare well in the Trust Game (Walsh et al., under review). In more prosaic settings, non-verbal behavior reveals unmonitored dislike (if not specifically mistrust), as noted.

Black Americans experience repeated treatment as incompetent and untrustworthy. Because this stereotype and ensuing behavior is racially category-based and negative, as well as potentially controllable, it is racist. Because the behavior comes from societal stereotypes, which come from social structure, Footnote 7 it is systemic.

Whites’ potential control implies responsibility for reinforcing system racism

Racialized interactions could also be termed racist, in the sense that White people could potentially observe their own inequitable behavior if they chose (Fiske, 1989 ). People rarely examine these unwritten rules, typical behaviors, but conceivably they could, so “unexamined” bias captures the higher potential control for behavior than for implicit associations. Control implies responsibility in the minds of lay people and the law, so this interpretation of “racialized” as “racist” creates concern and is likely to be contested. But the science makes the empirical point here that racialized social behavior is demonstrably controllable, given sufficient incentive (Monteith, Lybarger & Woodcock, 2009 ; Sinclair, Lowery, Hardin & Colangelo, 2005 ). So systematically different behavior by race reflects a racist habit, script, or norm, the components of a system from the bottom up.

The challenge in controlling racist habits is that they are the cultural default. Much of this systematic behavior results from White Americans’ inexperience with Black Americans, thereby substituting societal representations for individuating information about the unique human (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990 ). People use especially those default representations that fit their natural human tendency to detect and prefer people they view as similar to themselves. To unpack this, consider some basic principles of affiliation that would predispose Whites to favor other Whites and exclude Black people. First is the basic tendency to categorize others and to favor those of the ingroup. For decades, principles of attraction have established its foundations in similarity (Byrne, 1971 ; Montoya & Horton, 2013 ) or homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook, 2001 ). And mere categorization suffices to produce ingroup favoritism (Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ). No animus is necessary, although it easily develops. As a basis for categorization, race is arbitrary (more so than gender and age; Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001 ) but common (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999 ). Thus, race-based ingroup favoritism is a default, in the absence of other experience. Footnote 8 This makes it hard to over-ride.

Societal segregation by race makes difficulties for overcoming the racial default. Segregation limits White exposure to Blacks, undermining their direct experience, leaving Whites to rely on cognitive shortcuts to represent Blacks as a group. Indeed, the less exposure people have to outgroups, the more clearly they differentiate among them–stereotypically. That is, White Americans who know the least about other races have the clearest stereotypes about them; the less diversity, the more differentiated their cognitive representations (Bai, Ramos & Fiske, 2020 ).

What’s wrong with that?

As a scientific question, a skeptic might ask, what’s wrong with differentiating by stereotypes? One set of answers concerns the demeaning individual and face-to-face interaction, just addressed. The other answers pertain to sheer demographic diversity of Black Americans, covered next.

Given its racial history and ongoing systems, societal patterns and cultural stereotypes prevailing in the US tend to associate Blacks with low status and Whites with high status as noted. To the extent this race–status association has a kernel of statistical accuracy (Blacks are over-represented in low-status jobs), it fails several tests as an argument for using stereotypes as a constructive strategy of intergroup relations. First, it ignores variability, individuality, and (especially) Black diversity. Second, category-based thinking exaggerates perceived between-group variability and minimizes perceived within-group variability (Tajfel & Turner 1979 ; Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff & Ruderman, 1978 ). So “nouns that cut slices” (Allport’s, 1954 felicitous phrase for category labels) do violence to the human data. What’s more, society has civil rights laws protecting people from being judged by their group membership, so the consensus is that this is not only wrong, but illegal.

Race–status associations, in practice, ignore all the structural contributors to race–status associations, such as the neighborhood effects, already described. Whites assume meritocracy, believing that status accurately reflects individual competence (Fiske, Dupree, Nicolas & Swencionis, 2016 ); globally, the perceived status—perceived competence correlation hovers around 0.80. (The only countries where people are more cynical about the status-merit link are former Communist ones; Grigoryan et al., 2020 .) The point here is that status has many antecedents, and not all of them are merit (or other personal, stereotypical explanations, e.g., innately good/bad at math). Systemic factors such as neighborhood, school, family resources, connections, and especially race all receive no mention in the meritocracy account.

Whites do differentiate Black Americans by subcategories, e.g., by status, specifically social class, viewing low-income Black people as incompetent and untrustworthy, but Black professionals as competent and trustworthy (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002 ). Black Americans themselves differentiate several subtypes of Blacks likewise along a social-class dimension (Fiske, Bergsieker, Russell & Williams, 2009 ).

Status-keeping shortcuts are easier to maintain without information to the contrary, such as experiencing human variability. Whites with less exposure to Blacks are more overtly prejudiced as a function of structural features such as rural residence, where they encounter less diversity (Bai et al., 2020 ), and lack of education, where they experience less variability of ideas. As a structural matter, segregated White rural residence also predicts lower school quality partly because of the American policy of locally funding schools; this creates an association between a weaker tax base, rural location, ethnic homogeneity, and overt bias. These systemic factors interact to produce prejudice. As an earlier section shows, the social structure permeates American arrangements since the arrival of Whites on native lands.

Nevertheless, for most Whites, their isolated lives make them inexperienced about their Black fellow citizens. Housing segregation disfavors most Whites in experience with diversity, making them often inept and naïve when speaking about issues that are facts of Black lives. This means that Whites rely on cultural shortcuts to understand the Black people whose life experience they do not know. These cognitive representations derive from perceived structural patterns such as race–status associations and race-resource unfairness (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ).

We have seen that Whites’ racial beliefs are relatively automatic (implicit bias) and ambivalent (warmth/competence). The resulting associations (stereotypes) are more subtle than most people believe. They are consequently hard for anyone to detect in themselves (unexamined) or in any one person (under the radar), but the patterns appear systemically as aggregate biases. Supposing the aggregate biases are problematic, at least because they ignore variability, examine that more closely.

Aggregate bias ignores diversity

So far, this review has described the relentless systems of racism that limit opportunity and outcomes by race. Many Black Americans nevertheless succeed despite the rigged system. Black diversity thus results from those who escape the system, but also from African and Caribbean immigration, and from intermarriage. For Black students enrolled at selective colleges, especially, the diversity of their backgrounds is the main fact that underscores their success (Charles, Kramer, Massey & Torres, 2021 ). Any given White student’s background is far more predictable than any given Black student’s, which potentially ranges from extreme disadvantage to extreme wealth. For that minority (a third) of Black students whose segregated neighborhoods entail underfunded schools, gang violence, and concentrated police violence, their presence in college testifies to extraordinary resilience (Charles, Fischer, Mooney & Massey, 2009 ).

Most non-Black people do not realize that Black Americans are more diverse than most American ethnic groups. Underestimating their variety allows an oversimplified image to dominate every level, from mind to society, making it a systemic racism. This section describes diversity based on place, intermarriage, immigrant experience, parent education, and sheer escape.

A century ago, most Black Americans lived in the rural South, but after the Great Migration, most lived in cities, often in the North, usually hyper-segregated, but with family roots in both the North and South. By the turn of the current century, Black American student bodies at selective colleges were the most diverse in history, more biracial, more immigrant, more middle or upper class, and equally identifying themselves as both American and as Black (Charles et al., 2021 ). Black students, even as elites, show “unprecedented variation in terms of racial origins, skin tone, nativity, generation, class, and segregation” (Charles et al., 2021 , Ch. 10).

Clusters of characteristics and attitudes illustrate the variety. Mixed-race students identify less with being Black, are comfortable with both Blacks and Whites, see Whites as less discriminatory, and report deep parental involvement in their schooling and cultural experiences. Mixed race students also have more White friends and fewer Black friends than their monoracial peers and are more likely to date outside the group, especially with Whites. In addition, mixed-race students are less likely to join majority-Black organizations on campus, and thus report less intense interaction with Blacks . Psychologically, the White view of biracial individuals continues to demonstrate hypodescent, i.e., the view that biracial individuals belong to the less advantaged group, or the cognitive expression of the “one drop rule.” Combining the sociological and psychological angle demonstrates the lack of consistency between how biracial Americans are viewed and the way they see themselves.

Black students with an immigrant background are most comfortable with other Black students, and report having strict parents who expect obedience, respect, hard work, and family loyalty without hands-on, hovering involvement. First-generation immigrants, especially African immigrants (versus Caribbean ones), believe in meritocracy and see Whites as not so discriminatory. After a generation, idealism gives way to pragmatism: Hard work pays off. African immigrant origins predict reliably higher grades.

As for segregation, Black students growing up with more exposure to Whites feel closer to them but also view Whites as more discriminatory, a psychologically complex mental state to manage. In contrast, living in segregated neighborhoods especially exposes Black students to higher (the top third) levels of disorder and violence, leading them to view Whites as more distant and discriminatory. But parents are more protective, relying on strict discipline but not trying to use shame or guilt as an influence strategy (more frequent in Asian families).

As with all students, high-school GPA predicts college GPA. Besides that, again as with all students, Black women do better than Black men, as do those with educated parents . Differences in academic preparation vary by segregation in two ways: the more White students in their schools, the worse Black students’ grades but the higher their SATs, suggesting more rigorous standards. Thus, the portraits of Black college students are diverse; generalizations are unreliable, except perhaps for one: resilience in the face of systemic bias and a diversity of adaptations to a variety of challenges.

We document Black diversity here for these reasons: First, to avoid making the litany of systemic Black disadvantages the sole image conveyed here. Second, because of segregation, many White people, including University faculty, see a Black person on campus and—assuming they realize this is a student—they presume the person comes from a low-income background, unprepared for college, with uneducated parents, native born, but with little experience outside the imagined ghetto, etc. This may be true for some small fraction of students, but not just the Black ones, and not true of most Black students on campus today. A third reason to remind the reader of Black diversity on campus is to highlight experiences of inter-racial contact as important one mechanism for overcoming racial bias, and—if scaled up to integrated neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces—for shifting systemic racism.

Contact: exposure to racial diversity

People with least exposure to diversity have the most differentiated images of the outgroups they have never met (Bai et al., 2020 ). And the prospect and first experience of diversity is not salutary; newly diverse contexts show lower well-being (Putnam, 2007 ; Ramos, Bennett, Massey & Hewstone, 2019 ). But over time, people get used to each other: well-being is higher and stereotypes melt into each, forming an undifferentiated cluster of people like us, mostly warm and competent.

Psychology has 70 years of research to explain how this works, following Allport’s ( 1954 ) contact hypothesis. In one meta-analytic perspective (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006 ), intergroup contact reduces prejudice, the more it meets Allport’s conditions: shared goals, non-trivial interactions, authority sanctions, and rewarding results. Much of the process seems to be affect-driven. If the contact setting would afford the opportunity for friendship, the contact effect is stronger (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005 ). This is a useful reminder that much prejudice is emotional, not cognitive. In fact, a meta-analysis of 50 years of research on racist attitudes found that they predict racist behavior the most when they are emotions (“hating them”) rather than stereotypes (“they are lazy”) or even simple evaluations (2 on a 5-point scale) (Talaska et al., 2008 ).

Nevertheless, the core element of successful contact, goal interdependence, does operate via information processing. In laboratory experiments, interdependence makes people attend specifically to unexpected, stereotype-inconsistent information, and they make dispositional inferences, generating an individualized coherent impression of the teammate (Ames & Fiske, 2013 ; Erber & Fiske, 1984 ). Neural signatures of mindreading prominently include the mPFC regions that reliably activate when people are inferring another’s predispositions. The mind-reading mPFC activates most for an interdependent partner’s stereotype-inconsistent attributes. Although supporting evidence includes these mechanisms, a subsequent meta-analysis (Paluck, Porat, Clark & Green, 2021 ) notes that few high-quality intergroup studies have focused on race per se, few look at adults, few are experiments. We have much to learn.

Conclusion: systemic racism is individual/interpersonal and institutional/societal but rarely recognized

Segregated housing disadvantages many Black Americans, and its effects are far-reaching, not only in life opportunities and outcomes (education, employment, health, well-being) but also in the psychology of systemic racism. We have argued that case here. Most Whites fail to recognize and appreciate the growing diversity of America’s Black population, which has arisen from a mixture of Black resilience, a growing middle class, rising intermarriage, and global-South immigration. Generally, White Americans—because of the segregation perpetuated to sustain their advantage—have limited exposure to Black Americans, so their knowledge is indirect, and based on cultural caricatures. Segregation allows White people to be clueless about race, and because racial bias is more automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent than people think, they fail to detect it in themselves and others. As a result, White people have many unexamined biases, undergirded by earlier stages of information processing (e.g., attention, perception, learning, memory, reasoning) that sustain such a lack of awareness. These cognitive errors and biases stem from lack of exposure, lack of the accurate evidence, and a lack of necessary knowledge.

The assumption here is that if people were simply made aware of the facts that have been described in the earlier sections, they would slap their palm to their head and immediately vote for reparations. But as readers may no doubt deduce on their own, confronting accurate data and internalizing it is not a smooth or pretty process. That our minds resist information that challenges certain types of prior beliefs is a fundamental discovery from the mind sciences. Basic cognitive processes such as motivated cognition help to maintain a lack of awareness of racial experiences as they exist on the ground. But no lack of awareness need exist.

The human ability for conscious awareness, deliberate thought, and the motivation to link values to behavior cannot be underestimated as vehicles of change. We have accomplished this regarding how we understand the relationship of Earth to our Sun, so we know it is not as it seems. If we choose, we can similarly put our minds to derive the best evidence to learn about the presence or absence of systemic racism. If we can acquire the appropriate knowledge (often hidden from our conscious perception), we will be more likely to remain open to evidence that shows its presence.

If we do not undertake this effort, it is at our own peril. If, in the twenty-first century, we cannot mount a new struggle to see the social world for what it is, we are by choice dooming ourselves to extended ignorance that will be costly to us, our society, and the world we inevitably leave to our descendants. Earlier we provided evidence about unexpected (by scientists) decreases in implicit sexuality bias (massive drop) and race bias (more modest change) since 2007. These data provide optimism that mental content that we cannot change at will is nonetheless capable of movement toward racial neutrality across the US.

In other words, who-we-have-been need not be the future-selves-we-are-becoming. Here, we demonstrated that grappling with the correct data is a necessary step on the path to understanding our role in the creation of systemic racism. Among the blind spots that we will need to shake off, once and for all, is the belief that racism is the product of a few bad people in our society, and that removing them from power will suffice to deal with the issue.

Space and time preclude our covering the targets’ perspective, identity, resilience. Nor do we cover racial socialization in children.

Through the sensory and perceptual systems granted to our species by evolution, these dyadic and small-group social interactions evolve into larger and larger social units, such as the hundreds of so-called friends or millions of so-called followers on more recent forms of social media. Today we transcend ancestral, small-group interactions to generate larger-scale groups whose interactions occur on an exponential scale. The internet provides avenues for the high-speed transmission of individual attitudes, beliefs, values, as well as for propelling action across communities and nations. These communications have the potential to spread both social good and social harm, with explicit racial animus and implicit prejudicial bias being examples of the latter.

Using the most common measure of segregation (the dissimilarity index), in that year 94% Black metropolitan residents lived under conditions of “high” segregation (an index of 60 or greater on a 0–100 scale), meaning that at least 60% of Blacks would have to exchange neighborhoods with Whites to achieve an even distribution of the races across neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). Moreover, in a subset of metropolitan areas, not only were Black residents unevenly distributed across neighborhoods, they were also isolated within overwhelmingly Black districts that were themselves densely clustered near the central business district, a geographic pattern that Massey and Denton ( 1989 ) labeled "hypersegregation.”

The NLP fits more traditional findings, a form of cross-validation. Based on content analysis of an 84-adjective checklist, the language describing Black Americans did not change much, across samples from 1933 to 2007 (Bergsieker, Leslie, Constantine, & Fiske, 2012 , Study 4): The most recent data describe ambivalent view of sociality (aggressive, gregarious, passionate), and some specific stereotypes (loud, talkative, religious, loyal to family, sportsmanlike, musical, materialistic), but saying nothing about competence. Neglecting to mention an obvious dimension can reveal taboo topics, stereotyping by omission (Bergsieker et al., 2012 ).

Black people may distrust Whites, too, but they have less standing (status and power) to do damage.

An odd anomaly: Abundant research describes Black people’s generalized trust as lower then Whites’ generalized trust. Also, social science has studied Black Americans’ mistrust of government, business, healthcare, and education systems that have historically abused them (see next section). This would hardly seem puzzling enough to be the lion’s share of the trust literature and to eclipse White Americans’ pockets of mistrust. Specifically, no one seems to study Whites’ mistrust of Black people. Overlooking the obvious is one symptom of a systemic bias.

The combination of status-competence and warmth-trustworthiness creates remarkably stable perceptions of social structure (Durante et al., 2015). In social systems across the globe, middle classes are stereotypically competent and warm (trustworthy) whereas homeless people are neither. And in the mixed quadrants, rich people seem competent but cold, whereas old people seem well-intentioned but incompetent. These class and age patterns are nearly universal. In contrast, ethnic, racial, religious, and other cultural stereotypes are accidents of history, reflecting what subset of a group arrived under what circumstances. Compare stereotypes of Chinese railroad workers in the nineteenth century to stereotypes of Chinese entrepreneurs in the twenty-first century.

Implicit bias is difficult to monitor, as noted. Yet another way that prejudice goes undetected, is in its modern form, of being exhibited less as outgroup harm and instead as ingroup help (Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014 ). Despite this ambiguity, the net effect is the same—just harder to detect, and even lauded, because helping is a prosocial act that garners praise.

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Banaji, M.R., Fiske, S.T. & Massey, D.S. Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society. Cogn. Research 6 , 82 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00349-3

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Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change (2016)

Chapter: 6 conclusions and recommendations, 6 conclusions and recommendations, lessons learned, experiences of other countries.

The experiences of Australia, Canada, and England (see Chapter 4 ) strongly indicate that changing negative social norms that stigmatize people with mental and substance use disorders will require a coordinated and sustained effort. Behavioral health-related norms and beliefs are created and reinforced at multiple levels, including day-to-day contact with people affected by mental and substance use disorders, organizational policies and practices, community norms and beliefs, the media, and governmental law and policy. Successful national-scale anti-stigma programs in other countries shared the following characteristics:

• They were supported by government at the national level.
• Support was committed on a long-term basis, often over decades.
• There was ongoing evaluation and monitoring from the planning phase forward.
• The initiative was multipronged to address the full range of relevant needs.
• Programs and services were coordinated across states (provinces) and across economic and social sectors to reduce fragmentation of efforts.
• Information was collected and disseminated about what worked, with whom, and under which conditions in order to inform the ongoing program development as well as future programs.

The Ryan White Act

In the United States, the Ryan White Care Act (RWCA) provides an example of a coordinated and sustained effort to meet the full spectrum of needs in people with HIV/AIDS. The act was initially passed by Congress in 1990 and has since been reauthorized four times in 1996, 2000, 2006, and 2009. The act supports programs and services at the community, municipal, and state level across the nation. Over the past 25 years, the Ryan White Program has become a critical component of the HIV/AIDS health care system in the United States, serving more than one-half million people ( Crowley and Kates, 2013 ). The history, evolution, and outcomes of the program provide relevant information for future behavioral health anti-stigma initiatives.

The Ryan White Program has evolved to embrace a focus on treatment as prevention, which is consistent with the goals of the Affordable Care Act and the U.S. National HIV/AIDS Strategy. Ongoing evaluation and outcomes research provide future direction for the program, most recently in the areas of health workforce development, insurance coverage, and efforts to scale up programs to achieve population-level impacts ( Crowley and Garner, 2015 ).

The Ryan White Program funds social support-related services in addition to traditional health care and prescription drug programs, including transportation and housing assistance, nutrition services, day care, and dental care ( Taylor, 2010 ). Such “wrap-around” services are provided within the context of an integrated model of care to improve quality of life for people living with HIV/AIDS who face many of the stigma-related barriers as individuals with mental and substance use disorders ( Garfield, 2011 ). Funding is awarded through statutorily established formula grants and through competitive mechanisms with the bulk of funds distributed noncompetitively in response to evolving needs.

One critique of RWCA is that the act did not establish minimum standards for care and services delivery across all states. For example, the act funded AIDS Drug Assistance Programs that were managed by individual states with the states deciding how to allocate funding and set eligibility for enrollment. At the program’s peak height in September 2011, more than 9,000 people with HIV were on state medication waiting lists. Although state and local autonomy regarding implementation and delivery is essential, lessons learned from the AIDS Drug Assistance Programs underscore the need for unifying program standards and illustrate the

important role of the federal government in a national strategy to reduce stigma related to mental and substance use disorders.

An Ecological Framework

Research on stigma toward mental and substance use disorders is challenging and complex in part because it necessarily involves a wide range of independent service systems, numerous sectors and professions, competing agendas, nuanced ethical and cultural issues, and multiple levels of outcome analysis ranging from the individual level to national statistics. Coordinating research across these many layers and systems will require a strategic and harmonious effort on the part of the federal government, private foundations, and academic and health care institutions, and other stakeholders. A coordinated research effort should be finely tuned to the societal and cultural contexts that intentionally or unintentionally endorse or facilitate stigma at various levels, especially the structural level. One assumption of an ecological perspective is that society’s tolerance for or endorsement of a negative norm sets a precedent for stigma at the individual, family, and community levels ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2014 ). This underscores the need to focus more attention on eliminating structural stigma (see Recommendation 2 ).

Understanding the processes by which factors at the individual, family, community, and social levels interact to produce and maintain stigma will require multidisciplinary, multimethod, and multisector approaches. Research will need to leverage and build on the existing knowledge base related to mental and substance use disorders, stigma change, and other relevant and related fields. Finally, effective research needs to consider the cultural processes, social stratification, ecological variations, and immigrant/acculturation status that are pertinent to understanding the causes and consequences mental and substance disorder stigma ( Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2014 . These sociocultural factors are critical elements to consider in developing and testing intervention strategies and in adapting evidence-based practices to unique populations and target audiences to ensure cultural relevance, reach, efficacy, and adoption ( Barrera et al., 2013 ).

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

A national-level approach.

CONCLUSION: The experiences of the U.S. campaigns related to HIV/AIDS and of anti-stigma campaigns in Australia, Canada, and

England demonstrate the need for a coordinated and sustained effort over 2 or more decades to reduce the stigma associated with mental and substance use disorders.

Norms and beliefs related to behavioral health, such as the stigma associated with mental and substance use disorders, are created and reinforced at multiple levels, including day-to-day contact with affected individuals, organizational policies and practices, community norms and beliefs, the media, and governmental law and policy. A number of private and public organizations are already engaged in anti-stigma and mental health promotion efforts, but because these efforts are largely uncoordinated and poorly evaluated, they cannot provide an evidence base for future national efforts.

RECOMMENDATION 1: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should take the lead responsibility among federal partners and key stakeholders in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a multipronged, evidence-based national strategy to reduce stigma and to support people with mental and substance use disorders.

Relevant stakeholder groups would include the following:

• consumers in treatment for mental and substance use disorders and consumer organizations;
• families and others whose lives are touched by mental illness or substance use disorders, including suicide-attempt survivors and loss survivors;
• relevant private sector leadership, including major employers;
• relevant foundations and nongovernmental organizations;
• advocates and advocacy groups, including civil rights and disability law experts;
• insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers;
• journalists and others in the news media, including public health media experts;
• health and behavioral health care providers, and administrators, including protective services and social services providers;
• health professional education institutions and professional associations;
• academic researchers, including suicide prevention experts and researchers;
• law enforcement officials and first responders; and
• representatives of federal, state, and local governments.

Early tasks would include the following:

• Identify a lead organization to serve as convener of stakeholders.
• Promote coordination and engagement across local, state, federal, and nongovernmental groups, including the U.S. Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Labor, and relevant stakeholder groups to pool resources and promote evidence-based approaches.
• Evaluate current laws and regulations related to persons with mental and substance use disorders to identify opportunities to promote changes to support people on the path to recovery.
• Support the development of a strategic plan for research and dissemination of evidence about effective strategies to change social norms related to mental and substance use disorders (see Recommendation 3 ).
• With the federal agencies and other partners, develop a process of identifying and engaging grassroots efforts in each state to promote the implementation of evidence-based programs and fidelity monitoring of service delivery.
• With the federal agencies, establish a long-term, national monitoring system for stigma and stigma reduction.

Collaboration and Coordination

In 2013, eight federal agencies were identified as having programs to support individuals with mental and substance use disorders—the U.S. Departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Housing, Justice, Labor, Veterans Affairs, and the Social Security Administration—although their specific mission goals vary. To improve the effectiveness and extend the reach of the federal agencies’ programs, there are some ongoing efforts to coordinate across the agencies and their programs ( U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2014 ).

To maximize desired outcomes, collaborative efforts should eschew “ownership” of programs and include cobranding and resource sharing. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA’s) ongoing engagement with stakeholders can support the search for common ground, mutually articulated goals, and shared agendas.

The committee has identified structural stigma and stereotypes of dangerousness and unpredictability as major sources of public and self-stigma. Given the importance of reducing stigma in these areas, early efforts could focus on development of a communications campaign that

targeted policy and decision makers to challenge specific laws, policies and regulations that discriminate against people with mental and substance use disorders. Such a campaign could develop evidence-based public service announcements to hold in readiness for tragic events, such as mass violence, suicide by school and college students, and suicide clusters.

CONCLUSION: Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, based on the best possible evidence, which are supported at the national level and planned and implemented by a representative coalition of stakeholders. Engaging a wide range of stakeholders would facilitate consensus building and provide the support needed to overcome major obstacles to the implementation of effective anti-stigma programs in the United States. Barriers and challenges include, but are not limited to, conflict among major stakeholder groups regarding best practices and priorities, resource constraints, and the need to target multiple audiences with variable perceptions and priorities, as well as shifting priorities at the national level.

RECOMMENDATION 2: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should evaluate its own service programs and collaborate with other stakeholders, particularly the criminal justice system and government and state agencies, for the purpose of identifying and eliminating policies, practices, and procedures that directly or indirectly discriminate against people with mental and substance use disorders.

Strategic Planning for Research

The committee defines strategic planning as the process undertaken by an agency or organization to define its future and formulate a detailed plan to guide its path from the current state to its vision for the future.

CONCLUSION: A planning process usually results in the development of a key document that includes a plan to ensure that communication is maintained across all stakeholders. This element is especially relevant for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration given the agency’s ongoing engagement with stakeholders and collaborators. A strategic plan can also serve as the basis of comparison for an ongoing plan for iterative effectiveness monitoring.

RECOMMENDATION 3: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration should conduct formative and evaluative research as part of a strategically planned effort to reduce stigma.

SAMHSA’s ongoing program of research on social norms and communications practices could coordinate with national efforts to achieve common goals and objectives. SAMHSA’s Office of Communication’s future activities could also be informed and supported by partners and participating stakeholders.

Because change occurs slowly, outcome evaluations need to be multifaceted and sustained to capture both direct and indirect effects, as well as intended and unintended consequences. An evaluation plan should include and support community-based participatory research that is based on the principle of partnership, in which community partners act as co-learners with academic partners rather than helpers and recipients. This approach involves community stakeholders in helping to define both the change targets and the intervention strategies, as well as in the conduct of the research itself. To inform a national campaign, more in-depth formative and evaluative research is critically needed in three areas: communication strategies, contact-based programs, and the role of peers.

Communication Strategies

Communication science provides a basis for understanding the effects of message features, contents, and platforms on four outcomes: cognitive (e.g., attention and memory), affective (e.g., liking, empathy, and fear), persuasive (e.g., attitude and behavior change), and behavioral (e.g., intents and actions). These effects are not discrete. They depend on characteristics of the target audience or audiences, the media platform, the message source, and the specific content and production features used in the message. For example, in a campaign to counter the stereotype of dangerousness in the wake of a tragic event, relevant audiences would include the media, school officials and teachers, young people, parents, and clergy. Messages would target specific smaller groups and would be designed and delivered with input and support of engaged stakeholders, for example, in donated airtime or volunteered time of high-profile supporters and speakers.

CONCLUSION: Best practices in choosing effective messages first require that a communications campaign develop well-defined goals for each specific group targeted. Effective messages can then be tailored to the specific target audience for the defined goals.

Because of the complexity of designing communication messages, efforts to implement the committee’s recommendation on this topic should be informed by the results of formative and evaluative research. Research is necessary both before message concepts are generated and after message concepts are created for testing in the field. The perspectives of people with lived experience of mental and substance use disorders should inform anti-stigma campaigns at every stage, including design, delivery, and evaluation.

RECOMMENDATION 4: To design stigma-reduction messaging and communication programs, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration should investigate and use evidence from formative and evaluative research on effective communication across multiple platforms.

Several general features of effective communication programs have been identified by research and can inform the work in the committee’s recommendations to SAMHSA:

• Identify specific target groups and specific goals appropriate to each group (e.g., legislators and policy makers, employers and landlords, educators, health care practitioners, and people with mental and substance use disorders).
• Make strong appeals that are relevant and personally consequential to particular audiences, for example, young people or veterans.
• Understand how a particular audience orients to a message and what kinds of cues and styles hold their attention so that the message is absorbed and remembered.
• Know what matters most to a specific target group.

Contact-Based Programs

Mixed-methods research has led to the identification of key elements of successful contact-based programs ( Corrigan et al., 2013 , 2014 ). Outcome research on contact demonstrates robust effects in pre-post studies ( Corrigan et al., 2012 ; Griffiths et al., 2014 ) and at follow-up ( Corrigan et al., 2015a ). Although the efficacy of contact-based programs is greater than that of education programs alone in adults across a range of specific target audiences, such as health professionals, college students, and police, evidence shows that one-time contact is not as effective as repeated contact. Education programs are effective in changing stigmatizing attitudes among adolescents.

CONCLUSION: To expand the reach of contact-based programs, efforts will be needed to develop a nationally representative cohort of individuals who have disclosed information about their experiences of mental or substance use disorders. Involvement of those individuals needs to be preceded by the design of programs to aid personal consideration and action on disclosure decisions and of peer training programs to help people consider the risks and benefits of disclosure.

RECOMMENDATION 5: To decrease public and self-stigma and promote affirming and inclusive attitudes and behaviors targeted to specific groups, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration should work with federal partners to design, evaluate, and disseminate effective, evidence-based, contact-based programming.

The Role of Peers

Peers play an essential role in combatting stigma, in part because they model personal recovery. Their role is critical in helping individuals to overcome the debilitating forces of self-stigma. Peer support programs and services include social and emotional support, as well as practical support related to quality-of-life decisions, delivered by people with mental and substance use disorders. Peer support has existed since the 1970s, but in 2001 several states began efforts to certify and train the peer specialist workforce. By 2012, 36 states had established such programs, although there is considerable variation in the certification programs across these states ( Ostrow and Adams, 2012 ). State programs vary in terms of stage of development and certification requirements, including the content and process of training, examination criteria, and requirements for continuing education and recertification ( Kaufman et al., 2012 ).

Most research on the outcomes of peer services has focused on quality-of-life measures. Few data are available about the costs and benefits of these programs, although the research suggests that people who use peer support services are more likely to use other behavioral health services of all kinds, including professional services and prescription drugs, which may lead to improved outcomes ( Landers and Zhou, 2014 ). Although more peers are becoming certified, stakeholders disagree about the risks and benefits of professionalizing the role given grassroots origins of peer support in the consumer movement ( Ostrow and Adams, 2012 ).

CONCLUSION: In the United States, there is no established and accepted set of national or state competencies or standards for peer

specialists, such as those that apply to other health professionals at state levels.

Although stakeholders do not agree on the risks and benefits of certification for peer support providers, it may contribute to the quality and outcomes of peer services and facilitate research on the effectiveness of these services across a range of outcomes. Programs need to be appropriately targeted to the audience or audiences and implemented at the relevant geographic level. Components of this effort would include standardization of preparation for peer service providers and development of practice guidelines for referral to and delivery of peer services across agencies and organizations engaged in this work. SAMHSA has taken steps in this direction with its 2009 Consumer-Operated Service Evidence-Based Practices Toolkit ( Chapter 4 ) and continues to have an important role to play in the development and dissemination of these products and programs across the nation. The National Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health offers a national certification for parent support providers that could serve as a model for future efforts to expand the reach of high-quality peer support services.

RECOMMENDATION 6: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration should work with partners to design, support, and assess the effectiveness of evidence-based peer programs to support people with mental and substance use disorders along the path to recovery and to encourage their participation in treatment.

Development of a national strategy for eliminating the stigma of mental and substance use disorders is a challenging, long-term goal that will require collaboration across federal agencies, support from governments at all levels, and engagement of a broad range of stakeholders. No single agency can implement an effective national strategy, but SAMHSA brings specific and unique strengths including well-established stakeholder relations, commitment to the recovery model, and a history of promotion and implementation of prevention and early intervention strategies. Early objectives will include consensus building across a range of issues, design of cost-sharing arrangements, and development and implementation of a research strategy, including a system for monitoring change public attitudes, and mechanisms for disseminating information to inform future anti-stigma interventions.

Estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 4 Americans will experience a mental health problem or will misuse alcohol or drugs in their lifetimes. These disorders are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment. Improving the lives of people with mental health and substance abuse disorders has been a priority in the United States for more than 50 years. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 is considered a major turning point in America's efforts to improve behavioral healthcare. It ushered in an era of optimism and hope and laid the groundwork for the consumer movement and new models of recovery. The consumer movement gave voice to people with mental and substance use disorders and brought their perspectives and experience into national discussions about mental health.

However over the same 50-year period, positive change in American public attitudes and beliefs about mental and substance use disorders has lagged behind these advances. Stigma is a complex social phenomenon based on a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype that assigns undesirable labels, qualities, and behaviors to a person with that attribute. Labeled individuals are then socially devalued, which leads to inequality and discrimination. This report contributes to national efforts to understand and change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that can lead to stigma and discrimination. Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, which are based on the best possible evidence, supported at the national level with multiyear funding, and planned and implemented by an effective coalition of representative stakeholders.

Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change explores stigma and discrimination faced by individuals with mental or substance use disorders and recommends effective strategies for reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek treatment and other supportive services. It offers a set of conclusions and recommendations about successful stigma change strategies and the research needed to inform and evaluate these efforts in the United States.

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Discrimination: What it is and how to cope

For many people, discrimination is an everyday reality. Discrimination is the unfair or prejudicial treatment of people and groups based on characteristics such as race, gender, age, or sexual orientation.

• Racism, Bias, and Discrimination

What is discrimination?

Discrimination is the unfair or prejudicial treatment of people and groups based on characteristics such as race, gender, age, or sexual orientation. That’s the simple answer. But explaining why it happens is more complicated.

The human brain naturally puts things in categories to make sense of the world. Very young children quickly learn the difference between boys and girls, for instance. But the values we place on different categories are learned—from our parents, our peers, and the observations we make about how the world works. Often, discrimination stems from fear and misunderstanding.

Stress and health

Discrimination is a public health issue. Research has found that the experience of discrimination—when perceived as such—can lead to a cascade of stress-related emotional, physical, and behavioral changes . Stress evokes negative emotional responses, such as distress, sadness, and anger, and can often lead to an increase in behaviors that harm health, such as alcohol, tobacco, and other substance use, and a decrease in healthy activities, such as sleep and physical activity.

Discrimination can be damaging even if you haven’t been the target of overt acts of bias. Regardless of your personal experiences, it can be stressful just being a member of a group that is often discriminated against, such as racial minorities or individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

The anticipation of discrimination creates its own chronic stress. People might even avoid situations where they expect they could be treated poorly, possibly missing out on educational and job opportunities.

Discrimination, big and small

Laws are in place to protect people from discrimination in housing and employment.

• The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability.
• The Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, sex, ethnic origin, age, and disabilities.

Unfortunately, discrimination still occurs.

Yet experts say that smaller, less obvious examples of day-to-day discrimination—receiving poorer service at stores or restaurants, being treated with less courtesy and respect, or being treated as less intelligent or less trustworthy—may be more common than major discrimination. Such day-to-day discrimination frequently comes in the form of “microaggressions” such as snubs, slights, and misguided comments that suggest a person doesn’t belong or invalidates his or her experiences.

Though microaggressions are often subtle, they can be just as harmful to health and well-being as more overt episodes of major bias. People on the receiving end of day-to-day discrimination often feel they’re in a state of constant vigilance, on the lookout for being a target of discrimination. That heightened watchfulness is a recipe for chronic stress.

Dealing with discrimination

Finding healthy ways to deal with discrimination is important, for your physical health and your mental well-being.

Focus on your strengths. Focusing on your core values, beliefs, and perceived strengths can motivate people to succeed, and may even buffer the negative effects of bias. Overcoming hardship can also make people more resilient and better able to face future challenges.

Seek support systems. One problem with discrimination is that people can internalize others’ negative beliefs, even when they’re false. You may start to believe you’re not good enough. But family and friends can remind you of your worth and help you reframe those faulty beliefs.

Family and friends can also help counteract the toll that microaggressions and other examples of daily discrimination can take. In a world that regularly invalidates your experiences and feelings, members of your support network can reassure you that you’re not imagining those experiences of discrimination. Still, it’s sometimes painful to talk about discrimination. It can be helpful to ask friends and family how they handle such events.

Your family and friends can also be helpful if you feel you’ve been the victim of discrimination in areas such as housing, employment, or education. Often, people don’t report such experiences to agencies or supervisors. One reason for that lack of reporting is that people often doubt themselves: Was I actually discriminated against, or am I being oversensitive? Will I be judged negatively if I push the issue? Your support network can provide a reality check and a sounding board to help you decide if your claims are valid and worth pursuing.

Get involved. Support doesn’t have to come from people in your family or circle of friends. You can get involved with like-minded groups and organizations, whether locally or online. It can help to know there are other people who have had similar experiences to yours. And connecting with those people might help you figure out how to address situations and respond to experiences of discrimination in ways you haven’t thought of.

Help yourself think clearly. Being the target of discrimination can stir up a lot of strong emotions including anger, sadness, and embarrassment. Such experiences often trigger a physiological response, too; they can increase your blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature.

Try to check in with your body before reacting. Slow your breathing or use other relaxation exercises to calm your body’s stress response. Then you’ll be able to think more clearly about how you want to respond.

Don’t dwell. When you’ve experienced discrimination, it can be really hard to just shake it off. People often get stuck on episodes of discrimination, in part because they’re not sure how to handle those experiences. You might want to speak out or complain, but you’re not sure how to go about it, or are afraid of the backlash. So instead, you end up ruminating, or thinking over and over about what you should have done.

In a calmer moment, it might be helpful to talk over the ways you can cope with similar experiences in the future. Try to come up with a plan for how you might respond or what you could do differently next time. Once you’ve determined how to respond, try to leave the incident behind you as you go on with your day.

Seek professional help. Discrimination is difficult to deal with, and is often associated with symptoms of depression. Psychologists are experts in helping people manage symptoms of stress and depression, and can help you find healthy ways to cope. You can find a psychologist in your area by using APA’s Psychologist Locator Service.

Discrimination resources

If you have questions about policies or concerns about discrimination in your workplace, the human resource department is often a good place to start. To learn more about discrimination in housing and employment, or to file a complaint, visit:

• Equal Opportunity Employment Commission
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Recommended Reading

Related Reading

• Psychology topics: Racism, bias, and discrimination
• Stress in America
• Talking to your kids about discrimination

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Hear Something, Say Something: Navigating The World Of Racial Awkwardness

Listen to this week's episode.

We've all been there — having fun relaxing with friends and family, when someone says something a little racially off. Sometimes it's subtle, like the friend who calls Thai food "exotic." Other times it's more overt, like that in-law who's always going on about "the illegals."

In any case, it can be hard to know how to respond. Even the most level-headed among us have faltered trying to navigate the fraught world of racial awkwardness.

So what exactly do you do? We delve into the issue on this week's episode of the Code Switch podcast, featuring writer Nicole Chung and Code Switch's Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby and Karen Grigsby Bates.

We also asked some folks to write about what runs through their minds during these tense moments, and how they've responded (or not). Their reactions ran the gamut from righteous indignation to total passivity, but in the wake of these uncomfortable comments, everyone seemed to walk away wishing they'd done something else.

Aaron E. Sanchez

It was the first time my dad visited me at college, and he had just dropped me off at my dorm. My suitemate walked in and sneered.

"Was that your dad?" he asked. "He looks sooo Mexican."

Aaron E. Sanchez is a Texas-based writer who focuses on issues of race, politics and popular culture from a Latino perspective. Courtesy of Aaron Sanchez hide caption

He kept laughing about it as he left my room.

I was caught off-guard. Instantly, I grew self-conscious, not because I was ashamed of my father, but because my respectability politics ran deep. My appearance was supposed to be impeccable and my manners unimpeachable to protect against stereotypes and slights. I felt exposed.

To be sure, when my dad walked into restaurants and stores, people almost always spoke to him in Spanish. He didn't mind. The fluidity of his bilingualism rarely failed him. He was unassuming. He wore his working-class past on his frame and in his actions. He enjoyed hard work and appreciated it in others. Yet others mistook him for something altogether different.

People regularly confused his humility for servility. He was mistaken for a landscape worker, a janitor, and once he sat next to a gentleman on a plane who kept referring to him as a "wetback." He was a poor Mexican-American kid who grew up in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso, Texas, for certain. But he was also an Air Force veteran who had served for 20 years. He was an electrical engineer, a proud father, an admirable storyteller, and a pretty decent fisherman.

I didn't respond to my suitemate. To him, my father was a funny caricature, a curio he could pick up, purchase and discard. And as much as it was hidden beneath my elite, liberal arts education, I was a novelty to him too, an even rarer one at that. Instead of a serape, I came wrapped in the trappings of middle-classness, a costume I was trying desperately to wear convincingly.

That night, I realized that no clothing or ill-fitting costume could cover us. Our bodies were incongruous to our surroundings. No matter how comfortable we were in our skins, our presence would make others uncomfortable.

Karen Good Marable

When the Q train pulled into the Cortelyou Road station, it was dark and I was tired. Another nine hours in New York City, working in the madness that is Midtown as a fact-checker at a fashion magazine. All day long, I researched and confirmed information relating to beauty, fashion and celebrity, and, at least once a day, suffered an editor who was openly annoyed that I'd discovered an error. Then, the crush of the rush-hour subway, and a dinner obligation I had to fulfill before heading home to my cat.

Karen Good Marable is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been featured in publications like The Undefeated and The New Yorker. Courtesy of Karen Good Marable hide caption

The train doors opened and I turned the corner to walk up the stairs. Coming down were two girls — free, white and in their 20s . They were dancing as they descended, complete with necks rolling, mouths pursed — a poor affectation of black girls — and rapping as they passed me:

Now I ain't sayin she a golddigger/But she ain't messin' with no broke niggas!

That last part — broke niggas — was actually less rap, more squeals that dissolved into giggles. These white girls were thrilled to say the word publicly — joyously, even — with the permission of Kanye West.

I stopped, turned around and stared at them. I envisioned kicking them both squarely in their backs. God didn't give me telekinetic powers for just this reason. I willed them to turn around and face me, but they did not dare. They bopped on down the stairs and onto the platform, not evening knowing the rest of the rhyme.

Listen: I'm a black woman from the South. I was born in the '70s and raised by parents — both educators — who marched for their civil rights. I never could get used to nigga being bandied about — not by the black kids and certainly not by white folks. I blamed the girls' parents for not taking over where common sense had clearly failed. Hell, even radio didn't play the nigga part.

I especially blamed Kanye West for not only making the damn song, but for having the nerve to make nigga a part of the damn hook.

Life in NYC is full of moments like this, where something happens and you wonder if you should speak up or stay silent (which can also feel like complicity). I am the type who will speak up . Boys (or men) cussing incessantly in my presence? Girls on the train cussing around my 70-year-old mama? C'mon, y'all. Do you see me? Do you hear yourselves? Please. Stop.

But on this day, I just didn't feel like running down the stairs to tap those girls on the shoulder and school them on what they damn well already knew. On this day, I just sighed a great sigh, walked up the stairs, past the turnstiles and into the night.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

When I was 5 or 6, my mother asked me a question: "Does anyone ever make fun of you for the color of your skin?"

This surprised me. I was born to a Mexican woman who had married an Anglo man, and I was fairly light-skinned compared to the earth-brown hue of my mother. When she asked me that question, I began to understand that I was different.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza is a visiting assistant professor of ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. Courtesy of Robyn Henderson-Espinoza hide caption

Following my parents' divorce in the early 1980s, I spent a considerable amount of time with my father and my paternal grandparents. One day in May of 1989, I was sitting at my grandparents' dinner table in West Texas. I was 12. The adults were talking about the need for more laborers on my grandfather's farm, and my dad said this:

"Mexicans are lazy."

He called the undocumented workers he employed on his 40 acres "wetbacks." Again and again, I heard from him that Mexicans always had to be told what to do. He and friends would say this when I was within earshot. I felt uncomfortable. Why would my father say these things about people like me?

But I remained silent.

It haunts me that I didn't speak up. Not then. Not ever. I still hear his words, 10 years since he passed away, and wonder whether he thought I was a lazy Mexican, too. I wish I could have found the courage to tell him that Mexicans are some of the hardest-working people I know; that those brown bodies who worked on his property made his lifestyle possible.

As I grew in experience and understanding, I was able to find language that described what he was doing: stereotyping, undermining, demonizing. I found my voice in the academy and in the movement for black and brown lives.

Still, the silence haunts me.

Channing Kennedy

My 20s were defined in no small part by a friendship with a guy I never met. For years, over email and chat, we shared everything with each other, and we made great jokes. Those jokes — made for each other only — were a foundational part of our relationship and our identities. No matter what happened, we could make each other laugh.

Channing Kennedy is an Oakland-based writer, performer, media producer and racial equity trainer. Courtesy of Channing Kennedy hide caption

It helped, also, that we were slackers with spare time, but eventually we both found callings. I started working in the social justice sector, and he gained recognition in the field of indie comics. I was proud of my new job and approached it seriously, if not gracefully. Before I took the job, I was the type of white dude who'd make casually racist comments in front of people I considered friends. Now, I had laid a new foundation for myself and was ready to undo the harm I'd done pre-wokeness.

And I was proud of him, too, if cautious. The indie comics scene is full of bravely offensive work: the power fantasies of straight white men with grievances against their nonexistent censors, put on defiant display. But he was my friend, and he wouldn't fall for that.

One day he emailed me a rough script to get my feedback. At my desk, on a break from deleting racist, threatening Facebook comments directed at my co-workers, I opened it up for a change of pace.

I got none. His script was a top-tier, irredeemable power fantasy — sex trafficking, disability jokes, gendered violence, every scene's background packed with commentary-devoid, racist caricatures. It also had a pop culture gag on top, to guarantee clicks.

I asked him why he'd written it. He said it felt "important." I suggested he shelve it. He suggested that that would be a form of censorship. And I realized this: My dear friend had created a racist power fantasy about dismembering women, and he considered it bravely offensive.

I could have said that there was nothing brave about catering to the established tastes of other straight white comics dudes. I could have dropped any number of half-understood factoids about structural racism, the finishing move of the recently woke. I could have just said the jokes were weak.

Instead, I became cruel to him, with a dedication I'd previously reserved for myself.

Over months, I redirected every bit of our old creativity. I goaded him into arguments I knew would leave him shaken and unable to work. I positioned myself as a surrogate parent (so I could tell myself I was still a concerned ally) then laughed at him. I got him to escalate. And, privately, I told myself it was me who was under attack, the one with the grievance, and I cried about how my friend was betraying me.

I wanted to erase him (I realized years later) not because his script offended me, but because it made me laugh. It was full of the sense of humor we'd spent years on — not the jokes verbatim, but the pacing, structure, reveals, go-to gags. It had my DNA and it was funny. I thought I had become a monster-slayer, but this comic was a monster with my hands and mouth.

After years as the best of friends and as the bitterest of exes, we finally had a chance to meet in person. We were little more than acquaintances with sunk costs at that point, but we met anyway. Maybe we both wanted forgiveness, or an apology, or to see if we still had some jokes. Instead, I lectured him about electoral politics and race in a bar and never smiled.

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• Published: 06 August 2024

Observers of social media discussions about racial discrimination condemn denial but also adopt it

• Kiara L. Sanchez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8924-6661 1   na1 ,
• Maggie Harrington 2   na1 ,
• Cinoo Lee 2   na1 &
• Jennifer L. Eberhardt 2 , 3  

Scientific Reports volume  14 , Article number:  18246 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Human behaviour
• Social behaviour

Sharing experiences with racism ( racial discrimination disclosure ) has the power to raise awareness of discrimination and spur meaningful conversations about race. Sharing these experiences with racism on social media may prompt a range of responses among users. While previous work investigates how disclosure impacts disclosers and listeners, we extend this research to explore the impact of observing discussions about racial discrimination online—what we call vicarious race talk . In a series of experiments using real social media posts, we show that the initial response to racial discrimination disclosure—whether the response denies or validates the poster’s perspective—influences observers’ own perceptions and attitudes. Despite observers identifying denial as less supportive than validation, those who observed a denial response showed less responsive attitudes toward the poster/target (Studies 1–3) and less support for discussions about discrimination on social media in general (Studies 2–3). Exploratory findings revealed that those who viewed denial comments also judged the transgressor as less racist, and expressed less support and more denial in their own comments. This suggests that even as observers negatively judge denial, their perceptions of the poster are nonetheless negatively influenced, and this impact extends to devaluing the topic of discrimination broadly. We highlight the context of social media, where racial discrimination disclosure—and how people respond to it—may be particularly consequential.

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Introduction.

When individuals feel that they or their loved ones have experienced racial discrimination, they sometimes disclose these experiences to others 1 , 2 . We refer to this as racial discrimination disclosure . An increasingly common place that people share discrimination disclosures is on social media. Racial discrimination disclosures on social media have the power to raise awareness of discrimination and spur meaningful conversations about race. For instance, Christian Cooper’s social media post about being racially profiled in Central Park while bird watching in 2020 brought national attention to everyday racism faced by Black people in the United States 3 .

In addition to their societal impact, sharing personal experiences, especially those involving stress or adversity, can provide benefits to the discloser. Research indicates that such disclosures can lead to improvements in physical health, psychological functioning, and subjective well-being 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 . The benefits of disclosure could be particularly important in racial discrimination disclosure, as experiencing discrimination either directly or vicariously through a family member has been linked to greater depressive symptoms, anxiety, and anger 9 .

However, the benefits of disclosure are contingent upon the discloser feeling understood, validated, and supported by the listener 10 , 11 , 12 . In addition, in social media contexts, whether people feel like their audience is responsive to their perspective can shape the extent to which they feel comfortable sharing their experiences. In one set of studies, Facebook users who perceived their social network to be more responsive and supportive disclosed more openly and honestly in their posts 13 . Thus, we theorize that for targets of discrimination to be able to share authentically about their experiences and reap the benefits of doing so, it is critical that their social networks meet them with support.

Despite the potential societal and personal benefits, people who disclose experiences of discrimination face heightened risk of backlash, minimization, and dismissal. Indeed, Black Americans who claim experiences of discrimination are often labeled as complainers or troublemakers 14 , 15 , 16 . Moreover, White Americans often underestimate the prevalence of anti-Black racial bias and discrimination, both at societal and individual levels 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 . Thus, while online racial discrimination disclosures could provide an opportunity for learning and gaining perspective 21 , they also carry the potential to challenge readers’ race-related beliefs 22 , 23 . This can lead to responses that deny, rather than validate, the experiences of the discloser.

Research on disclosure has predominantly focused on the impact of disclosure within one-on-one exchanges, emphasizing the dynamics between the discloser and listener 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 . However, disclosure regularly extends beyond dyadic interactions to group settings and involves third party observers 13 , 28 . Approximately half of social media users report primarily consuming content rather than posting their own 29 ; thus, more work is needed to understand how individuals and social media users are impacted by conversations they observe.

We propose that, in addition to its impact on the discloser’s experience, responsiveness (or lack thereof) impacts observers’ perceptions of the discloser and the disclosed experience. Social learning and social influence research posit that we learn how to navigate our social world from observing others, and observing interactions has powerful effects on one’s perceptions of social norms and future behavior 30 , 31 . Individuals may be especially ready to adopt others’ views and behavior when engaging with race-related discourse, as there are limited models of how to talk about race in American society 2 , 32 , 33 , 34 .

In this work, we use the term vicarious race talk to refer to observing conversations about race . We propose that vicarious race talk has important psychological and behavioral impacts on observers. This framework is inspired by vicarious intergroup contact research, which shows that observing interactions between an ingroup and outgroup member can have similar effects on intergroup attitudes as engaging in an interaction directly 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 . We build on this literature in several ways. First, similar to traditional vicarious contact settings, a participant observes an interaction between two people (poster and commenter; Fig.  1 A). However, rather than manipulating mere presence or valence of intergroup contact, we focus on the topic of the interaction (racial discrimination) and manipulate specific content within it (Fig.  1 B). Second, we focus on observers’ judgments about the legitimacy of the discrimination experience and behavior toward the discloser, rather than on broad racial attitudes or interest in contact. Finally, we simulate an ecologically valid context where vicarious race talk happens constantly: social media.

( A ) Conceptual demonstration of the interaction context and experimental design. The post depicted is an abbreviated version of a discrimination disclosure used as stimuli in all 3 studies. “Discloser (poster)” signifies Person A, who posted the discrimination disclosure. “Target” is the person in the story who experienced discrimination, who is either the discloser or a close other (i.e. spouse or child), and “Transgressor” is the person/people who are accused of racist behavior. “Commenter” is the hypothetical person who denies or validates the experience. “Participants” signify the role of observers. In this framework, vicarious race talk occurs when the participant observes an interaction between the poster and the commenter. ( B ) Specific text used in each experimental condition.

Given the prevalence of discrimination denial at the societal and interpersonal levels, we focus on whether a response denies the role of racism in the experience or validates the target’s perspective. How might those who observe denial of discrimination in a social media thread perceive this type of response? On one hand, observers may judge a response that denies racism as a perfectly appropriate response to discrimination disclosure, in line with American societal norms that tend to minimize racism’s prevalence and impact 42 . On the other hand, denying someone’s lived experiences, whether related to race or not, may be seen as unsupportive and dismissive 43 . Moreover, public denial, regardless of one’s private beliefs, could be judged as inappropriate, as many Americans are motivated to respond in unprejudiced ways 44 .

Importantly, observers' explicit judgments of whether denial is supportive or appropriate may not consistently align with their attitudes. Indeed, while explicit racism is condemned by many, subtle language undermining discrimination persists widely 45 . Thus, we also examine whether denial can shape how observers perceive the broader situation and how they behave within it. We theorize that commenters on a discrimination disclosure post can either lend credence to the poster’s perspective or cast doubt upon it, and in doing so provide a model for how others should regard the discrimination experience and its target. For instance, some research shows that witnessing condemnation or confrontation of racism fosters anti-racist sentiments and increased recognition of biased behavior 46 , 47 . Conversely, exposure to hate speech has been linked to heightened prejudice 48 , and exposure to colorblind language fosters colorblind ideology and implicit bias 49 .

Overall, this work extends social learning and vicarious contact research to examine how different kinds of responses to racial discrimination disclosure—whether a comment denies or validates the experience—impact observers’ own attitudes and responsiveness to the racial discrimination experience and its target. We consider how these responses to racial discrimination disclosure influence observers’ perceptions of the poster, the situation, and discrimination as a topic more broadly. In doing so, we consider whether discrimination denial might aid in perpetuating a culture, both online and in the real world, in which such discussions are stifled and unwelcome.

Research overview and hypotheses

Figure  1 provides a schematic of the design for Studies 1–3. We operationalized vicarious race talk as the participants’ observation of an interaction between the poster and the commenter (Fig.  1 A). Across three experiments, we manipulate the nature of this vicarious race talk. We utilized a sample of real discrimination disclosure posts, and constructed “validation” and “denial” comments that were representative of a larger sample of comments on a social media platform. Each participant read one discrimination disclosure post in which the poster described an instance of discrimination that happened either to themselves or a close other (i.e., a spouse or child; see SI for stimuli). We refer to the person who experienced discrimination as the target (See Fig.  1 A). This operationalization of discrimination disclosure is based on prior research showing that vicarious experiences of discrimination through family members can have similarly negative outcomes as experiencing discrimination to the self 9 , and is also consistent with theories of inclusion of other in the self, in which individuals incorporate the identities and perspectives of close others into their own self-concept 50 .

Beneath the discrimination disclosure post, participants saw one comment that either validated the poster’s perspective or denied the role of racism in the poster’s experience (Study 3 tested an additional denial condition; Fig.  1 B). In the denial conditions, racism is explicitly denied and an alternative explanation is offered for the transgressor’s behavior (“Maybe they were just looking out for the neighborhood’s safety”), reflecting the commonality of such justifications in real-life racial profiling cases 51 . In the validation condition, the commenter expresses disapproval of the transgressor’s behavior, thus validating the poster’s perspective (“That’s not how people should look out for the neighborhood’s safety”).

After participants viewed this interaction, we first measured their judgments of how supportive the comment was (Studies 1–3). We hypothesized that the denial comment would be perceived as less supportive than the validation comment. Second, we tested the effect of exposure to a denial versus validation comment on participants’ attitudes toward the poster/target (Studies 1–3). We hypothesized that participants observing denial would report less responsive attitudes toward the poster/target compared to participants observing validation. Third, we examined whether the effect of denial versus validation extended to participants’ support for discrimination disclosure on social media in general (Studies 2–3). We hypothesized that participants who observed denial would view discrimination disclosure as a less appropriate and valuable topic on social media than those who observed validation. Fourth, we assessed whether observing denial or validation influenced judgments about whether the transgressor described in the post was racist, hypothesizing that participants observing denial would evaluate the transgressor as less racist than those who observed validation (Studies 1–3). Finally, we explored the effect of exposure to denial on participants’ supportiveness in their own written comment (Studies 1–3); we hypothesized that when asked to respond to the thread themselves, participants who observed denial would convey less support and be more likely to also deny the poster’s perspective relative to those who observed validation.

Importantly, although this work is rooted in vicarious intergroup contact theory, we do not explicitly manipulate interracial discussions. Although the commenters may be presumed to identify with a different racial-ethnic group than the non-White discloser, we do not explicitly label them as such in order to minimize social desirability bias and to mirror the fact that many social media platforms afford some level of anonymity to their users. In addition, this design reflects our focus on the content of the interaction, rather than the identity of the poster.

To investigate the effect of denial versus validation on these outcomes, we ran a linear regression model for each outcome, with the exception of presence of support and denial in participants’ comments, for which we ran a logistic regression for binary outcomes. In all models, we include age and political orientation as covariates (see Methods). In Study 3 (preregistered on OSF), in addition to replicating outcomes from Studies 1–2, we tested an additional condition to assess the role of sympathy in responses to discrimination disclosure (see Robustness and Moderation Results).

Participants’ judgements of a comment that denies or validates discrimination

After presenting participants with a discrimination disclosure post and either a denial or validation comment, we asked four items measuring how supportive participants thought the comment was (e.g., “How respectful is this comment?”; “How hurtful is this comment?” (reverse-coded); Study 1: alpha = 0.93; Study 2: alpha = 0.90; Study 3: alpha = 0.77; see SI for all items). We hypothesized that a denial comment would be explicitly judged as less supportive than a validating comment. Consistent with this hypothesis, across three studies, participants rated responses denying discrimination as less supportive than those validating the poster’s perspective (Study 1: b  = − 1.57 [− 1.81, − 1.33], t (261) = − 12.94, p  < 0.001, d  = − 1.60; Study 2: b  = − 1.40 [− 1.54, − 1.27], t (661) = − 20.92, p  < 0.001, d  = − 1.63; Study 3: b  = − 0.75 [− 0.92, − 0.58], t (817) = − 8.67, p  < 0.001, d  = − 0.61) (Fig.  2 ).

Primary outcomes by condition across Studies 1–3. Whiskers represent standard error. * =  p  < 0.05; ** =  p  < 0.01; *** =  p  < 0.001. Panel ( a) : Judgments of the comment as supportive and attitudes toward the poster/target by condition in Study 1. Attitudes toward the poster/target composite items were z-scored because they were originally presented on different scales (in Study 1 only). Panel ( b) : Judgments of the comment as supportive, attitudes toward the poster/target, and valuing posts about discrimination by condition in Study 2. Panel ( c) : Judgments of the comment, attitudes toward the poster/target, and valuing posts about discrimination by condition in Study 3.

Denial’s influence on participants’ attitudes toward the poster/target

After viewing the discrimination disclosure thread, participants completed four items that captured how responsive they felt toward the poster/target 12 , including the extent to which the participant felt bad for the target, how fair they thought the poster’s description was, how much they could see the poster’s perspective, and whether the poster may have misunderstood the transgressor’s intentions (reverse coded). We refer to this composite measure as attitudes toward the poster/target (Study 1: alpha = 0.81; Study 2: alpha = 0.84; Study 3: alpha = 0.72).

Consistent with our hypothesis, across three studies, participants in the denial condition expressed less responsive attitudes toward the poster/target relative to those in the validation condition (Study 1: b  = − 0.23 [− 0.41, − 0.06], t (262) = − 2.61, p  = 0.01, d   = − 0.32; Study 2: b   = − 0.16 [− 0.28, − 0.04], t (657) = − 2.59, p  = 0.01, d  = − 0.20; Study 3: b   = − 0.28 [− 0.44, − 0.12], t (817) = − 3.39, p  = 0.001, d  = − 0.24).

Denial’s influence on participants’ attitudes toward discrimination disclosure

While discrimination disclosures have the potential to spur meaningful conversations about racism 52 , this potential relies on viewers of the disclosure perceiving it as a legitimate topic of conversation 15 . Thus, in Studies 2–3, we tested whether the impact of observing denial or validation extended beyond the specific situation to participants’ broader attitudes about the value and appropriateness of discrimination disclosure on social media. We asked participants the extent to which they thought social media was an appropriate place to share discrimination experiences, and how valuable these types of posts were; these two items formed a composite (Study 2: r  = 0.70; Study 3: r  = 0.64). In both studies, we find that participants in the denial condition rated discrimination disclosure posts as less appropriate and valuable for social media relative to participants in the validation condition (Study 2: b   = − 0.21 [− 0.38, − 0.04], t (652) = − 2.49, p  = 0.01, d  = − 0.19; Study 3: b  = − 0.33 [− 0.60, − 0.06], t (816) = − 2.36, p  = 0.02, d  = − 0.17).

Denial’s influence on participants’ judgements of the transgressor

In addition to measuring perceptions of the poster, we also measured perceptions of the transgressor—the person being accused of racist behavior in the post. Here, we report exploratory findings on one key item: the extent to which the transgressor’s behavior is perceived as racist (a composite measure of perceptions of the transgressor is reported in Tables S12 – S14 ). Previous work has demonstrated how peers can influence not only one’s expression of prejudice 46 , 53 , but also their perceptions of specific discriminatory acts 47 , 54 . We hypothesized that participants exposed to a denial comment may be less likely to label the transgressor’s actions as racist compared to those in the validation condition. Across all three studies, participants in the denial condition viewed the transgressor’s actions as less racist than those in the validation condition (Table 1 ). Because of the exploratory nature of this measure, we additionally show data combined across all three samples (Table 1 ).

Denial’s influence on participants’ own behavior toward the target

To explore whether the effect of denial and validation could extend beyond attitudes to behavior, we asked participants to write a comment on the thread themselves (i.e., “If you were to leave a comment, what would you say?”). Two trained undergraduate research assistants who were blind to condition coded participants’ own comments for the presence of six themes. The two primary themes were a) expressing support for the poster and/or target (“support”; Cohen’s kappa = 0.83); and b) denying the role of racism in the poster’s experience (“denial”; Cohen’s kappa = 0.77) (Table S11 reports the four additional themes) (Table 2 ).

A logistic regression model compared the prevalence of each theme by condition, controlling for age and political orientation. Given the lack of power to detect differences because of missing data common in open-ended responses, we conducted a combined analysis of these themes collapsing across our three studies (Fig.  3 ). Table S11 reports regression results for each study. Across all studies, participants in the validation condition were more likely to express support for the poster ( b  = 0.60 [0.30, 0.89], z (1303) = 3.97, p  < 0.001, OR  = 1.82), and less likely to express denial towards the poster ( b  = − 0.94 [− 1.36, − 0.54], z (1305) = − 4.49, p  < 0.001, OR   = 0.39) than participants in the denial condition (Fig.  3 ).

Percentage of participants who expressed support and denial by condition (excluding participants who did not write a codeable response), collapsing across Studies 1–3. *** =  p  < 0.001.

Robustness and moderation

The impact of sympathy in denial comment.

In Studies 1–2, both the denial and validation comments offered a basic expression of sympathy (“I’m so sorry”) before either validating or denying the poster’s experience. Indeed, disclosure of negative experiences is often met with positive emotional support 28 . In Study 3, we introduce a third condition that denies the poster’s experience without expressing sympathy (“denial without sympathy” condition) to examine the role that expressions of sympathy may play in bolstering or dampening the effects of denial on participants. While we expect both the denial and denial without sympathy comments to be viewed less positively than the validating comment, there were two possibilities regarding participants’ attitudes toward the poster/target and the content. The first possibility was that mere exposure to a denial comment, regardless of whether it also expresses sympathy, would negatively impact how individuals perceive the content and the poster. If this were the case, participants in both the denial and denial without sympathy conditions would similarly exhibit less responsive attitudes toward the poster/target and regard discrimination disclosure posts as less valuable, compared to those in the validation condition. Alternatively, it is also possible that the inclusion of sympathy in a denial response might encourage participants to more readily adopt a denial perspective. Sympathy-infused denial could potentially be perceived as a more socially acceptable means of discrediting the poster/target's viewpoint, while a denial comment lacking expressions of sympathy might be deemed excessively harsh or violating norms of supportive behavior. If so, those exposed to denial without sympathy would exhibit more responsive attitudes toward the poster/target and regard discrimination disclosure posts as more valuable than those exposed to denial with sympathy.

In Study 3, participants judged the denial without sympathy comment as equally unsupportive as the denial comment with sympathy ( b  = − 0.09 [− 0.26, 0.08], t (817) = − 1.04, p  = 0.30, d  = − 0.07), and as less supportive than the validation comment ( b  = − 0.84 [− 1.01, − 0.67], t (817) = − 9.51, p  < 0.001, d  = − 0.67). When it came to attitudes, participants reported fewer responsive attitudes toward the poster/target when the denial comment included an expression of sympathy compared to when it did not ( b  = − 0.18 [− 0.34, − 0.01], t (817) = − 2.13, p  = 0.03, d  = − 0.15). In fact, participants who viewed the denial without sympathy comment had similarly responsive attitudes as those who observed a validation comment ( b  = 0.11 [− 0.06, 0.27], t (817) = 1.25, p  = 0.21, d  = 0.09). This supports the notion that denial without any expression of sympathy may appear overly harsh to participants, leading to reactance that counteracts the negative impact of denial. However, even as the denial without sympathy comment bolstered participants’ responsive interpersonal attitudes toward the poster/target, it did not mute the effect on broader attitudes about discrimination disclosure; participants in the denial without sympathy condition valued discrimination disclosures at similar levels to those in the denial with sympathy condition ( b  = 0.03 [− 0.24, 0.30], t (816) = 0.24, p  = 0.81, d  = 0.02), and less than those in the validation condition ( b  = − 0.29 [− 0.57, − 0.02], t (816) = − 2.09, p  = 0.04, d   = − 0.15). Participants in the denial without sympathy condition also rated the transgressor’s behavior as less racist than those in the validation condition, and there was no significant difference between the denial with sympathy and denial without sympathy conditions (Table 1 ).

Finally, in their own comments, participants in the denial without sympathy condition expressed similar levels of support ( b  = − 0.06 [− 0.45, 0.33], z (648) = − 0.31, p  = 0.76, OR  = 0.94) and denial ( b   = 0.21 [− 0.26, 0.67], z (648) = 0.88, p  = 0.38, OR  = 1.23) to those in the denial with sympathy condition; they expressed significantly less support ( b  = − 0.45 [− 0.88, − 0.03], z (648) = − 2.08, p  = 0.04, OR  = 0.63) and more denial ( b  = 1.59 [0.93, 2.33], z (648) = 4.50, p  < 0.001, OR  = 4.91) than those in the validation condition. These findings suggest that exposure to discrimination denial negatively shapes how observers regard and respond to discrimination disclosures on social media, regardless of how it is delivered and even when they hold positive attitudes about the individual target.

Moderation: participant race

Across all studies, we equally sampled Black and White participants in order to test how vicarious discussions of race impact members of the target’s ingroup and outgroup. We initially hypothesized an interaction between condition and participant race across our outcomes, such that White participants would be more impacted by denial than Black participants. However, we did not find interaction patterns on any of our primary outcomes (with one exception; see Table S8 ). Thus, primary results in all studies were collapsed across race (see Tables S6 – S8 for models including race for all studies).

Moderation: concern about racism

We theorized that the impact of observing discrimination denial may depend on the extent to which participants are generally concerned about racism, as those higher in concern about racism may be more vigilant to unsupportive communication about race. Thus, in Studies 2–3, we measured participants’ concern about racism using two items (Study 2: r = 0.74; Study 3: r = 0.60) and tested whether it moderated the effect of condition on the primary outcomes. In Studies 2 and 3, concern about racism moderated participants’ judgments of the comment, such that participants higher in concern about racism viewed the validating comment more positively than the denial comment, while those low in concern rated the two comments similarly (Study 2: b  = − 0.69 [− 0.82, − 0.55], t (650) = − 10.04, p  < 0.001, d  = − 0.79; Study 3 validation vs. denial with sympathy: b  = 0.59 [0.44, 0.75], t (814) = 7.53, p  < 0.001, d  = 0.53; Study 3 validation vs. denial without sympathy: b  = 0.67 [0.51, 0.83], t (814) = 8.03, p  < 0.001, d  = 0.56). However, concern about racism did not moderate attitudes about the poster/target or discrimination disclosure posts broadly (see Tables S9 – S10 ), which suggests that even those who view racism as a substantial problem in society are still influenced by denial.

Overall, this work highlights the power of responsiveness to discrimination disclosure in shaping observers’ perceptions and behavior. Specifically, whether a responder denies or validates that the experience was racist influences observers’ perceptions of the experience and its poster/target, and extends to their support for discrimination disclosure on social media in general. Observers are influenced by denial despite recognizing it as a less supportive response and even when they are highly concerned about racism, highlighting the potential for denial to influence people even when they are not motivated to accept it. This aligns with previous work showing how one’s perceptions and behaviors may appear contradictory 45 , 55 .

This work provides an initial understanding of the vicarious effects of race discourse, and sets a foundation for future research on this complex process. First, these studies presented a single comment to participants in order to isolate the effect of exposure to denial versus validation. Future work can expose participants to a broader array of comments, including multiple, often conflicting viewpoints, similar to what one may see on a typical social media platform. For instance, by manipulating the balance between denial and validation responses, researchers can explore the impact and threshold at which one kind of response outweighs the other. Second, subsequent studies should also explicitly manipulate the racial identity of the commenter to discern whether racial identity of the commenter plays a significant role in the observed effects. Third, while we test whether concern about racism moderated the effect of denial on participants’ perceptions, future research could test additional moderators such as racial centrality, personal experiences with discrimination, and frequency of intergroup contact. These factors may influence how Black and White observers respond to discrimination denial. Fourth, future work can also investigate how the content of a discrimination disclosure affects the influence of denial. For example, discourse that centers around systemic versus interpersonal instances of racism might affect observers’ broader attitudes towards race relations in the United States differently. Finally, follow-up work should also test this effect in other online and offline contexts, for instance by manipulating different characteristics and goals associated with the social media platform, and by utilizing in-person lab and field paradigms. This multifaceted approach can deepen our understanding of the complexities surrounding observers' reactions within diverse social environments.

Another strength of this work is the large enough sample size to power an investigation of the interaction between racial identity (Black, White) and condition. Contrary to our expectations, the findings held across Black and White participants, and effects were sometimes even driven by Black participants (see SI). This suggests that the vicarious effects of denial and validation are not specific to intergroup processes, which is consistent with some other racial bias studies 56 . It is possible that the denial comment activates similar skepticism among White and Black observers alike. However, another possibility is that a denial comment triggers a concern among Black participants about being judged as “playing the race card” 32 , leading them to adhere to a higher threshold for validating claims of racism.

By examining these questions in the context of social media, we spotlight a setting where racial discrimination disclosure—and how people respond to it—may be particularly consequential. Despite the potential psychological and physical benefits for the discloser 5 , 57 and increased awareness of racism 14 , conversations about race are often silenced on social media platforms 58 , 59 . Indeed, racial discrimination disclosure posts are reported and removed more often than posts disclosing negative experiences unrelated to race 60 . However, when these conversations do occur, we show that responses matter. Responses that deny or validate the experiences of people of color serve as building blocks for cultures that support or stifle important conversations about racial discrimination. If exposure to just one comment that denies a poster’s discrimination experience impacts an individuals’ responsiveness to discrimination disclosure on social media, it is easy to envision how this sentiment can spread quickly through social media 61 .

Even as social media presents an unprecedented and critical opportunity for more diverse groups of people to connect and discuss meaningful and difficult topics around race and social inequality, it also poses risks. This work highlights one underemphasized risk—how exposure to denial of racism can spread to its community of observers. Even one seemingly trivial comment on a social media platform can have ripple effects to those who observe it, ultimately shaping the community’s discourse.

Participants

Two hundred and sixty-seven White and Black adults were recruited through Prolific, an online recruitment platform (53% Black, 47% White; 76% women, 21% men, 3% Non-binary; mean age = 33.09). Table S1 reports additional demographic information. An additional 18 participants who identified as another race were excluded. An a priori power analysis for an ANOVA with interaction effects revealed that this sample size provided 90% power to detect an effect size of f = 0.20.

All studies reported in this paper were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Stanford University and Dartmouth College, and complied with ethical standards for human subjects research (including obtaining consent).

After providing consent, participants were told that they would view a randomly selected social media thread from a platform meant for neighbors to stay connected. We chose to present our hypothetical social media platform as locally-based, as racial discrimination is a common occurrence in neighborhoods, particularly those with shifting demographics 62 . Participants were not aware that the content of the thread would be specific to race. They were then presented with one of four posts (randomly selected) in which the poster described an experience of racial discrimination against either themselves or a family member (see Fig.  1 A for an example). All posts were sampled from a social media platform (Table S4 ). Posts were pretested and matched on perceived positivity/negativity of the event described, the language valence, and how racist the transgressor’s actions were perceived to be. To reflect the covert nature of modern racism 55 , the experiences described in the stimuli were relatively ambiguous. Pilot results indicate that participants were able to recognize the presence of racial discrimination in the described event. A fifth post that differed from the others on valence was excluded (Table S5 ).

Directly under the post, participants were randomly assigned to see one comment, which either denied or validated the poster’s experience (Fig.  1 B). We developed these comments to represent common responses we observed in a large corpus of discrimination disclosure threads. To isolate the effect of denial and validation of the poster’s attribution of racism, both comments began by expressing sympathy, but differed in their judgment of the experience described by the poster. The denial comment questioned the poster’s perception of the experience, while the validating comment supported the poster’s perception. After viewing the comment, participants were asked about their judgments of the comment and the poster, as well as some additional measures (see supplement). The attitudes toward the poster/target composite included four items, three of which were on a 1–5 scale, and one of which was on a 1–7 scale; thus, we z-scored the composite for analyses (see supplement for full list of items).

Finally, participants answered basic demographic questions (age, gender, political orientation, education attainment, state of residence, race) and were paid for their time.

For each outcome, we ran a linear regression model with condition (denial/validation) as the predictor. Age and political orientation had significant effects on the primary outcomes. Thus, they were included in all models as covariates. We planned to exclude values greater than three standard deviations from the mean from analysis. Neither of our primary outcomes contained outliers.

Six hundred and sixty-six Black and White Americans were recruited through Prolific to participate in Study 2 (51% Black, 49% White; 59% women, 39% men, 2% non-binary; mean age = 36.01). Table S2 reports additional demographic information. An additional 15 participants who did not identify as Black or White were excluded from analysis. Our sample size was based on an a priori power analysis for ANOVA with interactions with 95% power and an effect size of f = 0.14, which was the smallest effect size among our significant results in Study 1.

Study 2 followed the same procedure as Study 1, with the addition of two new measures: how valuable and appropriate discrimination posts are and concern about racism.

For each outcome, we ran a linear regression model with condition (denial/validation) as the predictor and age and political orientation as covariates. We planned to exclude values greater than three standard deviations from the mean from analysis. This resulted in four responses being excluded from analysis of responsive attitudes toward the poster/target, and nine responses being excluded from analysis of valuing discrimination disclosure posts; no outliers were excluded from analysis of judgements of the comment.

We conducted an a priori power analysis for an ANOVA with interactions using our smallest effect size from a pilot study (f = 0.11), for a 2 × 3 factorial design (race: Black/White; condition: validate/denial/denial without sympathy) with 80% power, which suggested a sample size of 800. Accordingly, we recruited 828 Black and White American participants from Cloud Research, an online recruitment platform (51% Black, 49% White; 50% women, 49% men, 1% non-binary; mean age = 45.58). Table S3 reports additional demographic information. An additional 44 participants who did not identify as Black or White were excluded from analyses.

Study 3 included the two conditions from Studies 1–2 (denial and validation), as well as the denial without sympathy condition (Fig.  1 B). This study followed the same procedure and used the same measures as Studies 1–2.

Study 3 was pre-registered on Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/g7pyh/ ). The judgments of transgressor and comment qualitative coding outcomes were pre-registered as exploratory analyses. For each outcome, we ran a linear regression model with condition (denial with sympathy vs. denial without sympathy vs. validation) as the predictor and age and political orientation as covariates. Again, we planned to exclude values for each outcome that fell outside three standard deviations of the mean; there were no outliers for our primary outcomes in Study 3.

Qualitative coding

Two trained undergraduate research assistants who were blind to condition coded participants’ own comments for the presence of six themes. The two primary themes were (a) expressing support for the poster (“support”); and (b) denying the role of racism in the poster’s experience (“denial”) (see Table S11 for additional themes). The “support” category intentionally conflated validation of the poster’s perspective with expressions of sympathy. This was because explicit validation of the poster’s attribution of racism was rare, perhaps because an expression of sympathy alone (without denial; e.g., “I’m so sorry, that sucks”) can be assumed to implicitly validate the poster’s perspective. Across all three studies, we excluded 244 responses which were either left blank, or not codeable (e.g., “n/a”, “I would not respond”, nonsensical characters). Cohen’s kappas for all themes ranged from 0.71 to 1.00. After all responses were coded, disagreements were settled by lead authors. Given the rate of missing data, we conducted analyses for each individual study as well as a combined analysis (which excluded the denial without sympathy condition from Study 3). Logistic regression models compared frequencies of each theme by condition, controlling for age and political orientation.

Data availability

The data and analysis files for all studies and the pre-registration for Study 3 are available on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/g7pyh/ . Note that a redacted version was uploaded at a later stage, with proof that the original submission was dated before data was collected. We redacted the pre-registration in accordance with a data usage agreement with the company from which we obtained the social media posts used as stimuli.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the SPARQ Media + Tech team and the RSI Lab for early comments on theory and design, and Stacia King, Kengthsagn Louis, Efrain Sanchez, and Nicky Sullivan for their feedback on the manuscript. The authors are also grateful to Daphne Muhammad and Anna Valdez for coding the open-ended responses in Studies 1–3.

This research was supported by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

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These authors contributed equally: Kiara L. Sanchez, Maggie Harrington and Cinoo Lee.

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Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, 03755, USA

Kiara L. Sanchez

Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, USA

Maggie Harrington, Cinoo Lee & Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford, 94305, USA

Jennifer L. Eberhardt

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K.L.S., M.H., and C.L. conceptualized, designed, implemented, and analyzed the research and wrote the manuscript. J.L.E. helped conceptualize the research and provided feedback on manuscript drafts.

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J.L.E. serves on the advisory board for a social media company. The position is unpaid. J.L.E. participates in the advisory board as a learning opportunity—to gain broader insight on the tech industry as a whole. This kind of proximate engagement with leaders and stakeholders is critical to the research team’s work and mission: to produce scholarship that has an impact on the world. Understanding the space, larger ecosystem, and levers for change is necessary to produce innovative and rigorous research.

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Sanchez, K.L., Harrington, M., Lee, C. et al. Observers of social media discussions about racial discrimination condemn denial but also adopt it. Sci Rep 14 , 18246 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-68332-8

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• Sign Language Linguistics (bachelor)
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• Sociale geografie en Planologie (bachelor)
• Sociologie (bachelor)
• Sociology (bachelor)
• Sociology (master)
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• Spaanse en Latijns-Amerikaanse studies (bachelor)
• Spirituality and Religion (master)
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• Stochastics and Financial Mathematics (master)
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• Taalwetenschappen (bachelor)
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• Wiskunde (bachelor)

Presentation Master's thesis - Xiaoyi Lin - Social Psychology

Roeterseilandcampus - Building A, Street: Roetersstraat 11, Room: B2.02

This study investigates the underlying mechanism of Dutch teachers’ biased track recommendations for Arab-Muslim girls and boys by examining the nature of stereotypes and prejudices. With an intersectional perspective, we proposed that 1) Arab-Muslim girls are perceived as less competent than majority girls, triggering more paternalistic prejudice; 2) Arab-Muslim boys are perceived as less warm and moral than majority boys, eliciting more hostile prejudice. In turn, both paternalistic and hostile prejudice would predict higher track recommendations bias against Arab-Muslim students. We conducted an online experimental survey and measured stereotypes, prejudice, and track recommendations. We analyzed the dataset simulated from the responses of 16 Dutch preservice teachers. Contrary to our hypotheses, we did not find a significant positive association between the incompetent stereotype and paternalistic prejudice toward Arab-Muslim girls. For the boys, the cold stereotype was positively associated with hostile prejudice, while we did not find a significant positive relationship with the immoral stereotype. Paternalistic prejudice positively predicted track recommendation bias against Arab-Muslim girls, and hostile prejudice positively predicted the bias against Arab-Muslim boys. The research contributed to a deeper understanding of teachers’ track recommendations, which can serve as a basis for developing intervention strategies.

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Who Are the Far-Right Groups Behind the U.K. Riots?

After a deadly stabbing at a children’s event in northwestern England, an array of online influencers, anti-Muslim extremists and fascist groups have stoked unrest, experts say.

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By Esther Bintliff and Eve Sampson

Esther Bintliff reported from London, and Eve Sampson from New York.

Violent unrest has erupted in several towns and cities in Britain in recent days, and further disorder broke out on Saturday as far-right agitators gathered in demonstrations around the country.

The violence has been driven by online disinformation and extremist right-wing groups intent on creating disorder after a deadly knife attack on a children’s event in northwestern England, experts said.

A range of far-right factions and individuals, including neo-Nazis, violent soccer fans and anti-Muslim campaigners, have promoted and taken part in the unrest, which has also been stoked by online influencers .

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to deploy additional police officers to crack down on the disorder. “This is not a protest that has got out of hand,” he said on Thursday. “It is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”

Here is what we know about the unrest and some of those involved.

Where have riots taken place?

The first riot took place on Tuesday evening in Southport, a town in northwestern England, after a deadly stabbing attack the previous day at a children’s dance and yoga class. Three girls died of their injuries, and eight other children and two adults were wounded.

The suspect, Axel Rudakubana , was born in Britain, but in the hours after the attack, disinformation about his identity — including the false claim that he was an undocumented migrant — spread rapidly online . Far-right activists used messaging apps including Telegram and X to urge people to take to the streets.

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