1-Page Summary

In Biased, social psychologist Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt compiles findings from her decades of research on the social and neurological roots of implicit bias. When you hear the word “bias,” you may think of conscious prejudice—but the most potent biases are actually subconscious. These implicit biases are normal neurological responses to the culture you grow up in.

In the United States, everyone holds some degree of (often subconscious) antiblack bias, even in black communities. This racial bias doesn’t just influence how you make decisions—it determines what you notice in your environment and what becomes invisible. And in high-stakes situations like police encounters, the consequences of racial bias can be devastating.

In this guide, we’ll learn how bias forms in the brain, how racial bias in particular influences police interactions and impacts every level of the criminal justice system, and how some people use science as a tool to promote racial bias. With this foundation, we’ll then look at how bias impacts every area of our daily lives. Finally, we’ll discuss how implicit bias can transform into explicit racism, as it did during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Other-Race Effect Is a Form of Categorization

Before we get into the ways bias impacts various parts of daily life, let’s look at why bias exists in the first place: in other words, the brain functions that create it.

Have you ever heard someone say, “They all look alike” about people of another race? That comment doesn’t actually reflect a conscious prejudice—it’s the natural result of human biology. Scientists call this the “other-race effect”: the experience of being able to easily recognize faces of your own race but struggling to identify faces of other races.

The other-race effect is a form of categorization, which is a normal, subconscious brain function that helps us divide all the information we encounter into smaller categories that we can understand. Categorization is not a bad thing by default, but it can easily be hijacked into making harmful generalizations based on race (like, “all black men are dangerous”). Those generalizations are the root of bias.

(Shortform note: One way to avoid this mental reflex is to look for more individuating information about the person. In Superforecasting, authors Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner argue that any new piece of information we get about a person, no matter how irrelevant it seems, makes it harder for us to categorize that person. This is called the “dilution effect.”)

Bias in Science and Pseudoscience

Racial bias is a centuries-old phenomenon that began as a way to justify slave trading—over time, that bias solidified as leading scientists invented baseless theories that black people were not fully human and therefore fundamentally inferior to white people. This process is called scientific racism, and it’s still used to justify antiblack bias to this day. In particular, the association between black people and apes is still alive and well. Sometimes that association is explicit—like in the widespread “ape” and “monkey” comments online after the election of Barack Obama—but it more frequently happens implicitly. In fact, researchers found that the implicit association between black faces and apes is even stronger than the association between black people and crime. That means that even people who consciously confront their own biases can carry that unconscious ape association and thus see black people as subhuman.

Ape Jokes Have Deadly Consequences

Equating black people to apes is dangerous. In 2009, researchers studied the impact of the black-ape association on threats to assassinate Barack Obama. The researchers determined that the black-ape association—particularly in the form of a controversial political cartoon—directly contributed to the unprecedented number of threats on President Obama’s life. These threats were part of the reason the Department of Homeland Security authorized Secret Service protection for then-Senator Obama beginning in 2007, a full 18 months before he was first elected president.

Bias in Housing and Neighborhoods

Bias isn’t just a large-scale social phenomenon. It also impacts very personal decisions—like where to live. Antiblack racial bias led to formal housing segregation laws, and although those laws no longer exist, they laid the groundwork for the de facto housing segregation we see today.

The History of Segregated Housing

In the early 20th century in America, black people migrated northward en masse to escape persecution and look for economic opportunities. To keep black people out of their white neighborhoods, private housing developers began instituting official covenants that forbade white homeowners from renting or selling their homes to black people. These covenants were so widespread that by the time the Supreme Court banned them in 1948, black residents were banned from 80% of the neighborhoods in big cities like Los Angeles. (Shortform note: Whole books have been written on the subject of racist housing policies. For example, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein examines segregated housing in the United States from a legal and historical standpoint.)

For over 30 years, racial covenants ensured that black homeowners and renters were crowded into tiny neighborhoods, completely segregated from their white neighbors. Those covenants are the origin of the segregated neighborhoods and ethnic ghettos that still exist today. Government policies didn’t help—they were even more discriminatory. For example, during the Great Depression recovery effort, government-built housing projects were racially segregated; later, after World War II, federal laws prohibited black veterans from using their GI Bill housing benefits to buy homes in white neighborhoods. (Shortform note: In The New Jim Crow, author Michelle Alexander describes how white elites enacted these laws as a way to keep black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy while ensuring they didn’t band together with poor white people to challenge the social order.)

Modern Segregation

Racial discrimination in housing is now technically illegal, but nearly 70 years of officially-sanctioned segregation has left its mark on American cities. Today, African Americans are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods than people of any other race—regardless of their economic status. Furthermore, segregation is largely maintained by white people’s racial biases. Studies show that most white people wouldn’t move to a neighborhood that is even 30% black, citing fears of high crime rates and low property values.

“Space Racism” and Attitudes Toward Black Spaces

These biased attitudes toward black spaces reflect the idea of “space racism” that Ibram X. Kendi describes in How to Be an Antiracist. “Space racism” describes the combination of attitudes and policies that contribute to inequality between spaces that are primarily inhabited by people of one race. For example, the funding gap between majority-white and majority-black schools is an example of space racism because it reflects the racist attitude of people in power that white children deserve more resources than black children.

Bias in Schools

Racial bias also impacts the American education system. Even when black and white students attend the same schools, their educational experiences aren’t equal. White students take it for granted that they’re valued as individuals at school; black students don’t have the same guarantee. Even at a young age, they’re well aware of the stereotypes their teachers might believe, and many black students learn to defend against possible racist treatment by never fully letting their guard down in the classroom. That makes learning difficult because learning is a vulnerable act—it requires letting people in and being honest about what you don’t know or don’t understand.

Unfortunately, black students have good reason to be wary of bias in their schools. Research shows that black students are much more likely to be suspended than students of any other race. (Shortform note: The racial disparities in school discipline are linked to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, school suspensions contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline because students who are suspended or expelled are more likely to get into trouble with the law.)

Reducing Bias in Schools

Thankfully, there are ways to reduce bias in the classroom. Effective strategies include empathy training for teachers, building trust between teachers and students, teaching accurate history of race relations and prejudice, and framing feedback as an expression of faith in a student’s ability to do better (which reassures students of color that criticism of their work isn’t an expression of bias).

However, many educators approach the problem of bias ineffectively by claiming they “don’t see color” as a way to avoid acknowledging race at all. But racial colorblindness isn’t possible—as humans, our brains naturally rely on color to help us distinguish items in our environment, so it isn’t really possible to “not see” it. Beyond that, colorblindness can actually increase racial disparities, because ignoring skin color naturally means ignoring the racial discrimination people face because of it. To reduce bias, educators need to acknowledge the specific struggles their black students face.

The Many Dangers of Racial Colorblindness

Eberhardt examines the “colorblind” approach to racial bias in the context of education, but colorblindness is a common problem in all types of conversations about race. For example, in How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi argues that ignoring race won’t eradicate racism because racist ideas stem from racist policies, not the other way around. Therefore, to fight racism, we have to start by attacking racist policies—and it’s impossible to identify racist policies if we can’t see race.

Similarly, in The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that colorblindness is dangerous because it keeps us from seeing just how deeply entrenched racism is in public institutions like the criminal justice system. As a result, it’s easy to make the mistake of over-emphasizing personal responsibility and ultimately blame individuals for what is really a systemic problem.

Bias in the Workforce

Racial bias in the workforce is another massive, widespread problem. In fact, the unemployment rate for young black people is twice as high as it is for young white people.

The main driver of this disparity is racial bias in the hiring process. In one study, researchers sent out thousands of resumes in response to real job applications and discovered that applicants with stereotypically black-sounding names were half as likely to be contacted about the job than applicants with white-sounding names. Another study found that, regardless of gender or education level, white people get 36% more callbacks for jobs than black people.

(Shortform note: The racially biased criminal justice system is also a major driver of black unemployment. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how people with criminal records have a harder time getting hired. In Chapters 4-5 of this guide, we’ll see how black Americans are more likely to be arrested and face harsher sentences than white Americans, which means black job seekers are more likely to have a criminal record.)

Bias Training

Many businesses looking to reduce workplace bias are following the example Starbucks set in 2018 after police arrested two black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks for the simple crime of asking to use the restroom before purchasing anything.

Starbucks’s corporate response to this incident is a model for addressing racial bias in the workplace on a large scale. Instead of just addressing the incident itself, Starbucks committed to confronting racial bias head-on by holding a four-hour implicit bias training for all 175,000 Starbucks employees. This training required closing down 8,000 Starbucks locations for the day, costing the company roughly $12 million.

“From Privilege to Progress”

The Starbucks incident also sparked change in another way. Melissa DePino (the white woman who filmed and tweeted the whole encounter) and Michelle Saahene (a Black woman who was the first to speak up during the incident) connected over their shared horror and frustration at the injustice they witnessed that day in Starbucks. Together, they launched "From Privilege to Progress," an organization devoted to bringing white and Black people together to fight systemic and interpersonal racism. Through speaking engagements and online activism, they empower people to push past awkwardness and have hard, necessary conversations about racism.

Bias in Cases of Police Brutality

Although bias forms as part of a natural process, it can be a dangerous and even fatal component of police encounters. To examine the ways racial bias impacts police brutality, Eberhardt breaks down the 2016 murder of Terence Crutcher (an unarmed black man from Oklahoma) by police officer Betty Shelby. Here are a few key ways that bias escalated that deadly encounter.

Deciding to Pull Over

Officer Betty Shelby and her partner were en route to a domestic violence scene when they first saw Terence Crutcher’s car stalled in the road. Why did Shelby abandon an actively violent situation and decide to pull over? Because racial bias can dictate where people focus their attention.

Scientists study this effect using subliminal priming (flashing words or images on a screen so quickly that participants don’t consciously realize it happened). When researchers primed police officers with either crime-related or neutral words before showing them photos of white and black faces, the officers who were primed to think about crime looked longer at the black face than the white face, but officers in the control group looked at the two faces equally. That might explain why Officer Shelby was drawn to the sight of a random black man while she was responding to an active crime scene.

(Shortform note: The link between racial bias and selective attention is well-established in science; however, Terence Crutcher’s death may not be the best example of this principle in action. Crutcher’s SUV wasn’t pulled over to the side of the road—it was stalled in the middle of the street, blocking traffic, which created a dangerous traffic situation. Under those circumstances, it makes sense for an officer’s attention to be diverted to the scene.)

Seeing Surrender as a Threat

Officer Shelby shot Terence Crutcher while he was walking away from her with his hands in the air, indicating surrender. But Shelby later testified that she fired the gun because she genuinely feared for her life. Why? Because racial bias primes people to see black people’s movements as more threatening by default. Research on the New York Police Department’s controversial “stop, question, and frisk” program (where officers had the liberty to stop anyone on the street if they deemed that person suspicious) showed that black people were more likely than white people to be frisked and to have physical force used on them, but they were less likely to have a weapon. It’s likely that Officer Shelby interpreted Terence’s movements as more suspicious than she would if he had been white.

(Shortform note: Some reviewers of Biased criticized Eberhardt for not mentioning that Crutcher's autopsy revealed he was high on PCP at the time of the shooting, which may have contributed to his erratic movements. According to her lawyer, Officer Shelby had completed drug recognition training and was aware that Crutcher was likely under the influence of the drug.)

Pulling the Trigger

The most crucial impact of racial bias is on behavior, especially for law enforcement officers, whose actions can have deadly consequences. Racial bias makes officers more prone to use violence against a black suspect than a white one. In a computer simulation study featuring pictures of people of different races holding either a gun or an innocuous object, police officers hit “shoot” faster for black people with guns than white people with guns. This explains why Officer Shelby was so quick to pull the trigger when she assumed Terrance had a gun, an action that had deadly consequences.

(Shortform note: Eberhardt doesn’t touch on the fact that Officer Shelby’s partner shot Crutcher with his Taser just seconds before Shelby fired the fatal shot. This begs the question: Why was Shelby’s first instinct to grab her gun rather than her Taser? Implicit bias may have led her to choose the deadlier weapon, but police training also plays a role: Experts say most officers get extensive firearms training but only “a few hours'' of Taser training. Officers are taught to think of their firearm as their “best friend.”)

Bias in the Criminal Justice System

Bias creates racial disparities at every level of the criminal justice system, from police stops to bail to death sentences.

Discretionary Stops

Police officers’ officially-sanctioned biases are on display when they make decisions about who to pull over for equipment-related violations (like expired tags or a broken tail light). It’s often up to the officers’ discretion to decide if a minor equipment issue is worth the time and resources it takes to stop someone. That freedom often becomes an excuse to act on unchecked biases: An analysis of 18.5 million traffic stops over six years found that black drivers are more than twice as likely to be pulled over for equipment-related issues than white drivers.

(Shortform note: Surprisingly, this type of discrimination isn’t illegal. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how, according to the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, it’s legal to use perceived race in the decision to pull someone over so long as race isn’t the only factor.)

The Cash Bail System

In the United States’ cash bail system, bail is money used as collateral to ensure that, if they’re released, the person in jail will return for their official trial and subsequent court dates. (If they don’t return, they’ll lose that money for good.) If the person can post bail, they’re free to go home until the trial; if not, they’re stuck in jail—sometimes for months. The court decides the bail amount for each person based on things like job stability and criminal record, which puts anyone who isn’t rich and white at a disadvantage. Young black men face the most discrimination in bail charges—on average, they’re charged 35% more bail than white arrestees.

The effects of pre-trial detention can be devastating, even for people who ultimately aren’t convicted of a crime. When people are locked up for months awaiting trial, they’re unable to work, pay rent, or take care of their children—and can lose their jobs, homes, and custody rights as a result. (Shortform note: Opponents of bail reform argue that, without collateral, people won’t show up for their court dates and so won’t face justice. However, states that have implemented bail reforms didn’t see significant changes in court appearances—most of the time, people still showed up, even without having money on the line.)

Unequal Sentencing

If a case does go to trial, the outcome is heavily influenced by racial bias. This is especially true in the states where the death penalty is still legal. When a murder victim is white, the murderer is significantly more likely to receive a death sentence than if the victim is black. That disparity both reflects and reinforces the biased belief that white lives are precious and deserve justice, but black lives are expendable.

Racial Bias Influences Jury Selection

One reason juries may be so prone to anti-black racial bias is that they are often overwhelmingly white. A 2010 study of eight southern states found evidence of widespread racial discrimination in jury selection, especially in cases where the defendant is eligible for the death penalty if they are found guilty. In some places (like Houston County, Alabama), this discrimination is so extreme that prosecutors dismissed over 80% of qualified black jurors in cases involving the death penalty.

From Implicit Bias to Explicit Racism

Until now, we’ve focused on the role of implicit biases that people often aren’t even aware they have. However, in the right circumstances, those implicit biases can bubble up to conscious awareness and become explicit racism. This was the case in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) before a “Unite the Right” rally. That march and its aftermath marked a fundamental change in the national conversation about race.

On the morning of the rally, following a night of widespread violence and white terrorism, hundreds of heavily armed far-right protesters clashed with several thousand counterprotesters. The tension between the groups quickly escalated from shouting to all-out brawling. That violence turned deadly when a self-professed neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

The Resurgence of Explicit Racial Bias

The Charlottesville march was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades, but the hatred that fueled it had been simmering beneath the surface for generations. Experts think that the sudden resurgence in white nationalism and explicit racial bias has happened because suddenly, white people are “outnumbered.” The population is diversifying more and more, and white people (particularly white men) are no longer the unquestioned rulers of society. No longer being the dominant social group makes many white people feel threatened, so they embrace white supremacist ideas more openly as a coping mechanism.

“Unite the Right” Was a Prelude to the 2021 Capitol Attack

The Unite the Right rally marked a cultural shift in part because it was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades. Four years later, on January 6th, 2021, pro-Trump extremists stormed the United States Capitol building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Some commentators argue that the president’s failure to condemn white supremacy in Charlottesville emboldened the far right groups who ultimately participated in storming the capitol (indeed, many of the same protestors attended both events).

Shortform Introduction

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do is a practical guide to the science of implicit bias, or the automatic assumptions we make about other people without even realizing it. These biases are the result of natural cognitive processes—we sort people into categories as a mental shortcut to make the world easier to understand. In the United States, antiblack bias is such an ingrained part of the culture that everyone encodes it to some degree, and that implicit bias impacts where we live, work, and study; how we interact with the criminal justice system; and where we focus our attention.

About the Author

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist, a professor, and a recipient of the 2014 MacArthur “genius” grant. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard and taught at Yale before joining the faculty at Stanford in 1998. At Stanford, she co-founded SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions), a “do tank” (rather than a “think tank”) dedicated to turning academic research on racial bias into actionable solutions for real-world change. She also regularly works directly with police departments to train officers on how to recognize their own implicit biases and avoid the potentially deadly consequences of acting on those biases.

Eberhardt is considered the reigning expert on the science of racial bias. She’s been interviewed in TIME Magazine, on NPR, and on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and the BBC. In 2020, she gave a TED talk about her research on bias and how companies and police departments can reduce bias.

Connect with Dr. Eberhardt:

• Website
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• Twitter

The Book’s Publication and Context

Publisher: Viking Penguin

Biased is Dr. Eberhardt’s first book. It is the culmination of decades of academic research on how biases develop and why implicit biases are so hard to combat. In the book, she explores the role of racial bias in major facets of daily life, including policing and the criminal justice system, science, housing, schools, universities, and workplaces.

Historical and Intellectual Context

The book was published in March of 2019, right on the precipice of a renewed wave of protests against police brutality in response to the high-profile police killings of Elijah McClain (August 2019), Breonna Taylor (March 2020), and George Floyd (May 2020). It joined the national conversation about race and racism alongside books like So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Although those books are more well-known and spent months on bestseller lists, Biased was the first to take a more scientific approach to talking about racism.

The Book’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Critical Reception

Biased was well-received by both critics and readers. Forbes praised the book’s blend of science and storytelling, as did other writers of books on racial bias. The book was even endorsed by Vice President Kamala Harris, who read it while serving as a senator. Harris said, “We could not ask for a better guide to understand this reality [of bias] than Jennifer Eberhardt.”

Negative reviews of Biased center on its limitations. Some inferred from the book’s title that the book would explore bias against all minorities, when it focuses almost exclusively on Black Americans. Other reviewers felt the book is a “beginner’s guide” to the study of bias and may be too basic for those well-read on psychological biases.

Finally, one New York Times reviewer argued that Eberhardt fails to consider alternative hypotheses to explain her findings, such as social deference theory (which suggests that police can and should expect a certain degree of respect from civilians because police officers rank higher in the implicit social hierarchy). Through the lens of social deference theory, police mistreatment of black Americans isn’t the result of racial bias—it’s the result of police officers demanding deference from people they think are beneath them on the social hierarchy. However, black people may be so tired of being harassed by police that they refuse to defer, in which case the officers will use increasingly violent ways to demand respect.

Commentary on the Book’s Approach

Biased begins with a basic overview of how bias works in the brain, then explores how implicit bias impacts different domains of daily life, beginning with police brutality and criminal justice before moving on to topics like housing and education. As an academic researcher, Eberhardt primarily focuses on the association between antiblack bias and crime, so she’s organized the book to focus on her area of expertise first before showing how those same types of racial biases can impact other areas of life. This organization supports her main argument that the most prevalent stereotype about black people in America is the association between black people and crime—and that this particular stereotype is the main root of antiblack bias.

However, Eberhardt made a deliberate choice to address this topic not just as a scientist but through three relevant, intersecting identities: a social scientist, a black woman, and a mother of young black men. Balancing those perspectives makes the book accessible for all types of readers—there’s enough science to be authoritative, and enough humanity to keep you engaged with empathy instead of clinical detachment.

Our Approach in This Guide

While Eberhardt’s organization makes sense given her expertise, we’ve focused instead on the wider context of bias first—what it is, where it comes from, and how it’s become such a prevalent problem. We’ll start by discussing how bias works in the brain; then, we’ll add historical context by looking at the history of racial bias in science. With that background, we’ll examine how racial bias impacts housing, education, and the workforce to get a sense of how bias subtly impacts so many areas of daily life. That holistic understanding of how implicit racial bias works in general will make it easier to see the bigger picture by the time we discuss police brutality and criminal justice. It’s tempting to jump right into those hot-button topics, but they’re just the tip of the racial bias iceberg, so it’s important to fully understand the basics of bias in order to put those topics into perspective.

Finally, we’ll end with a discussion of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This chapter marks a tonal shift from the rest of the book and shows how implicit racial bias can bubble up into explicit racism. We’ve retained the book’s chapter numbers to help you refer back to the book.

Throughout the book, Eberhardt weaves in her own experiences of bias as a black woman and the mother of black sons. While these personal stories make the book engaging for the reader, this guide focuses more on the major principles of bias and the science behind them. Eberhardt’s goal was to present her research on implicit bias and describe how it connects to her journey as a researcher and a black woman, and her personal stories are a key part of achieving that goal. In contrast, our goal is to highlight the main ideas of the book and put them in context, so we’ve omitted those stories for the sake of concision.

Chapters 1-2: Bias Changes What You See

When you hear the word “bias,” you may think of a conscious form of prejudice. But Eberhardt argues that the most potent biases are actually unconscious, operating without any conscious input or even awareness.

These implicit biases are normal neurological responses to the culture you grow up in—they affect everyone. But, specific cultures create biases against different groups of people. In the United States, everyone encounters and encodes antiblack bias to some degree, even in black communities. This bias doesn’t just influence how you make decisions—it determines what you notice in your environment and what becomes invisible.

In this chapter, we’ll learn how bias develops through the other-race effect and categorization; then, we’ll discuss how that bias gets transmitted to others through parenting and the media. Understanding how bias spreads will help to clarify why racial bias impacts so many areas of daily life.

The Other-Race Effect

Have you ever heard someone say, “They all look alike” about people of another race? Those types of comments can be deeply offensive. (Shortform example: In 2018, Hillary Clinton came under fire for saying, “I know, they all look alike” after a reporter mixed up Senator Cory Booker and former attorney general Eric Holder, both of whom are black men.)

However, that sentiment doesn’t typically reflect a conscious prejudice—more often, it’s the natural result of human biology. Scientists like Eberhardt call this biological process the “other-race effect”: It’s the experience of being able to easily recognize faces of your own race but struggling to identify faces of other races.

Eberhardt says that the other-race effect is one of the neurological processes underlying bias because it makes us see people of our own race as individuals worth recognizing and people of other races as just representatives of a group, not individual people.

The effect is universal: If you’ve spent time around groups of people outside your own race, you may have experienced it yourself. It develops because your brain can’t absorb every detail of the sensory environment around you all at once, so it learns to prioritize whatever it sees most often and focus its attention there.

How the Other-Race Effect Develops in Infancy

As early as 1975, scientists had confirmed that infants are naturally drawn to faces more than other stimuli. One study even found that newborns less than one hour old prefer images of typical faces over images of scrambled facial features. However, this overall preference for faces tends to decline by the age of three months, which is around the same age that scientists first see evidence of the other-race effect. This suggests that babies begin life with a generalized preference for human faces, which then gets "tuned" by their environment into a preference for faces of a certain race. By the age of nine months, most infants can only recognize faces of their own race.

There are some exceptions to this rule—for example, one study found that Chinese and Vietnamese children who were adopted into white families between the ages of two and 26 months old were equally good at recognizing Asian and Caucasian faces later on. However, another study found that Korean children adopted into white families after the age of three are much better at recognizing Caucasian faces than Asian ones. Scientists think this might mean that being exposed to faces of at least two different races of people during the first two years of life might make it easier to recognize multiple races later on.

Racial Experience Changes the Brain

Eberhardt argues that the fact that your ability to recognize others’ faces depends on your experience with people of other races reveals something important about human brain development—cultural conceptions of race are so powerful, they can change how your brain functions. This is an example of neuroplasticity, which is your brain’s ability to change its structure and function in response to experience.

(Shortform note: Until the mid-twentieth century, scientists thought that neuroplasticity was impossible in adults because the brain was already fully developed; now, scientific research shows that adult brains can still change and grow new connections between neurons. How well your brain maintains the ability to adapt is partly determined by genetics, but your lifestyle is important, too: Research shows that people who exercise regularly, practice mindfulness, and keep learning new things have an easier time forming new neural connections.)

Scientists can track these changes in the brain using brain scans. However, until recently, there was no scientific evidence that facial recognition abilities (the brain process at the core of the other-race effect) could also change in response to experience with people of different races. Eberhardt and a team of neuroscientists set out to study this question using brain scans of the fusiform face area (FFA), where facial recognition happens in the brain.

In a 2001 study, Eberhardt and her team studied changes in the FFA when participants looked at pictures of people from their own race or other races. They tracked these changes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technology that allows researchers to track blood flow to different parts of a person’s brain while that person does a specific task. (Shortform note: Increased blood flow means the brain is routing more oxygen to that area because it’s working harder than usual (just like you breathe heavier when you sprint than when you lie down). Scientists call that increased blood flow “activation.”)

For both black and white participants, the team found that the FFA activated more when people looked at faces of people the same race as themselves. In other words, when you see a person of your own race, your brain automatically works harder to encode their specific features so that you can recognize them later. If you grew up surrounded by white faces, your brain prioritizes recognizing white faces; if you grew up surrounded by black faces, your brain prioritizes recognizing black faces. The conclusion: Parts of the brain actually change how they function depending on a person’s experience with race.

Positive Interracial Experiences Reduce the Other-Race Effect

Eberhardt’s team was the first to find evidence that a person’s experience with people of other races can change how their brain functions. Since then, other scientists have found similar results, even in other areas of the brain. In 2020, a group of researchers studied activation in a broader group of brain structures related to facial recognition in white participants while they looked at images of black and white faces. They found that the more positive interpersonal experiences a white person had with black people, the more the facial recognition areas of their brain lit up when they looked at black faces. In other words, having positive, high-quality contact with people of another race mitigates the other-race effect, making it easier to recognize individual faces of people of that race.

Categorization

According to Eberhardt, categorization is another factor at the root of racial bias. In the context of racial bias, categorization is the process of seeing people of other races as representatives of a homogenous category, rather than as individuals, and automatically making assumptions about people based on your experience with that category. For example, if someone grows up in a culture that associates black people with crime, they’re likely to assume that every individual black person they encounter is a criminal.

How Categories Form

Eberhardt emphasizes that categorization is an automatic neurological process, not a conscious choice. It’s the brain’s way of sorting chaos into order. Mental categories are a collection of all your beliefs, experiences, feelings, knowledge, and preferences relating to a particular thing. For example, when you think of the category “sports,” your mind automatically calls up images of people playing sports as well as all the information stored in your memory about different sports, their various rules, famous athletes, and so on.

The feelings and memories you associate with the “sports” category are here, too. Maybe you’re an avid basketball player, so thinking about basketball brings up happy memories and a feeling of confidence. On the other hand, if you were bullied in school for not being athletic, thinking about any sport might bring up painful memories. Either way, the moment you see something sports-related, your brain cues up all the thoughts and feelings you have about the entire category, starting with the strongest associations (so if you met your spouse at a college football game, that will come to mind much faster than the name of a famous baseball player).

This same process applies to groups of people. According to Eberhardt, whether we’re aware of it or not, we all internalize stereotypes and cultural beliefs about groups of people, and that information gets stored in the corresponding category. When you see an individual member of that group, your brain automatically pulls up the entire category—even parts you don’t consciously agree with or don’t even realize are there. That’s why, regardless of your conscious beliefs, seeing a single black person can bring to mind ingrained messages like “that person is dangerous” or “that person is good at basketball.”

(Shortform note: One way to avoid this mental reflex is to look for more individuating information about the person. In Superforecasting, authors Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner argue that any new piece of information we get about a person, no matter how irrelevant it seems, makes it harder for us to categorize that person. This is called the “dilution effect.”)

Stereotypes

Our natural impulse to group people into categories sometimes leads us to rely on reductive stereotypes. Stereotypes are automatic, culturally-instilled beliefs about a group of people that we assume apply to all members of that group, even when that’s not true (for example, the idea that all black men are violent is a stereotype).

Eberhardt asserts that, just like categorization, stereotyping is an automatic neurological process that serves a functional purpose. There is simply too much information in the world for our brains to process each individual thing separately. But when stereotypes are applied to people, they become a dangerous source of bias.

Relying on stereotypes to inform our understanding of other people leads to confirmation bias, where people seek out information that confirms what they already believe and ignore anything that challenges those beliefs. (Shortform note: To avoid confirmation bias, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb recommends a technique called “negative empiricism” in his book The Black Swan. Negative empiricism is the process of seeking out information that disproves your original belief. In the context of racism, if someone believed black people were more likely to commit crimes, they might look for evidence that black people are actually less likely to commit crimes than people of other races.)

For example, when researchers showed people photos of a black person’s face moving gradually from an angry expression to a friendly one, people who were more racially prejudiced against black people labeled the face “angry” for more frames than less prejudiced people. In other words, they interpreted the neutral expressions between angry and friendly as still “angry.” Their prejudice colored their perception in a way that confirmed their existing beliefs. Seeing what you want to see instead of what’s really there is the heart of bias.

Stop Your Stereotypes by Slowing Down

Relying on stereotypes may be a natural cognitive process, but unchecked stereotypes can cause real harm to people of color. One way to minimize your risk of accidentally causing harm is to slow down. Eberhardt touches on this idea in Chapter 10, and other writers have also discussed the connection between speed and bias. For example, in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that when we make decisions too quickly, we don’t have time to take in all the relevant information, so our brains automatically fill in the gaps with stereotypes and assumptions. However, when you take a moment to stop and think before acting, you have more time to process the specific situation without relying on stereotypes.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains why slowing down might help us avoid stereotypes in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman argues that human thinking operates in two different systems: System 1 is automatic, unconscious processing, while System 2 is conscious, effortful thought. System 1 thoughts can be completely involuntary and happen almost instantaneously, which is why System 1 is the home of bias and stereotypes. By slowing down and reminding yourself to apply conscious thought to a situation that invokes bias, you force your brain to switch from System 1 thinking to System 2 thinking, which makes it much easier to avoid relying on stereotypes.

Categorization in the Brain

As we’ve noted, like the other-race effect, categorization is a normal, mostly subconscious brain function that helps us process the enormous amount of information we encounter in everyday life. Within this process, we automatically prioritize information we use most often and rely on simplistic categories for everything else. Categorization is not a bad thing by default, but it can easily be hijacked into making generalizations based on race and stereotypes (like, “all black men are dangerous”).

According to Eberhardt, the other-race effect plays a role in determining the exact generalizations people make: People are automatically predisposed to focus on faces they’ve sorted into the “like me” category—even if they’re wrong about that categorization—and block out or ignore everything else.

Research on the impact of categorization shows just how powerful those in-group and out-group designations are. In one study, researchers showed participants computer-generated faces. The facial features were specifically designed to be racially ambiguous, but each face was shown twice: once with a hairstyle typically worn by Latinos, and once with a typically African American hairstyle. When they saw the same faces later on, Latino participants were significantly better at recognizing faces with the Latino hairstyle than the African American hairstyle—even though it was the exact same face.

Once the participants in this study categorized the face as a member of their own race based on the hairstyle, they automatically focused more on memorizing their features because human brains are primed to focus on in-group faces. Essentially, your brain sees faces of your own race as individuals—not just members of a reductive category—so it automatically focuses on encoding the unique features of those faces.

Resist Categorizing by Changing Your Focus and Experiences

Other authors also warn about the dangers of making assumptions based on categorization instead of looking at people as individuals. In Factfulness, author Hans Rosling refers to categorizing as “the generalization instinct.” He argues that we can overcome the generalization instinct by focusing on differences within groups of people and similarities across groups of people. For example, if your mental category for black men includes “good at sports,” you might challenge that by focusing on the countless black men who aren’t athletic, or by focusing on the number of professional athletes from other races. That way, you’ll remind yourself that not all black men are athletic, and not all athletic people are black men.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell also offers advice for resisting categorizing by spending more time with people from other races and cultures. This works because we unconsciously prioritize information that we use in daily life—so if you’re exclusively surrounded by white people, you’re more likely to slot everyone else into reductive categories instead of seeing them as individuals. However, if you spend more time with people of other races or seek out books and movies that highlight other groups’ experiences, you’ll unconsciously begin to prioritize information about those other groups rather than falling back on categories.

How Bias Spreads to Others

Now that we know how racial bias develops in individual people, let’s examine how it spreads to others. It’s important to understand how bias spreads in order to understand why racial bias is so pervasive throughout modern culture. Specifically, in the United States, antiblack bias isn’t confined to one specific region or type of person—it spreads through parenting and popular media into every corner of the country.

Biased Parents Raise Biased Kids

According to Eberhardt, parents are one of the strongest sources of the generational spread of antiblack bias. Young children form their understanding of the world by watching the adults in their lives. When those adults show racial bias—even through subtle cues like body language—kids pick up on the message: This person of another race is treated badly, so they must be bad. The more often they hear that message, the deeper they encode it and adopt it as their own belief.

The Implicit Association Test

To test the impact of parents’ bias on their children, researchers use the implicit association test (IAT), which is the gold standard for testing the strength of implicit biases. The beauty of the IAT is that it doesn’t rely on self-reporting (which is often inaccurate because most people don’t want to admit to being racially biased). Instead, the IAT tests the power of biases operating below conscious awareness by measuring how quickly people associate black and white faces with good and bad words. (Shortform note: If you’re curious about your own implicit biases, you can take the IAT yourself through Harvard’s “Project Implicit.”)

To administer the test, researchers show participants a series of black and white faces on a computer screen interspersed with good words (like “joy”) and bad words (like “evil”). There are two conditions, both of which use only two buttons. In the first condition, participants push one button if they see a black face or a bad word, and the other button for a white face or a good word; in the second condition, participants push one button for a black face or good word, the other for a white face or bad word.

The idea behind the IAT is that culturally-ingrained bias makes it easier for the brain to associate black faces with bad words (and white faces with good words) than to associate black faces with good words (and white faces with bad words). In the first condition, the task is easy, so response times tend to be quick. But the brain has to work a little bit harder to associate black faces with good words, so the time it takes to push the right button is a little bit longer—the stronger the bias, the harder the brain has to work to associate “black” with “good,” and the longer it takes to respond. The IAT estimates the strength of a person’s implicit biases by measuring the difference between response times for the two conditions. When it comes to parenting, the results of the IAT confirm that heavily biased parents tend to raise heavily biased kids.

Parents’ Influence on Kids’ Racial Bias Fades Over Time

For young children, having a parent with strong implicit bias makes them less sympathetic when they see a black child being teased versus a white child. Interestingly, older children are typically very sympathetic to teasing victims of any race, regardless of how biased their parents may be. That might be because kids begin to form their own views of the world, separate from their parents, as they grow up and interact with more people.)

Bias in the Media

Bias also spreads through all forms of media. Growing awareness of media inequality in the early 21st century led to a major rise in the representation of black characters in leading roles in film and television. Eberhardt cautions that media representation is powerful, but seeing black surgeons and superheroes on screen is not enough to eliminate antiblack bias—in fact, it can even reinforce it. This effect is subtle and often subconscious, but still very real.

To test this effect, researchers took clips from shows that have strong, positive portrayals of black characters (including CSI and Grey’s Anatomy) and muted the sound. Then they compiled a series of clips of various white characters talking to the same unseen character (sometimes black, sometimes white), who was either offscreen or edited out. They showed these clips to study participants who had never seen that particular show and asked them to rate how much the white characters, as a whole, liked and respected the unseen character, based only on the white characters’ nonverbal cues.

The results of this study were significant: The offscreen characters that participants rated as less liked and well-treated by the other characters were significantly more likely to be black. In other words, white characters treated other white characters more positively than they treated black characters, and that difference was big enough that viewers picked up on it even without dialogue.

The perceivable bias in well-meaning TV shows isn’t just unfortunate—it’s dangerous. After viewing the clips, participants took an implicit association test. The more negatively they perceived the show’s white characters’ behavior toward the offscreen black characters, the more antiblack bias they showed on the IAT—even when they didn’t know the poorly-treated unseen characters were black. These results show that creating more positive roles for black characters isn’t enough to actively combat antiblack bias in the media.

Could Inclusion Riders Solve Popular Media’s Bias Problem?

An increase in positively-portrayed black characters on TV is a good first step, but the overall media landscape is still far from equal. A study of the 100 highest-grossing films of each year from 2007-2015 found that black characters made up 12% of speaking roles. While this might seem promising because black people make up roughly 13% of the American population, it’s not the full picture because a few movies with majority-black casts skewed the results. In fact, in 2015, only 10 of the top 100 films were cast in a way that reflects the actual population (meaning they featured black people in roughly 13% of the film’s speaking roles). Even worse, a full 17% of films featured zero black characters in speaking roles.

How can we solve this problem? Inclusion riders are one possibility. Inclusion riders (also called equity riders) are contractual clauses stipulating that the cast and crew of a film must include people from underrepresented groups in the industry, like women, people of color, and people with disabilities. If big-name actors and filmmakers add inclusion riders into their contracts, they can leverage their fame to open doors for talented people and ultimately create a more realistically diverse film industry.

Exercise: Reflect on Your Experiences With Bias

Racial bias impacts people of every race. Take a moment to reflect on your experience with bias and your motivation for engaging with this subject.

• When you think of racial bias, what images and associations come to mind? (For example, you may think of a moment in your own life, historical examples of bias, racially segregated neighborhoods, or more recent police shootings.)

• When do you remember first becoming aware of racial bias? How old were you, and what experience opened your eyes to the fact that racial bias exists?

• Racially biased ideas can lurk in everyone’s mind, regardless of race or conscious beliefs, because we all grow up in a heavily biased culture. When have you noticed biased thoughts or first impressions in yourself? How did you feel when you noticed that implicit bias in yourself?

• Finally, what do you most hope to get out of this guide? (For example, maybe you want to better understand how bias works in the brain, or maybe you’re looking for practical tips to reduce the impact of bias in your workplace.)

Chapter 6: Bias in Science and Pseudoscience

Unfortunately, racial bias isn’t a new trend. Racial bias is a centuries-old phenomenon that began as a way to justify slave trading. Over time, that bias solidified as leading scientists invented baseless theories that black people were not fully human and therefore fundamentally inferior to white people. This process is called scientific racism, and it’s one of the biggest reasons that racial bias has persisted for so long.

The History of Scientific Racism

Scientific racism is the false theory that different racial groups have fundamentally different physical and mental traits. According to Eberhardt, supporters of this theory believe those traits are universal, immutable, and objective, meaning that white supremacy and black inferiority are facts of nature rather than social constructs. Throughout history, scientists and academics have used scientific racism to justify their own racial bias as well as the entrenched racial inequality in their societies. (Shortform note: Some scholars, like Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, use the term “biological racism” to describe these same ideas.)

As we’ll see below, scientific racism began with scientists inventing “natural” racial hierarchies, then evolved over time into a debate on the biblical origins of race, and finally adapted to fit the new understanding of human evolution and natural selection.

Phase 1: Human Hierarchies

In the 19th century, several prominent scientists published supposed hierarchies of humanity based on differences in physical and mental traits. Respected doctors and scientists wrote what they considered to be purely objective scientific texts asserting that black people were an entirely different species and therefore naturally inferior to white people.

Eberhardt argues that the original goal of these texts was to defend Europe and America’s economic interests in the slave trade against moral or religious objections. Scientists of the time provided the perfect cover: Black people were fundamentally, biologically inferior to white people and servile by nature, so slavery was simply part of the natural order of things. That “scientific” justification absolved white slaveholders of any guilt over kidnapping and enslaving fellow human beings. Over time, justifying bias and prejudice against black people became a fundamental part of mainstream science.

(Shortform note: While there’s no excuse for prejudice, author Jordan Peterson argues in 12 Rules for Life that the urge to establish social hierarchies is an evolutionary instinct that humans share with other animals, such as lobsters.)

Many of the scientists providing these false justifications for slavery focused on the size and shape of human skulls to prove their points. The most infamous of these scientists was American physician Samuel George Morton, who believed that the size of a person’s skull was a direct indicator of their intellectual ability. He collected thousands of human skulls from around the world, categorized them by race, and measured their capacity by filling them with lead pellets. Morton concluded from those studies that white Europeans were the most intelligent (and therefore most evolved) humans, and that Africans and Native Americans were separate, inferior species.

(Shortform note: Many of the skulls Morton collected belonged to people who had been enslaved. After his death, Morton’s collection ended up at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2020, in response to the national wave of antiracist activism, the museum removed the skulls from public display and formed a committee focused on repatriating the skulls of enslaved people.)

Morton’s ideas about skull capacity and human intelligence became the foundation of the field of physical anthropology, which uses physical anatomy to study human behavior and culture. As we’ll see, physical anthropology would go on to become a hotbed of scientific racism.

Phase 2: Polygenesis

In the highly religious culture of 19th century America, the idea that black people and white people were entirely different species presented a challenge: Christianity only recognizes one creation story, not two, so all humans should theoretically be the same species. Eberhardt tells us that religious writers were divided on this question: Some supported the theory of monogenesis (a single creation story), others supported polygenesis (multiple creation stories). Supporters of monogenesis believed that all of humankind originated from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; supporters of polygenesis believed that there were separate creation events for each race, but only the creation of white people was important enough to be included in the Bible.

In 1854, writers Josiah Nott and George Gliddon merged polygenesis and the pseudoscience of human hierarchy into a single idea: White people originated from Adam and Eve, but people of all other races were created separately, more akin to animals than to the first humans. This led them to conclude that slavery was the natural order of the universe.

Justifying Slavery With the “Curse of Ham”

In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi describes another common religious justification for racism during this period: The “Curse of Ham,” based on the biblical story of Noah (of ark-building fame) cursing the descendants of his son, Ham, to serve as slaves to one of his other sons, Shem. Although there’s no mention in the story of Ham having dark skin, proponents of slavery claimed that all Africans were descended from Ham’s line and therefore destined to be enslaved.

Justifying Polygenesis With Science

Like other scientific racists of the time, Nott and Gliddon focused on comparing human skulls to make their point. At the time, most scientists believed that brain size was linked to intelligence—to them, a larger skull meant a larger brain, which meant higher intelligence. Therefore, to prove white people’s superiority, these scientists set out to prove that white people had larger average skull sizes than black people. However, in reality, Eberhardt tells us that there is no difference in average skull size between people of different races.

(Shortform note: Modern scientists have found a correlation between skull measurements and geographic origin. However, that doesn’t mean that science supports using skull measurements to identify different races, because race and geographic origin are not the same thing. Geographic origin is the continent where your ancestors came from; race is the social category you fall into based on traits like skin color or language.)

Without actual physical evidence, scientists had to rely on grossly exaggerated sketches of human skulls to show the biological differences they claimed to have discovered. These sketches became the template for the racist caricatures we still see today.

For example, the image below (from Nott and Gliddon’s 1854 book Types of Mankind) claims to show the skulls of a white person, a black person, and a chimpanzee. Eberhardt believes that the authors’ goal was to make it abundantly clear to even non-scientist readers that black people were biologically closer to apes than human beings. In the illustration, the black person’s skull is contorted beyond recognition—it’s arguably even less human-shaped than the chimpanzee skull—and the black face beside it is an early example of racist caricature. On the other hand, the drawing of the white person’s head is exaggerated to the other extreme: It’s based on a statue of the Greek god Apollo, which many consider to be the pinnacle of physical attractiveness.

Types of Mankind and Harvard’s Complicated History of Racial Bias

The original citation for Types of Mankind includes “additional contributions” from other authors, including Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-American scientist and Harvard lecturer who was well-known at the time as the founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. As a Harvard biologist, Agassiz lent a sense of academic credibility to the book, as the primary authors were not biologists—Nott was a surgeon and Gliddon was an Egyptologist. By attaching his name and his academic clout to the book, Agassiz helped make Types of Mankind an instant best-seller.

While at Harvard, Agassiz also commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women, shown without clothing, that became some of the earliest surviving images of enslaved people in America. In 2019, the university came under fire when Tamara Lanier—a direct descendant of two of the people featured in the daguerreotypes—sued the university for profiting off the images of her ancestors, who wouldn’t have been able to legally consent to having their picture taken. Although she lost the case, Lanier’s lawsuit exposed the lingering influence of Agassiz’s racism at Harvard, prompting internal changes. Until 2019, the website for the Museum of Comparative Zoology lauded their founder as a “renowned teacher of natural history”; now, the site features a large “Black Lives Matter” banner across the main page and an official statement denouncing Agassiz’s ideas.

Around the time Nott and Gliddon were creating these racist sketches, French scientist Paul Broca discovered that brain function is localized, meaning certain physical areas of the brain are responsible for certain functions (like speech, emotions, sensory perception, and so on). Today, Broca is best known for discovering the brain region responsible for producing coherent speech—that region is still called “Broca’s area” in his honor—but few people know the racist motivations for his discoveries.

Broca was a firm believer in polygenism and the basic tenets of physical anthropology. However, according to Eberhardt, Broca’s understanding of brain localization added another layer of complexity to these concepts by examining the shape of the skull. He understood that basic functions like sensory processing happened closer to the base of the brain (the occipital lobe) while more complex functions like logical reasoning happened in the upper front of the brain (the frontal lobe).

This knowledge shaped Broca’s theory that differences in skull shape predicted differences in intelligence: Someone whose skull was larger in front must have a larger frontal lobe (and be more intelligent) than someone whose skull was larger in the back (and therefore had less capacity for rational thought). Like other European scientists at the time, Broca believed that all black people had more forward-jutting skulls than white people, with a larger capacity at the base than the front; consequently, they must also have overdeveloped occipital lobes and underdeveloped frontal lobes. Broca offered up this theory as a way to explain what he saw as the natural, inborn intellectual and social inferiority of black people as a whole.

(Shortform note: Broca’s discoveries were based on the pseudoscience of phrenology, or the idea that localized brain functions created unique shapes and features in a person’s skull. Phrenology proponents believed that tiny bumps and craters in different parts of someone’s skull were clues to their intelligence, personality, and moral character. Today, scientists know that brain functions are localized, but not in the highly pinpointed way that phrenologists believed, and those brain areas don’t impact the shape of the skull based on how well they function.)

Phase 3: Evolution and IQ

Shortly after Nott and Gliddon published Types of Mankind and Broca discovered his eponymous brain region, Charles Darwin rocked the scientific community with his theory of evolutionary biology in On the Origin of Species. Darwin argued that all humans were part of a single species that originated in Africa; but as we spread out over the world, different groups of people evolved differently to suit their unique physical environment.

According to Eberhardt, the new theory of evolution effectively ended debates on polygenism, but it could not wipe out scientific racism. Instead, scientists found new theories to justify racial bias: If humans are capable of physical evolution, then white people must be the most evolved humans. In that worldview, any non-white person represented a more primitive stage of evolution.

By the early 20th century, most scientists accepted Darwin’s ideas, and false theories about skull size and intelligence began to fade. In their place came a new tool for scientifically “proving” white intellectual superiority: the intelligence quotient (IQ) test. The IQ test is not a neutral, objective measure of intelligence. It was specifically designed to quantify the overall intelligence of different racial groups, provide “objective” evidence of white superiority, and use that evidence to justify and reinforce racial bias in existing institutions.

The Link Between IQ Tests, Scientific Racism, and Eugenics

The modern IQ test was first developed by French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1905. During World War I, the U.S. Army administered the test to millions of recruits, which paved the way for the widespread use of IQ tests. At that time, scoring well on the test required extensive knowledge of upper-class American pop culture, which meant that recent immigrants and working-class people (many of whom were people of color) were at an automatic disadvantage—unsurprisingly, rich whites scored far higher on IQ tests than any other group. The growing eugenics movement in the United States used these score differences as proof of a fundamental difference in intelligence between racial groups.

In the years following World War I, eugenicists were increasingly using IQ tests to identify candidates for forced sterilization and institutionalization. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld states’ rights to sterilize “feebleminded” people (as identified by IQ tests) without their consent in the Buck v. Bell ruling; in the following 10 years, 28,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized. During the Nuremberg trials after World War II, Nazis specifically cited Buck v. Bell as inspiration for their own eugenics programs.

The Lasting Impact of Scientific Racism

Unfortunately, scientific racism is not just a historical phenomenon. Old ideas about black inferiority are so deeply ingrained in Western culture that they persist to this day. In particular, the association between black people and apes is still alive and well, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.

Modern Confusion About “Biological Race”

Most modern scientists have abandoned the idea of “biological race” (that is, the idea that racial groups are biologically and genetically distinct from one another), but these ideas are still prevalent in the general population. In fact, nearly 53% of Americans believe that “biology determines your racial identity.” However, biological anthropologist Alan Goodman argues that there’s often more genetic variation between any two people of the same race than between different racial groups.

Goodman also tackles the common misunderstanding that sickle cell anemia is proof of biological race because it’s most common in people of African descent. While that is true, the reality is more complicated: The gene variant that causes sickle cell anemia is common in West Africa (as well as India, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East), but practically nonexistent in the rest of the African continent. That means that not all black people are susceptible to sickle cell anemia, and not everyone who carries the genes for the disease falls under the racial category of “black.” In other words, race isn’t the determining factor—geography is.

The Ape Association

Sometimes, the association between black people and apes is conscious and explicit. For example, Eberhardt describes how, in 2016, leaked text messages between San Francisco police officers showed similar dehumanizing language comparing black people to wild animals. And after the election of Barack Obama, online media exploded with racist animal comparisons targeting not just the president but his entire family—including his young daughters.

(Shortform note: It’s difficult to quantify just how common this form of racism really is because it often plays out on a much less public stage. For example, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University publishes a selection of private letters it receives every year, including a 2012 letter arguing that black people are "closer to apes than to humans" and a 2017 letter accusing the museum of enabling “monkey children” to become rapists and murderers.)

However, this particular form of bias isn’t always so blatant; the implicit association between black people and apes lurks quietly in our collective subconscious. Eberhardt covers a few studies of subliminal priming uncovering racism:

• People subliminally exposed to line drawings of apes focused longer on black faces than white faces in implicit association tests.
• In the famous “invisible gorilla” test of selective attention, participants primed with stereotypically black names (like Jamal and Shaniqua) notice the gorilla 70% of the time, compared to just 45% of participants primed with white names (like Brad and Katie).
• In another study, participants who were primed with ape-related words (like “gorilla”) and viewed a video of police officers beating a suspect were more likely to say the violence was justified when they were told the suspect was black. When they were told the suspect was white, the priming didn’t have an effect.

These studies point to an implicit association between black people and animals. This is dehumanizing, and it makes people more likely to condone violence against black people since they implicitly see them as subhuman. The fact that this operates at a subconscious level is concerning—even people who work hard to avoid conscious racial bias can actively contribute to increased violence against black people.

Can Priming Studies Accurately Measure Implicit Bias?

The use of priming techniques in social psychology studies has come under fire in recent years. Critics claim that the results of priming studies often can't be replicated, which is concerning because replication is a crucial part of determining whether researchers have stumbled on a real phenomenon. If their results can’t be replicated by other researchers in other places, they’re more likely to be a statistical fluke.

To complicate things further, there are many different types of priming, some of which are easier to scientifically validate than others. Many of the studies on implicit racial bias rely on subliminal priming, where participants are exposed to stimuli (like faces or words) so quickly that they’re not consciously aware of it. A 2018 analysis found that the experimental design of subliminal priming studies makes all the difference—in other words, studies that were properly designed found much more reliable results than studies that used less scientifically-robust methods. The same analysis also highlighted the importance of using EEGs to directly monitor participants’ neurological responses to priming.

Other studies of implicit bias rely on supraliminal priming, where participants are consciously aware of what they’re seeing (such as news reports). Scientists haven’t tried to replicate these particular studies yet, so it’s hard to say whether the results are reproducible.

Implicit Racial Bias in Modern Science

Like many modern scientists, Biased author Jennifer Eberhardt frequently presents the results of her studies at academic conferences. When she first presented her findings on the black-ape association, she expected her colleagues to be skeptical and shocked. Instead, they accepted her research easily—the fact that most people have an implicit mental link between black people and apes made sense to them.

However, these same scientists questioned Eberhardt’s conclusion that the black-ape association is a form of racial bias; instead, they argued that her results were probably just a case of color matching. Their logic was that black people and apes are both dark in color, so it makes sense that seeing one would make people more likely to notice the other (in reality, most of Eberhardt’s studies used line drawings or words, not color images, so the color matching theory falls flat).

There’s a disconnect between theory and experience here: Eberhardt’s white colleagues see racial bias as an abstract concept because they lack the context of lived experience. Without that perspective, they don’t realize that rationalizing the black-ape association is a form of racial bias in itself. They’re essentially saying, “It makes sense to equate black people with animals because they really are more like animals than white people are,” even if they’re not consciously thinking that.

Ape Jokes Have Deadly Consequences

The idea that the black-ape association is logical, harmless, and not about race is dangerous. In 2009, researchers studied the impact of the black-ape association on threats to assassinate Barack Obama. The researchers determined that the black-ape association—particularly in the form of a controversial political cartoon—directly contributed to the unprecedented number of threats on President Obama’s life. These threats were part of the reason the Department of Homeland Security authorized Secret Service protection for then-Senator Obama beginning in 2007, a full 18 months before he was first elected president. The researchers found that many of the “ape” and “monkey” comments levied against the Obama family were written off as jokes. However, in the context of hundreds of years of people using the ape association to justify discrimination and violence against black people, those “jokes” become genuinely dangerous.

Exercise: Compare the Impact of Images and Words

Early images from racist scientific texts are the precursors to modern racist caricatures. Compare the impact of those images to biased speech and writing.

• This chapter included an image from the book Types of Mankind that compares sketches of a white person’s skull, a black person’s skull, and a chimpanzee skull. What did you first notice about the image? What stuck out to you?

• What thoughts or emotions did that image bring up for you? Why do you think you reacted that way?

• You may have seen more recent images that are similarly biased (for example, in magazines, on Facebook, or in journalistic cartoons depicting figures like Barack Obama or Serena Williams). What ideas about race do you think the artists were trying to convey? Who is the target audience?

• In cases like this, do you think an image really is “worth a thousand words”? Do racist images have a different impact than biased speech or writing? Why or why not?

Exercise: Think About the Black-Ape Association

The implicit association between black people and apes hasn’t faded with time. Think about why this particular form of bias is so persistent.

• Why do you personally think the black-ape association has persisted for so long? Explain your reasoning.

• Do you think that animal association will ever fade for black people the way it did for Irish American immigrants? If so, what needs to change in order for that to happen? If not, why not?

Chapter 7: Bias in Housing and Neighborhoods

So far in this guide, we’ve learned how bias works in the brain and the history of racial bias in science. Now, we’ll see how bias impacts very personal decisions—like where to live. Today, segregation and racial bias in housing is a major problem, especially in large cities. This problem stems from a long history of racist policies that severely limited where black people could buy or rent property. Although most of those policies no longer exist, they created a pattern of de facto segregation that persists to this day.

(Shortform note: Whole books have been written on the subject of racist housing policies. For example, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein examines segregated housing in the United States from a legal and historical standpoint.)

In this chapter, we’ll explore the history of racist residential policies, the link between housing discrimination and ideas about cleanliness and disease, and the way those ideas play out on modern platforms like Nextdoor and Airbnb.

The History of Segregated Housing

In the early 20th century, private housing developers began instituting official real estate covenants as a response to black Southerners migrating northward. These covenants forbade white homeowners from renting or selling their homes to black people; if a white homeowner ignored this covenant, the new black occupants could be legally evicted based on their race because racial covenants were “voluntary private contracts.” Racial covenants were so widespread that by the time the Supreme Court banned them in 1948, black residents were banned from 80% of the neighborhoods in big cities like Los Angeles.

For over 30 years, racial covenants ensured that black homeowners and renters were crowded into tiny neighborhoods, completely segregated from their white neighbors. Those covenants are the origin of the segregated neighborhoods and ethnic ghettos that still exist today. During this time, there was no legal recourse for people facing housing discrimination—if anything, government policies were even more discriminatory. State and local government policies varied, but many places had zoning regulations that specifically barred all non-white people from certain areas.

The Link Between Implicit Bias and Housing Segregation

In Biased, Eberhardt describes the history of housing segregation primarily as a backdrop to discuss modern racial discrimination in housing. The policies she describes are primarily examples of explicit bias, since they were deliberately designed to keep black families out of white neighborhoods.

However, implicit bias also played a strong role in the history of housing segregation. In The Color of Law, Rothstein describes “blockbusting,” a tactic that real estate agents used to scare white homeowners into selling their homes at a steep discount. While these agents sometimes relied on explicit bias by touting lies that black people moving into a neighborhood would reduce property values, they often employed subtler methods that preyed on white homeowners’ existing implicit biases. For example, real estate agents would pay black mothers to walk their babies through white neighborhoods. The agents knew that the mere sight of a black person in their neighborhood would activate white homeowners’ implicit biases and ultimately make them more likely to sell.

These tactics were so successful that they led to the phenomenon of “white flight,” in which white people moved out of racially diverse neighborhoods en masse, often fleeing to the suburbs, which were still almost exclusively white.

Modern Segregation

Racial discrimination in housing is now technically illegal, but nearly 70 years of officially-sanctioned segregation left its mark on American cities. Today, African Americans are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods than people of any other race—regardless of their economic status. What’s more, Eberhardt argues that segregation is largely maintained by white people’s racial biases. Studies show that most white people wouldn’t move to a neighborhood that is even 30% black, citing fears of high crime rates and low property values.

(Shortform note: In her 2018 memoir, Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama describes a visceral childhood encounter with antiblack bias in white neighborhoods. The former First Lady and her family visited their close friends, a light-skinned black family, who had recently moved to the suburbs. When it was time to return home, the family discovered that someone had keyed a deep gouge in their Buick, most likely as a warning that they weren’t welcome in that white neighborhood.)

Racial bias also skews white people’s perception of risk and danger: The more black people living in a given neighborhood, the higher white people estimate the crime rate to be and the more they fear for their own personal safety. But Eberhardt argues that these biased ideas about black spaces don’t just affect white people—one study showed that both white and black people report seeing more “disorder” (like graffiti or loose garbage) in black neighborhoods, even if the neighborhood is actually well-maintained. Another study showed that people of all races associate black neighborhoods with words like “dangerous” and “dirty.” In fact, research shows that people are willing to pay $22,000 more for a house if they think the previous owners were white than they would if the owners were black.

“Space Racism” and Attitudes Toward Black Spaces

These biased attitudes toward black spaces reflect the idea of “space racism” that Ibram X. Kendi describes in How to Be an Antiracist. “Space racism” describes the combination of attitudes and policies that contribute to inequality between spaces that are primarily inhabited by people of one race. For example, the funding gap between majority-white and majority-black schools is an example of space racism because it reflects the racist attitude of people in power that white children deserve more resources than black children.

As a concept, space racism also describes the bias Eberhardt observed against black neighborhoods, because people who hold those biases ignore the fact that majority-white neighborhoods can also experience dangerous crime, including mass shootings. In fact, a 2019 study funded by the Department of Justice found that perpetrators of mass shootings in K-12 schools, places of worship, and commercial locations are most often white men.

Bias in Neighborhoods and Communities

As we’ve seen, racial biases can affect where we live and who we allow into our communities—but the physical and cultural makeup of those communities also, in turn, affects our racial biases. For example, if someone grows up in a culture with entrenched antiblack racial bias, they’ll most likely see that bias as just another social norm; if they move to a place with an actively antiracist culture, their idea of social norms will shift to reflect that.

Physical Space as a Tool of Bias

The physical environment a person lives in plays an important role in the biases they develop. Physical space can both reflect and reinforce bias. For example, “Whites Only” signs on businesses and drinking fountains reflect the racial bias of people in that space, but they also ensure that anyone who spends time there begins to share that bias (because when you’re literally, physically surrounded by a certain message, it’s easy to wind up believing it). Today, racially segregated neighborhoods work the same way—they reflect a history of racial bias and reinforce the message that “this is how things should be.”

For black people, living in those kinds of heavily segregated environments is not only demoralizing: It’s a constant reminder of an underlying threat of violence. Whether through lynch mobs or police brutality, black people have always faced deadly violence in white spaces. That constant threat of violence turns the physical space itself into a tool of subjugation—it’s impossible to live, work, or merely exist in those spaces without being reminded of your place in the social hierarchy and the potentially deadly consequences for stepping out of it.

Police Brutality: Retaliation for Barack Obama’s Success?

In her 2020 book Caste, author Isabel Wilkerson argues that lynch mobs and police brutality are violent tools designed to keep black people in their place. She also argues that the recent spike in police violence against black people is, in part, a reaction to the election (and re-election) of Barack Obama. According to Wilkerson, many white people saw a black man occupying the highest office in the country as a threat to white social dominance. The ensuing panic brought up buried racist sentiments, which manifested in two ways: politically, in the form of the birther movement and the Tea Party; and socially, in the sudden explosion of racist hate groups. This increase in public anti-black sentiment was a precursor to the increase in police violence against black Americans.

Technology and Bias in Neighborhood Interactions

Today, much of the interaction between neighbors that once took place in person has moved into the digital space. When it comes to racial bias, this is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, technology gives people from racial minorities a tool to document the bias they experience in daily life. For example, when a white man in Michigan fired his shotgun at a black teenager who came to his door asking for directions, the security camera integrated into the man’s doorbell recorded the entire incident; the recording corroborated the terrified 14-year-old’s story and led to the homeowner’s arrest and eventual conviction. Without that recording, the boy would have been powerless in the face of the biased criminal justice system.

(Shortform note: The perpetrator in this case, Jeffrey Zeigler, was convicted of “assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder” as well as possessing a firearm in the commission of a felony. He was sentenced to 4-10 years in prison. However, in 2020, Zeigler and his new defense attorney appealed the ruling and requested a full sentencing review, in part because they believe that a detective’s testimony in the original hearing “improperly injected race into the case when it really wasn’t an issue.")

On the other hand, technology can also escalate racial bias in dangerous ways. The lightning speed of online communication makes it easier than ever to circulate biased information. For example, if racial bias leads a white person to see a nervous black teenager as a threat, they can send a photo of the “suspicious person” to the entire neighborhood in the span of seconds. That decision can put an innocent person’s life at risk: While the person sending the message may not be the violent type, who’s to say their neighbors won’t take a “shoot first, ask questions second” approach like the homeowner above?

How Nextdoor Combats Racial Bias

Eberhardt argues that this unchecked bias is a particular problem for companies like Nextdoor, a social network specifically designed to connect people who live in the same physical neighborhoods. Nextdoor functions like a neighborhood bulletin board for the digital age where neighbors can ask for babysitter recommendations or spread the word about a lost dog. Its “crime and safety” category, however, quickly became a hotbed for racial profiling. The speed of communication was so quick that users never stopped to think about why a person walking down the street or sitting in their car seemed so “suspicious”; they thought they were helping to keep their neighborhood safe, never realizing that their suspicions boiled down to racial profiling.

When Nextdoor’s founders became aware of the problem, they called on Eberhardt and other experts to weigh in on the best ways to reduce racial profiling on the site. (Shortform note: Nextdoor executives were so impressed with what they learned about implicit bias that they now have a whole webpage dedicated to it.) They discovered that fear and speed are the two biggest factors contributing to racial profiling: People are most likely to let their biases go unchecked when they’re afraid and they don’t take time to stop and think before acting. Therefore, to combat racial profiling, Nextdoor needed to add just enough friction to the posting process to force users to stop and think about their biases, but not enough that users would become frustrated and abandon the site entirely.

To slow down the process of posting in the “crime and safety” category, Nextdoor implemented a checklist that users have to click through before posting. The checklist prompts users to get specific about what exactly makes someone “suspicious” by reminding them to focus on specific behaviors and give a detailed description of the person’s clothing. Crucially, the checklist also explicitly mentions race: It prompts users to “consider unintended consequences” if their description were to lead to an innocent person being stopped or arrested and reminds them not to “assume criminality” because of someone’s race. That’s important—according to Eberhardt, research shows that explicitly talking about race (instead of just alluding to it) leads people to act more fairly.

For technology companies, adding friction isn’t a natural instinct because the entire point of technology is typically to make daily activities faster and easier. However, in this case, slowing the process down worked: Racial profiling on the site dropped by 75%, with no significant reduction in the total number of users. Nextdoor even created international versions of the checklist that reflect the dominant racial, ethnic, and religious biases in each country, with similar positive results worldwide.

Nextdoor’s Racial Reckoning: Success Story or Empty Gesture?

Eberhardt speaks highly of Nextdoor’s progress in combating racial profiling, but other commentators have raised serious concerns about the company’s approach to racial issues. For example, moderators often remove posts advertising Black Lives Matter protests, and the company still actively recruits local police departments to join the app.

The conversation escalated in 2020, when Nextdoor’s official Twitter made a post in support of Black Lives Matter one week after the killing of George Floyd. They faced immediate backlash from users who felt that, despite the company’s efforts, the Nextdoor app was still riddled with racism. The conversation garnered so much public attention that even Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly called on the company to take concrete action and “deal [with] their Karen problem” instead of just tweeting a hashtag (“Karen” is slang for an entitled, middle-aged, and often openly racist white woman).

To their credit, Nextdoor listened to these complaints and took further concrete steps to address the app’s race problem. Nextdoor’s CEO accepted responsibility for Black Lives Matter posts being deleted and promised to provide bias training for the local “neighborhood leads” who serve as moderators on the app (previously, “neighborhood leads” received no training or vetting). The company also created an antiracism resource page on their site and is working to diversify their mostly-white executive board.

Like many companies, Nextdoor underwent significant upheaval in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests against police brutality. So far, it seems to be too soon to tell whether the changes they’ve implemented will be enough to solve the problem, and no data is available. Whatever its next moves, the company will move forward with Dr. Eberhardt’s guidance—she’s now an official member of their Neighborhood Vitality Advisory board.

Bias in Travel and Hospitality

In addition to Nextdoor, Eberhardt describes how racial bias and housing discrimination often take place on platforms like Airbnb, a website that allows users to rent out their homes for travelers to use in lieu of a hotel. In 2016, the company received a huge wave of complaints of racial bias and discrimination in their booking process. (Shortform note: This problem came to a head in 2016, but it started much earlier. In 2014, researchers found that black hosts charged 12% less than non-black hosts for equivalent listings because the hosts knew that if two listings were equal in price, bias would tip guests away from black-owned properties.)

Black users reported trying to book available dates only to have the host reject their request for no apparent reason. To confirm their suspicions of racial discrimination, some users changed the name or photo on their profile to appear white; others enlisted white friends to help by requesting the same properties on the same dates. In both cases, when the host thought the guest was white, the rooms were suddenly available again. (Shortform note: In 2018, Airbnb changed their policy so that hosts don’t see guests’ profile photos until after they accept the booking.) These were not isolated incidents: Independent researchers found that black people were 16% less likely to be accepted as guests, even when they accounted for all other variables (like having young children who might be rowdy).

How Airbnb Combats Racial Bias

Ultimately, Airbnb abandoned the idea of a legal solution and simply made their own rules. Now, before users can sign up, they have to read Airbnb’s expanded non-discrimination policy and pledge to abide by it. Crucially, users also have to agree that if they violate this policy, they understand that Airbnb will terminate their account. (Shortform note: As of 2019, Airbnb reports that over 1 million users were banned after refusing to sign the Community Commitment and Nondiscrimination Policy.)

Eberhardt argues that while this policy change gives the company a built-in tool to respond to explicit racial bias, it does very little to combat implicit bias, which experts argue is a far bigger problem. Airbnb’s “instant book” tool may be a solution. When hosts opt for “instant book,” they set certain dates that their property is available, and guests can book those dates without waiting for the host to approve their application (similar to booking a traditional hotel room). It’s a hands-off approach that bypasses the opportunity for bias to interfere, and research shows that it works: There are no racial disparities in “instant book” transactions.

Project Lighthouse and Airbnb’s Continued Antiracism Efforts

In 2020, one year after Biased was published, Airbnb announced the launch of Project Lighthouse, a data collection effort they developed with help from eight different civil rights agencies. The project will collect users’ first names and profile photos and send them to a third party evaluator who will indicate which race they think the user is. These judgments will be made by an actual human rather than by artificial intelligence, which often has racial bias issues of its own. Airbnb will then use those judgments to assign a racial category to the user profile and run experiments with internal data to see if users who are judged to be people of color experience discrimination on the site.

In addition to Project Lighthouse, Airbnb commissioned their internal Black@Airbnb employee resource group to create an Activism and Allyship guide. The guide was used internally before being shared with all Airbnb users in the wake of the George Floyd killing in 2020.

While Airbnb has made progress toward eliminating racial bias on the site, their internal bias problem remains. Despite launching a Diverse Candidate Slate Rule in 2017, Airbnb reported in 2019 that its workforce was just 3.5% African American. For reference, census data for the same year show that African American people make up 13.4% of the U.S. population.

Chapter 8: Bias in Schools

In Chapter 7, we saw how racial bias impacts where people live and how they interact with the community around them. That bias also extends into the classroom. Schools are no longer legally segregated, but black and white students still don’t have truly equal educational experiences. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the ways racial bias impacts black students, why “not seeing color” doesn’t help students, and the innovative ways that educators can reduce racial bias in their classrooms.

School Integration

In the United States today, many people assume that school segregation is a thing of the past because there are no longer laws explicitly barring black students from certain schools. However, in reality, school segregation has increased in the last few decades. The number of schools where white students make up less than 10% of the population has more than tripled. Meanwhile, the proportion of black students who attend segregated schools has increased by 11%. This is a problem because research shows that students of all races learn best in integrated schools.

Beyond academics, integration has social benefits: Adults who attended integrated schools are much more likely to have racially diverse friends, live in more diverse neighborhoods, and be more civically engaged than people who attended segregated schools. (Shortform note: One benefit of integrated schools that Eberhardt doesn’t mention is that they prepare students to enter an increasingly diverse workforce. In fact, when the Supreme Court heard an affirmative action case in 2015, nearly half of the Fortune 100 companies collectively filed an amicus brief arguing that “a workforce trained in a diverse environment is critical to their business success.”)

However, integration alone isn’t always the answer. For integration to actually break through racial bias and allow people to form genuine interracial bonds, it must happen under very specific conditions that were first proposed by researcher Gordon Allport in the 1950s. For example, the people involved must have equal status in the official hierarchy (for instance, in a school setting, a successful interracial interaction could be between two students or two teachers, but not between a student and a teacher). The interaction must also have the support of authorities (like teachers or upper management) and the contact must be genuine and personal.

Contact Theory and the Possible Risks of Integration

Allport’s research on the specific conditions that promote interracial bonds gave rise to “contact theory,” or the idea that contact between people of different races can reduce racial prejudice. Many studies have found that this effect is especially strong in interracial friendships (as opposed to colleague or neighbor relationships). However, these studies haven’t fully addressed the problem of causation—in other words, do interracial friendships make people less biased, or are people who are already less biased more likely to seek out interracial friendships?

Contact theory comes with two other major caveats. First, research shows that when people from socially disadvantaged groups have more positive contact with people from privileged groups, they’re less likely to support social policies that would level the playing field. Second, negative interracial contact increases prejudice more than positive contact reduces it. In simplified terms, each positive interracial experience a person has will make them a little less prejudiced; but a single negative interracial interaction can erase all that progress. That’s probably because we notice racial differences more when the contact is negative.

The Threat of Racial Bias Impedes Learning

Eberhardt argues that even when black and white students attend the same schools, their educational experiences aren’t equal. White students take it for granted that they’re seen and valued as individuals at school; black students often don’t have the same guarantee. Even at a young age, they’re well aware of the stereotypes that might be lurking in their teachers’ minds, and many black students learn to defend themselves from possible racist treatment by never fully letting their guard down. That makes learning difficult because learning is a vulnerable process—it requires being honest about what you don’t know or don’t understand. And when kids don’t feel safe enough to be vulnerable, it’s much harder to learn, regardless of how smart they are.

However, black students don’t just face the threat of biased treatment from their teachers—their own implicit biases can undermine their school performance. When black students struggle in school, it can feel like evidence that the negative stereotypes about their intelligence may actually be true. That thought can be a devastating blow to their self-esteem, which in turn makes it harder to do well in school and sets off a vicious cycle of self-sabotage. (Shortform note: This process is similar to “stereotype threat,” a psychological phenomenon in which the fear of confirming a negative stereotype about your group can negatively affect your performance. In Lean In, author Sheryl Sandberg describes how stereotype threat can keep girls from pursuing math or science: Being constantly reminded of the stereotype that “boys are better at math” affects girls’ performance in those areas.)

Antiblack Bias in Schools Is Very Real

Unfortunately, black students have good reason to be wary of bias in their schools. Research shows that black students face unequal treatment, especially when it comes to punishment. In one study, Eberhardt and her colleagues found that teachers are typically fair when punishing a student for the first time—but for a second infraction, they administer much harsher punishments for black students than white students. This builds on implicit racial stereotypes: If a black student repeatedly gets in trouble, teachers are more likely to see that as evidence that they’re headed for a life of crime—but when a white student repeatedly gets in trouble, teachers are more likely to see that as pure childhood antics.

Suspension: The First Step in the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The racial disparities in school discipline are linked to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, school suspensions contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline because students who are suspended or expelled are more likely to get into trouble with the law.

How to Reduce Bias in Schools

Thankfully, there are ways for schools to create a more equitable learning experience for their students. Here are four powerful tools for reducing bias in the classroom:

1) Utilize empathy-focused teacher training sessions. In these sessions, teachers listen to students’ stories about facing discrimination in school and how worrying about racial bias impacts their ability to learn. Teachers can then share strategies with one another for prioritizing a healthy and supportive relationship with their students while still administering discipline when they need to. This type of training works: Compared to the control group, students of teachers who went through empathy training were half as likely to be suspended and felt more respected in the classroom. (Shortform note: A more recent study found that empathy interventions can reduce teachers’ anti-black racial bias before they even begin their teaching careers.)

2) Teach accurate history. An accurate understanding of history gives kids the context to understand social issues (such as police brutality) in the present. However, teachers and school curricula often gloss over the brutal realities of slavery and other hard topics because they’re uncomfortable to talk about. As a result, young Americans as a whole are alarmingly ignorant about these important historical issues—one study found that 22% of young people have never heard of the Holocaust. Eberhardt notes that most teachers want to give their students an accurate understanding of history but are afraid of stepping on toes or saying something wrong. (Shortform note: If you’re looking for concrete tools to facilitate conversations about race and slavery with children, the organization Learning for Justice (formerly known as Teaching Tolerance) has resources for teaching “hard history” to elementary, middle, and high school students.)

3) Build trust and mutual respect between teachers and students with values affirmations. One study found that black seventh graders who wrote daily journal entries in class about things they value (like relationships with friends and family) earned higher grades than those who wrote about neutral subjects (like their daily routine). Students who completed values affirmations were still outperforming students in the control group two years later. Eberhardt believes that this worked for three reasons. First, it reminded students that they have an identity outside of how people at school might see them. Second, it reframed school as a place where students’ feelings matter, creating a sense of psychological safety. And third, reading the journal entries helped teachers to see their students as individuals, not stereotypes. (Shortform note: Values affirmations have a strong, lasting effect on African American and Latino students, but they don’t make much difference for white students. This might be because most white students automatically feel safe and respected at school, so they don’t need as many reminders of their intrinsic worth as students of color do.)

4) Use “wise feedback” to give criticism. According to Eberhardt, black students are so accustomed to racial bias in the classroom that they often mistake criticism of their academic work for a personal attack. Before they can accept academic feedback, they need to feel psychologically safe, which involves trusting that their teachers aren’t using academic criticism as a weapon to express racial bias. “Wise feedback” is a tool designed to build that trust by framing criticism as a teacher’s way of saying, “I know how talented you are, so I know that you can do better than this” rather than, “You’re not good enough.” Studies show that wise feedback puts black students at ease and motivates them to try to improve.

(Shortform note: Wise feedback has three essential components. First, teachers need to convey that they’re critiquing a student’s work because they have high expectations for their students. Second, teachers need to reassure students that they know they can meet those high standards. Third, teachers need to provide students with the resources to improve their work, like constructive feedback or additional help.)

More Resources to Reduce Bias in Schools

A 2020 study found two additional tools for reducing the impact of racial bias in schools. The first is a change in school policy that creates opportunities for teachers to hear students’ perspectives. Schools can do this by implementing restorative practices like community circles that give each student a chance to feel fully heard.

The second way to mitigate bias in schools is to emphasize a “growth mindset,” a term created by psychologist Carol S. Dweck, author of Mindset, to describe the belief that people can improve their abilities through hard work and perseverance. Dweck contrasts this with a “fixed mindset,” or the belief that abilities like intelligence are unchangeable—you’re either born with them, or you’re not. This study found that when teachers were reminded that students can improve their bad behavior (and that the teacher-student relationship can improve), they were less likely to label black students as “troublemakers.” When these tools were combined in the same school, racial disparities in student discipline dropped dramatically.

How Not to Reduce Bias in Schools

Instead of the successful interventions above, many educators claim they “don’t see color” as a way to avoid acknowledging race at all in the classroom. But colorblindness isn’t a viable strategy—as humans, our brains naturally rely on color to help us distinguish items in our environment, so it isn’t really possible to “not see” it. Beyond that, Eberhardt argues that colorblindness can actually increase racial disparities, because ignoring skin color naturally means ignoring the racial discrimination people face because of it. To reduce bias, educators need to acknowledge the specific struggles that their black students face due to racial bias.

According to Eberhardt, the idea that noticing or mentioning skin color is impolite stems from our cultural discomfort with talking about race. In our desperation to avoid those difficult conversations, we end up completely erasing a very important part of a person’s identity. This is especially dangerous in schools because children pick up on that discomfort easily—by age 10, most kids hesitate to talk about race or to mention someone’s skin color. In fact, one study found that kids who are exposed to messages that downplay the importance of race (like “we’re all the same”) were significantly less likely to notice blatant racial discrimination than kids who heard messages celebrating diversity (like “we need to recognize how we’re different and appreciate those differences”).

The Many Dangers of Racial Colorblindness

Eberhardt examines the “colorblind” approach to racial bias in the context of education, but colorblindness is a common problem in all types of conversations about race. For example, in How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi argues that ignoring race won’t eradicate racism because racist ideas stem from racist policies, not the other way around. Therefore, to fight racism, we have to start by attacking racist policies—and it’s impossible to identify racist policies if we can’t see race.

Similarly, in The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that colorblindness is dangerous because it keeps us from seeing just how deeply entrenched racism is in public institutions like the criminal justice system. As a result, it’s easy to make the mistake of over-emphasizing personal responsibility and ultimately blame individuals for what is really a systemic problem.

The refusal to acknowledge systemic racism is also part of what causes colorblindness rhetoric in the first place, as Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility. For many white people, the word “racism” calls up mental images of police dogs and firehoses being turned on black protestors during the 1950s and ‘60s. As a result, white people claim they don’t notice race in an effort to distance themselves from those violent examples.

It’s clear that colorblindness isn’t the answer, but talking plainly about race is easier said than done. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo lays out a formula for having those hard conversations. Start off on the right foot by doing your homework and reading up on other people’s perspectives. During the conversation, listen more than you speak. If you notice yourself getting defensive, take a step back to examine the feeling. The more you’re willing to sit with those uncomfortable feelings, the more productive the conversation will be.

Exercise: Design a New History Class

In schools today, history curricula often gloss over difficult topics like slavery and the Holocaust. Think about the changes you would make to give students a more accurate understanding of history and the way it impacts their current reality.

• Think back to your own history lessons in school. How did your teachers address racially-charged topics like slavery or the Civil Rights Movement?

• In this chapter, we learned the importance of teaching history honestly, as well as some ways that teachers can be more sensitive to racial bias when they talk to students. With that in mind, how would you rate the way your own teachers handled difficult topics? Why?

• If you were thrown into a high school history class today, how would you approach these sensitive subjects? What would you do differently than your own teachers? (For example, you might include more discussion about the founding fathers being slaveholders or design a lesson connecting slavery to the structural inequalities black people still face today.)

• In your opinion, how can teachers discuss difficult topics like slavery and racism without making their black students feel singled out? (For example, maybe they could start by asking every student to write down their own feelings or concerns about discussing racism in the classroom, or provide a trigger warning before showing images or videos that could be re-traumatizing for black students.)

Chapter 10: Bias in the Workforce

As we’ve seen, racial bias affects people at home and in school. That same bias shapes the world of work in nearly every way, from crafting a resume to getting an interview to navigating a diverse workplace.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the hurdles people of color face in applying to jobs and the strategies they use to overcome them. Then, we’ll examine how companies like Starbucks respond to instances of blatant racial bias in their businesses. Finally, we’ll explore the innovative ways businesses are attempting to sidestep that bias, like implementing company-wide bias training sessions.

Bias in the Job Application Process

Racial bias in the workforce is a massive, widespread problem. In fact, the unemployment rate for young black people is twice as high as it is for young white people. That’s partly because of the housing discrimination we discussed in Chapter 7, meaning black teens and young adults are more likely to live in low-income neighborhoods with fewer job options. (Shortform note: Eberhardt doesn’t mention it, but the racially biased criminal justice system is also a major driver of black unemployment. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how people with criminal records have a harder time getting hired. In Chapters 4-5 of this guide, we’ll see how black Americans are more likely to be arrested and face harsher sentences than white Americans, which means black jobseekers are more likely to have a criminal record.)

However, Eberhardt argues that the main driver of this disparity is racial bias in the hiring process—an alarmingly common phenomenon that is well-documented in scientific research. For example, in one study, researchers created a set of resumes for fictional applicants that would be perfect candidates for actual job listings. The fictional applicants behind these resumes were equally well-qualified for each job, with just one difference: Some had stereotypically black names (like Jamal and Tamika) while others had stereotypically white names (like Geoffrey and Emily). Applicants with black-sounding names were half as likely to be contacted about the job than applicants with white-sounding names.

Big-Name Companies Are Guilty of Hiring Discrimination

Many of the world’s most prominent companies have been accused of hiring discrimination. In 2021, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched a systemic inquiry into Facebook’s hiring practices based on several complaints of racial discrimination (the company reports that just 3.9% of its U.S. employees are black). That same month, Starbucks agreed to revamp its store-level promotion policies after the EEOC found evidence of racial discrimination. The banking industry faces a similar problem—A 2021 study found evidence of racial disparities in promotions in 13 of the largest banks in North America.

Whitening the Resume

In many ways, these studies confirm what people of color already know about bias in the workforce. For example, when researchers interviewed black and Asian college students about their job search process, many of them were painfully aware of racial bias and actively tried to avoid it by “whitening” their resumes: using white-sounding nicknames or initials instead of their given names, removing references to cultural or ethnic groups (like Black Student Associations), and adding references to stereotypically white interests like hiking. (Shortform note: This study was originally published in 2016, but the pattern still persists today. In 2021, a black human resources professional went viral on Twitter for advising black jobseekers not to use “hood names'' on their resumes and to go by their initials or middle names instead.)

To make matters worse, research shows that “whitening” actually works: The more changes an applicant makes to whiten their resume, the higher their chances of getting a callback. Worst of all, employers who included formal diversity commitments in their job descriptions were no less likely to discriminate against unwhitened resumes than other employers.

(Shortform note: What’s a person of color to do if they don’t want to “whiten'' their resume? A resource guide for black students at the University of California Davis advises these students to embrace their names and experience. The guide cites the example of Barack Obama, who went by “Barry” until college, when he embraced his full first name.)

Stereotypes Make It Harder to Recognize Success

Despite all this research showing that white people are significantly more likely to be considered for a job simply because of their skin color, many white Americans actually believe the opposite is true. In 2017, a Harvard study found that 55% of white Americans think there is racial discrimination against white people in the United States. Many of these people cite affirmative action policies as proof that racial minorities have an unfair advantage. If they’re competing for a job and lose out to a black person, they immediately blame affirmative action rather than consider the possibility that a black person could be genuinely more qualified for the job.

Does “Reverse Racism” Exist? It Depends Who You Ask

The idea that white people face discrimination for being white is also called “reverse racism” or “anti-white racism.” In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo argues that claims of “reverse racism” stem from the fact that there are two separate definitions of “racism” in popular use. The first definition is purely interpersonal: “Racism is bias against a person based on their race.” The second is societal: “Racism is bias against a person based on their race, in the context of power structures that support that bias.”

If you’re using the first definition, the idea of “reverse racism” makes sense, because racism is purely about individual biases. However, under the second definition, “reverse racism” is a contradiction in terms because the major power structures in the United States fundamentally privilege white people. Many race scholars use the second definition. For example, in White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explains it this way: While people of color can be prejudiced against white people and can discriminate against individual white people, they don’t have the social power to be truly racist.

However, not everyone agrees with this view—in fact, author Ibram X. Kendi argues in How to Be an Antiracist that black people can be racist, and that claiming otherwise is actually a form of racism in itself because it assumes that black people have no power. Kendi uses both of Oluo’s definitions to support his argument by dividing the concept of “racism” into racist ideas and racist policies. Therefore, people of color can be racists because they can hold racist ideas about white inferiority, even though they lack the power to enact racist policies that target white people.

Bias Training

Bias in the workplace can be a difficult topic for employers to grapple with—and as a result, many companies are now holding formal bias training for their employees. However, professional bias training isn’t a foolproof solution (and can be expensive), so companies need to consider their options carefully. Many are following the example Starbucks set in 2018 that revolutionized the corporate approach to engaging with bias.

The Starbucks Incident

In May of 2018, police arrested two black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks for the simple crime of asking to use the restroom before purchasing anything. The men planned to meet their business partner there and were waiting to order until he arrived; the barista interpreted this as trespassing and called the police. Within ten minutes of that phone call, police had arrested the two men and physically removed them from the store. A white woman filmed the incident on her phone and posted it online, where it quickly went viral. In the video, the two black men are quiet and polite throughout the entire ordeal while other customers—including their white business partner, who arrived in the middle of the chaos—demand an explanation for the arrest.

Starbucks’s corporate response to this incident is a model for addressing racial bias in the workplace on a large scale. First, they addressed the incident itself by changing company policy to allow anyone to use the restroom—regardless of whether they’ve purchased something—and the Starbucks CEO traveled to Philadelphia to apologize to the two men in person. Then, Starbucks took their response a step further: Instead of just addressing the incident itself, they committed to confronting racial bias head-on by holding a four-hour implicit bias training for all 175,000 Starbucks employees. This training required closing down 8,000 Starbucks locations for the day, costing the company roughly $12 million.

“From Privilege to Progress”

The Starbucks incident also sparked change in another way. Melissa DePino (the white woman who filmed and tweeted the whole encounter) and Michelle Saahene (a Black woman who was the first to speak up during the incident) connected over their shared horror and frustration at the injustice they witnessed that day in Starbucks. Together, they launched "From Privilege to Progress," an organization devoted to bringing white and Black people together to fight systemic and interpersonal racism. Through speaking engagements and online activism, they empower people to push past awkwardness and have hard, necessary conversations about racism.

Bias Training Is an Imperfect Solution

Bias training like the program Starbucks utilized is becoming increasingly popular in government, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. The demand for this training has led to the sudden rise of private companies focused on creating bias training programs to pitch to other businesses. In many cases, these training sessions lead employees to profound personal realizations about the ways implicit bias impacts their own behavior; however, on a larger scale, we don’t yet know whether bias training actually reduces implicit bias.

According to Eberhardt, part of the problem is that social scientists are reluctant to tackle the issue in the real world. They feel that scientists should focus on building and testing the perfect bias training program in the lab before exposing others to it. Eberhardt disagrees—she argues that waiting to act until we can test every step of a process with pure science often results in never acting at all. Instead, she argues that social scientists should embrace the uncertainty and develop theories based on their practical experience, rather than the other way around.

Social Scientists: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Involved

Eberhardt’s ideas on social scientists’ responsibility to get involved in practical applications of their research are backed up by Gordon Allport, the scientist who pioneered contact theory. In a 1941 article calling for psychologists to use their expertise to boost “civilian morale,” Allport wrote, “If the psychologist is tempted to say that he knows too little about the subject he may gain confidence by watching the inept way in which politicians, journalists, and men in public life fence with the problems of propaganda, public opinion, and morale.”

Bias Training Prompts Moral Credentialing

Without empirical studies on the results of different training styles, it’s hard for bias educators to know the best ways to talk about bias. According to Eberhardt, this is especially complicated because people tend to rely on moral credentialing: the idea that if they’ve established a past reputation as an unbiased person when it comes to race, they’re entitled to express racial prejudice in the present without consequences. This is the proverbial “but I have black friends” defense, where people act as though befriending a black person means nothing they say from then on could possibly be racist. Moral credentialing doesn’t just affect individuals—companies are equally guilty of using their reputations as socially conscious organizations as an excuse for discrimination. The challenge for bias educators, then, is to deliver useful training while ensuring that training doesn’t become a “get out of racism free” card.

To Resist Moral Credentialing, Slow Down and Refocus

Moral credentialing doesn’t just apply to people who have undergone formal bias training. For example, people who read Biased might rely on moral credentialing, too, by using their newfound knowledge of racial bias as an excuse not to question their own biases. To overcome that temptation, try these three strategies:

• Practice mindfulness. To prevent yourself from engaging in moral credentialing, you first need to notice when you’re in a situation that might trigger that response. Practicing mindfulness will help you focus on the present moment, so you’ll have a better chance of catching yourself before slipping into moral credentialing.

• Use the “two second rule.” In other words, before you let yourself off the antiracist hook, take two seconds to pause and think through your response. By slowing your thought process down, you switch from System 1 to System 2 thinking, as we learned in Chapters 1-2.

• Focus on your goals and values, not on being a “good person.” If your goal is to practice antiracism, you’ll remember that you need to consistently resist racist ideas and policies. Similarly, if justice is an important value for you, you’ll be more motivated to question your biases to make sure you’re contributing to a just world.

Other Ways to Combat Bias at Work

Beyond structured training, there are several ways for individuals and organizations to combat racial bias in the workplace:

1) Understanding the Conditions That Trigger Bias

Bias is difficult to control partly because it’s a conditional state. Most people don’t act in biased ways all the time or in all situations, but the right combination of factors can activate dormant biases in even the most open-minded person.

According to Eberhardt, the two biggest factors that trigger bias are speed and ambiguity. In this case, “speed” refers to how quickly we make decisions in a certain situation—for example, when hiring managers review resumes, the sheer volume of applications often forces them to decide a candidate’s fate after looking at their resume for just six seconds. “Ambiguity” comes into play when those decisions are based on subjective impressions rather than concrete criteria. In the resume review example, deciding which candidates to interview based on the hiring manager’s gut feeling invites ambiguity; to avoid bias, she should instead commit to interview everyone who meets a predetermined set of criteria (such as having a degree in a relevant field and having three years of experience).

As we saw in the case of Nextdoor’s anti-bias checklist in Chapter 7, slowing down the decision process can significantly reduce instances of bias. When police officers interact with citizens, slowing things down has a powerful and potentially life-saving effect. For example, the Oakland Police Department has a foot pursuit policy that prohibits officers from following suspects into backyards or blind alleys during foot chases—instead, they should stop and call for backup.

That small pause deescalates the situation and prevents officers from having to make life-or-death decisions in the heat of the moment. This policy change keeps officers and citizens safer: In Oakland, officer injuries fell by 70%, and police shootings dropped from about eight per year to one or two per year.

(Shortform note: The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department enacted a similar rule in 2011, with a small difference: Officers are allowed to chase suspects on foot, but the pursuing officer should not be the first person to put their hands on the suspect. This allows officers to keep the suspect in sight but reduces the risk of making adrenaline-fueled, racially-biased decisions with disastrous consequences. The change helped: The department saw a 23% decrease in total use of force.)

2) Using Monitoring Technology

When structural conditions contribute to bias, changing those structures can eliminate bias. An example of such a change is implementing monitoring technology like police body cameras. Studies show that wearing body cameras has a powerful effect on police officer behavior: When officers know they’re being recorded, they’re more motivated to consciously control their racial biases and treat people fairly. For instance, after the Oakland Police Department implemented body cameras, instances of officers using force dropped sharply as the cameras held officers accountable. Citizen complaints declined, too, both as a result of the decreased use of force and because Oakland residents know they now have objective records of their encounters with police officers.

Body Cameras Aren’t a Magic Cure

In the wake of high-profile instances of police brutality, activists called for more police departments to adopt body cameras as a way to prevent officers from breaking the rules. Like in Oakland, many departments saw some initial positive effect of the cameras—however, more and more evidence shows that body cameras alone have very little effect on police use of force.

However, that doesn’t mean body cameras aren’t important. According to two criminal justice scholars writing for the National Police Foundation, body cameras do work—not as a “disinfectant” that prevents use of force in the first place, but as a “flashlight” that illuminates the situation after the fact. These writers argue that body cameras can’t actually prevent police brutality in the long term because officers respond to charged situations with instinct, not conscious thought, so they don’t have time to think about how they’re being recorded and change their behavior in response. However, body cameras are still an important piece of the police reform puzzle because they provide an objective witness to incidents of police brutality, which can bolster the victim’s account of what happened.

3) Building Personal Relationships That Override Biases

As we saw in Chapter 8, strong interracial relationships that develop under the right conditions can be powerful bias-busters. Therefore, employers should provide opportunities for their employees to develop genuine, mutually-respectful relationships with coworkers of other races. (Shortform note: One study found that having a black coworker significantly reduced racial bias for white employees. Importantly, the researchers in this study bypassed the causation question of earlier studies on contact theory by assigning a “propensity score” to each white worker in a large national sample. Workers with high propensity scores are more likely to want to work with people of color, regardless of whether they already do. Then, the researchers matched each white person in the sample who had black colleagues to a white person with the same propensity score who did not have black colleagues and compared their levels of racial bias.)

4) Creating a New Normal (Despite the Growing Pains)

Businesses today are working hard to catch up to new, more inclusive social norms; however, bias is a complicated topic, and there is a steep learning curve for companies hoping to address it. For example, three years before the bogus arrests in Philadelphia, Starbucks attempted to spark a national conversation about race by having baristas write “Race Together” on customers’ drink cups. The “Race Together” campaign lasted barely a week before the company called it due to backlash from customers who felt it was a superficial gesture. (Shortform note: Criticism of the campaign was so widespread that it inspired a Saturday Night Live parody.)

While the campaign was short-lived, the lessons of that early failure informed the company’s bold response to “the Starbucks incident” years later. In other words, Starbucks’s willingness to engage with a difficult topic—even clumsily—played a huge role in creating a new norm for addressing racial bias in business.

Is CEO Activism Part of the “New Normal”?

Beyond bias training and firing employees who make racist comments, how can employers commit to antiracism? “CEO activism” is one method, in which prominent CEOs publicly take a stand on social and environmental issues like racism, gender equality, or climate change. Starbucks’s “Race Together” was an example of CEO activism—the initiative was the brainchild of CEO Howard Schultz, who rolled out the campaign against the warnings of his executive team and without doing any market research. The “Race Together” pushback illustrates why many people feel that corporate executives should keep their personal beliefs out of business, especially since taking a stand on controversial topics risks alienating customers or employees and ultimately losing money.

Regardless of the risks, CEO activism is a growing trend that’s unlikely to fade, especially as the socially-conscious Millennial generation takes over. And CEOs are even more powerful when they band together, which is why PwC Chairman Tim Ryan founded “CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion,” an antiracist business commitment with nearly 2,000 signatories, all of whom are presidents or CEOs.

Chapter 3: Bias in Cases of Police Brutality

Now that we understand how bias develops and spreads to others, we can examine how racial bias impacts specific situations, beginning with police brutality. Eberhardt approaches this complex topic in a unique way: by using the 2016 murder of Terence Crutcher (an unarmed black man who was fatally shot by an Oklahoma police officer) as a case study representing the wider problem of police brutality. She breaks that encounter down into five crucial decision points and examines how racial bias played a role in each of them.

Police Brutality in the United States

The United States has a damning history of violent police interactions; in those situations, racial bias can have life-or-death consequences. (Shortform note: In 2020, police officers killed 1,127 people; 28% of those people were black.)

According to Eberhardt, the ubiquity of camera phones and the increased use of body cameras in police departments means that more and more of these murders are caught on film and shared online, putting a much more personal face to the statistic. In Cleveland, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing in a park with a toy gun when he was shot and killed by a rookie officer who thought the preteen posed a “lethal threat.” In Minnesota, an officer shot Philando Castile seven times at point-blank range mere seconds after pulling him over; Castile bled out in his car in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter.

The high-profile murder of innocent black people at the hands of the police brought the power of implicit bias into the national conversation. Eberhardt describes having tough conversations with mothers of black sons, who’d been coaching their boys on how to avoid police brutality for generations but were suddenly confronted with visceral evidence that young black men can do everything “right” and still not survive an encounter with police.

On top of that, the officers involved in any given instance of police brutality are rarely prosecuted and even more rarely convicted—even when the entire encounter is caught on video. Each acquittal further erodes the black community’s trust in the justice system. (Shortform note: Since 2005, fewer than 2% of officers involved in fatal civilian shootings have been arrested. Of those arrested, 46% of those charged with murder or manslaughter were convicted.)

The Murder of Terence Crutcher

Let’s look at the role of bias in police brutality through the lens of one incident: the 2016 murder of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man from Oklahoma, by police officer Betty Shelby.

Part 1: Deciding to Pull Over

Officer Betty Shelby was en route to a domestic violence scene when she saw Terence Crutcher’s stalled car and decided to pull over. Why did she abandon an actively violent situation to focus on someone having car trouble? Because racial bias can dictate where people focus their attention. In other words, people are more likely to notice and pay attention to black people when they’re thinking about subjects like crime—because their racial bias creates an unconscious link between black people and crime.

Eberhardt describes how scientists have demonstrated this effect using subliminal priming. In one study, the author and her colleagues found that police officers who were primed to think about crime looked longer at black faces than white faces. The results of this study are telling: If thinking about crime draws your attention to black faces, and a police officer’s job is to think about crime, then bias is inevitable. This might explain why Officer Shelby was drawn to the sight of a black man in a stalled car while she was responding to an active crime scene.

(Shortform note: The link between racial bias and selective attention is well-established in science; however, Terence Crutcher’s death may not be the best example of this principle in action. Crutcher’s SUV wasn’t pulled over to the side of the road—it was stalled in the middle of the street, blocking traffic, which created a dangerous traffic situation. Under those circumstances, it makes sense for an officer’s attention to be diverted to the scene.)

Part 2: Overestimating Crutcher’s Size

Subconscious racial biases don’t just influence our beliefs—they also impact our ability to accurately see what’s right in front of us. For instance, several studies show that both black and white people estimate black men to be much larger than they really are. In one study, participants looked at photos of black and white men’s faces and guessed their height, weight, and strength: They consistently rated black men as taller, heavier, and stronger than white men, even without seeing their full bodies.

The tendency to overestimate black men’s size and strength twisted officers’ perception of Terence Crutcher and made him seem like more of a threat. Terence Crutcher was five feet nine inches tall and weighed 255 pounds, but the officers on the scene that night guessed his weight to be 300 pounds. Given that most police officers are well-practiced in estimating suspects’ body size, 45 pounds is a big discrepancy.

Size Overestimation, Police Violence, and the Black-Ape Association

Overestimating black men’s size and strength is an established trend in fatal police-civilian interactions. For example, in 2014, Milwaukee police officer Christopher Manney fatally shot Dontre Hamilton after Hamilton grabbed the officer’s baton: Manney later said that Hamilton had “superhuman strength" and could easily overpower any police officer. Hamilton’s autopsy revealed that he was only 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 169 pounds. Similarly, in 2019, police officers in Aurora, Colorado held 23-year-old Elijah McClain in a now-banned chokehold, causing him to vomit and struggle to breathe—the officers labeled this as “excited delirium” and called for paramedics to administer ketamine, a powerful sedative. Although McClain weighed just 140 pounds, a first responder seriously overestimated his weight and administered enough ketamine for a 190-pound person; McClain went into cardiac arrest and died several days later.

Overestimating black men’s size and strength is related to the black-ape association discussed in Chapter 6. In a 2008 study, Eberhardt and her team found that newspaper articles about death-penalty-eligible criminal cases are more likely to contain ape-related words when the defendant is black. The researchers combed these articles for mentions of 54 ape-related words, many of which—like “brute,” “beast,” and “predator”—are related to size and strength. In a later study, other researchers found that police officers who implicitly associate black people with apes are more likely to see black children as older than they really are and to use violence against black children in police custody.

Part 3: Seeing Surrender as a Threat

People see black men’s bodies as larger and stronger than they really are—and when those bodies move, the effect is amplified. In this case, Officer Shelby shot Terence Crutcher while he was walking away from her with his hands in the air, indicating surrender. But Shelby later testified that she fired the gun because she genuinely feared for her life. Why? Because racial bias primes people to see black people’s movements as more threatening by default.

A pioneering study in 1976 found that when college students saw a white stranger shove a black stranger during a staged argument, 17% classified the white person as “violent”; but when they saw a black person shove a white person, a full 75% called the behavior “violent.” It’s clear that racial bias has a strong impact on how people interpret the movements of others—and it’s likely that Officer Shelby interpreted Terence’s movements as more suspicious than she would if he had been white. (Shortform note: Some reviewers of Biased criticized Eberhardt for not mentioning that Crutcher's autopsy revealed he was high on PCP at the time of the shooting, which may have contributed to his erratic movements. According to her lawyer, Officer Shelby had completed drug recognition training and was aware that Crutcher was likely under the influence of the drug.)

Part 4: Assuming He Had a Gun

Officer Shelby felt threatened in part because she incorrectly assumed Crutcher had a gun in his car. Racial bias was at play here too. The author and her colleagues studied that assumption with another subliminal priming experiment, this time by subconsciously exposing participants to either white male faces, black male faces, or no faces. Next, they measured how quickly participants identified an object from a series of grainy images that slowly cleared up over 41 frames. Some of the images showed common household items; others showed objects that obviously related to crime, like a gun.

All participants identified household items equally quickly, regardless of priming. However, participants who were primed with black faces identified crime-related objects much quicker than participants in the other groups because of the underlying, biased association between black people and crime. Racial bias changes the way we see objects, not just people. (Shortform note: A 2006 study found similar results: After seeing a black face, participants were more likely to mistake a household object for a gun than if they’d seen a white face.)

Part 5: Pulling the Trigger

The most crucial impact of racial bias is on behavior, especially for law enforcement officers, whose actions can have deadly consequences. Racial bias makes officers more prone to use violence against a black suspect (like Terence Crutcher) than a white one.

To test whether racial bias impacts the decision to shoot at a suspect, researchers gave participants a simulated shooting task in which suspects were either black or white and held either a gun or a household object.

The first rounds of this study tested college students and non-police community members. These participants hit “shoot” faster when the person holding a gun was black than when the person was white, and they were also more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black person than an unarmed white person. Police officers showed similar results: Just like the general population, officers hit “shoot” faster for black people with guns than white people with guns. However, the officers’ results differed from the general results in two important ways:

1) Officers from big cities (with large populations of black people) had more racial bias in their reaction time than officers from places with smaller black populations. In other words, they were quicker than other officers to shoot at black people with guns and slower to shoot at white people with guns.

2) There was no racial bias in false positives (“shooting” someone who isn’t holding a gun) for the police officers. Eberhardt believes that this is most likely because officers undergo extensive use-of-force training, in which they practice quickly distinguishing between a gun and a harmless object. The more hours of training officers had, the less likely they were to mistakenly shoot anyone, regardless of race. The goal of officers’ training isn’t to reduce racial bias—it’s to reduce the likelihood of an officer shooting an unarmed person. However, giving officers the opportunity to regularly practice that skill made them better at their jobs, which reduced racial bias by default.

(Shortform note: Eberhardt doesn’t touch on the fact that Officer Shelby’s partner shot Crutcher with his Taser just seconds before Shelby fired the fatal shot. This begs the question: Why was Shelby’s first instinct to grab her gun rather than her Taser? Implicit bias may have led her to choose the deadlier weapon, but police training also plays a role: Experts say most officers get extensive firearms training but only “a few hours'' of Taser training. Officers are taught to think of their firearm as their “best friend.”)

Is the Case Study Approach Helpful?

This section is a detailed look at a single incident of police brutality, but not every fatal police encounter is the same, and it’s not clear whether bias impacts those other encounters in the same ways. For example, officer Tim Loehmann fatally shot Tamir Rice within two seconds of arriving on the scene. Some of the same factors were at play in that encounter as in the death of Terence Crutcher—for instance, the officers saw Tamir as larger than he really was (Loehmann’s partner described Tamir as “maybe 20” years old while radioing for an ambulance). However, the studies in this section don’t shed light on whether or how racial bias played a role in the unique aspects of this incident, such as why the officers failed to administer first aid after the shooting or why they tackled and handcuffed Tamir’s 14-year-old sister when she arrived on the scene.

Ultimately, using a case study to structure the discussion of bias in police brutality helps organize the information rather than just presenting a list of scientific studies. However, this approach invites questions about how these studies apply to police violence more generally, or whether other factors (such as dispatch priming, which can influence officers’ decision to pull the trigger before even arriving on the scene) may have been more relevant in other incidents of police shootings.

Chapters 4-5: Bias in the Criminal Justice System

Violent police interactions don’t happen in a vacuum—they both shape and are shaped by societal context and local perceptions of the police. In this chapter, we’ll see how the daily realities of police work can increase officers’ racial bias and lead to burnout. Finally, we’ll see how bias creates racial disparities at every level of the criminal justice system, from discretionary stops to cash bail, plea bargains, and death sentences.

Interpreting Data Based on Experience

Eberhardt frequently works with the Oakland Police Department, which is required to collect data on every police stop as part of a federal settlement. In 2014, the author and her colleagues analyzed the data for a 13-month period (roughly 28,000 stops) and determined that Oakland police disproportionately stopped and searched black people, who made up only 28% of Oakland’s population but accounted for 60% of police stops. Officers were also significantly more likely to conduct searches of black people during a stop (65%) than white people (23%). During those stops, 72% of Oakland officers had handcuffed a black person who was not under arrest, but only 26% had handcuffed a white person without making an arrest. (Shortform note: Stanford University (where Dr. Eberhardt teaches) is home to the Open Policing Project, which has gathered data on over 200 million traffic stops all over the country. Data sets from every city in the project are available on their website for other researchers to download and use in their own analyses. The project is the first to gather comprehensive data on police stops and make that data available to the public.)

The same pattern of data plays out in police departments all over the country and even internationally. From the perspective of an antiracist community leader, that evidence is proof of racial profiling; but from the perspective of a police officer, that evidence is proof that black people are simply more likely to commit crimes in the first place. The statistics may be impartial, but the way people interpret them is not.

Same Data, Different Narratives

The reason these two groups interpret the same numbers so differently has to do with the narrative they impose on the data. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes the “narrative fallacy,” which is the human tendency to rearrange data to construct a story that makes sense. In the case of police data, different groups are telling different stories about the same data. For example, police officers’ narratives may rely on the assumption that officers only stop people who have committed a crime (or who they can reasonably suspect to be a criminal). With that narrative in mind, the fact that black people make up the majority of police stops in Oakland naturally means that black people also make up the majority of criminals.

However, antiracist activists have a different underlying narrative: They may assume that police stops often happen for reasons that don’t have to do with actual crime (such as bias or ticket quotas). In that case, the fact that black people make up 60% of Oakland police stops but just 28% of the population doesn’t mean there are more black criminals—it means police officers are deciding who to stop based on racial bias. The pre-existing narratives in each group prevent them from seeing other ways of interpreting the same data.

Procedural Justice Training

Many police departments now use a program called “procedural justice training” to help officers reframe how they see and interact with the community. The goal of procedural justice training is to help officers reconnect to the noble goals that inspired them to join the force in the first place. Officers then use that “ideal self” as a compass to guide their interactions with the community, particularly in four central ways: give people a voice, apply the law fairly, treat people with respect, and be trustworthy. When the officers follow these principles, they build respect for the police and a better connection with the community, which ultimately makes their jobs easier and more rewarding.

Procedural justice training is a marked improvement from past officer training programs, which emphasized relying on instinct and trusting “the hairs rising on the back of your neck.” Generations of cops were trained to ignore objective evidence and focus solely on intuition—which is often bias in disguise. Racial bias is ingrained so early and so powerfully that it influences people even when they’re actively trying to avoid it, but police officers are trained to embrace that bias, creating an even more destructive force.

Procedural Justice Training Didn’t Save George Floyd

In 2014, the Department of Justice sponsored the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a police reform initiative that included procedural justice training for officers in addition to policy changes. The program debuted in six cities—including Minneapolis, Minnesota. Every officer in the Minneapolis Police Department received 24 hours of procedural justice and implicit bias training. In addition, the MPD hosted eight “listening sessions” with specific community groups, including black Minneapolitans. In 2016, the department committed to a number of policy changes based on the information shared in these sessions, including updating their use-of-force policy to “prioritize sanctity of life” and requiring officers to intervene if another officer is using excessive force.

The reform initiatives in Minneapolis ran from 2014 to 2018. Derek Chauvin, the former MPD officer convicted of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, joined the department in 2001 and presumably received these trainings. Additionally, the three other officers who were on the scene when George Floyd died would have been aware of the department policy that required them to intervene if a fellow officer used excessive force. And yet, no one intervened as Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, which the department’s longest-serving officer characterized as “totally unnecessary.”

If procedural justice training alone can’t prevent instances of police brutality, what can? Activists, policymakers, and academics have proposed a variety of ideas, ranging from minor reforms to abolishing the police completely. One idea that most of these proposals have in common is establishing an unarmed team of social workers and medical professionals to address calls involving mental health crises, domestic disputes, or homelessness. Currently, police officers spend most of their time on nonviolent calls like these despite having relatively little training in mental health or mediation; an unarmed crisis team would be better able to de-escalate these situations while freeing up armed officers to focus on violent crime.

Discretionary Stops

Police officers’ officially-sanctioned biases are on display when they make decisions about who to pull over for equipment-related violations (like expired tags or a broken tail light). It’s often up to the officers’ discretion to decide if a minor equipment issue is worth the time and resources it takes to stop someone. That freedom often becomes an excuse to act on unchecked biases: An analysis of 18.5 million traffic stops over six years found that black drivers are more than twice as likely to be pulled over for equipment-related issues than white drivers.

(Shortform note: Surprisingly, this type of discrimination isn’t illegal. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how, according to the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, it’s legal to use perceived race in the decision to pull someone over so long as race isn’t the only factor.)

Why do police stop more black people? Eberhardt believes that pulling someone over gives officers an excuse to search that person for contraband (like drugs or unregistered weapons), which could lead to another crucial tally in their arrest count. To increase those odds, cops rely on the bias linking black people with criminality and assume that stopping black drivers is more likely to result in an arrest. But that assumption is flawed—a federal report on Ferguson, Missouri (where police shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014) showed that black people were more likely than white people to be searched, but less likely to have contraband on them. Crucially, the federal report concluded that racial disparities in police stops did not reflect actual differences in crime rates and were exclusively the product of racial profiling.

(Shortform note: The same is true all over the country: Research shows that white people and black people use illicit drugs at roughly the same rates. However, since white people make up 76% of the U.S. population, there are more white drug users than black drug users in total.)

Disproportionately stopping black drivers has a powerful cultural and economic impact, but Eberhardt argues that many black people worry about even bigger consequences than arrest or a citation. Every year, 11% of police shootings happen during discretionary stops. That’s a serious communal trauma, and it’s the reason many black drivers are terrified of being pulled over—if the situation escalates, it could be a death sentence.

The Communal Trauma of Driving While Black

Racially-biased discretionary stops are so common that the black community has a term for them—“Driving While Black.” (Filmmaker Dominique Purdy even made a movie by the same name to describe the experience of driving while black.) While white Americans may be worried about getting a ticket during a traffic stop, many black Americans are worried about making it out of the situation alive. Many know all the classic safety measures by heart—stay calm, keep your hands visible, and never reach for the glove compartment.

That constant hypervigilance increases the risk of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders in the entire community, even among people who haven’t had encounters with the police. In fact, these effects are so widespread that the American Medical Association considers police brutality to be a public health issue. Even famous figures like Serena Williams, LeBron James, and billionaire Robert F. Smith have talked openly about being terrified of being stopped by police.

The “Respect Deficit” in Police Interactions

Ordinary traffic stops can escalate into deadly encounters for many reasons, including police officers’ language and tone of voice. In the first part of a two-part study, Eberhardt studied footage from almost 1,000 traffic stops in Oakland, California. Her multidisciplinary team of researchers isolated 36,000 utterances (individual words and phrases directed at the driver during the stop). College students rated a sample of those utterances based on friendliness, respectfulness, politeness, formality, and impartiality. Oakland officers scored well in every category overall, but they were significantly more professional with white drivers than black drivers.

In the second part of the study, the team collapsed those five variables into a single variable: “respect.” They identified the utterances that students rated as highly respectful and used a computer program to scan transcripts of traffic stops (a total of nearly 500,000 words) for those high-respect words. This second, much larger data set yielded similar results: As a whole, Oakland officers were respectful to the drivers they stopped, but significantly less so with black drivers. (Shortform note: In a podcast interview, Eberhardt specified that Oakland officers were more likely to use the titles “sir” and “ma’am” for white drivers and more likely to address black drivers as “bro” or “dude.”)

Both black and white police officers show this “respect deficit” regardless of the driver’s age, gender, or criminal record. The severity of the offense doesn’t matter—officers are more respectful to white people driving recklessly than to black people with expired tags. The difference is so significant that a computer algorithm can correctly identify the race of the driver based solely on the words the officer uses during the stop.

The Respect Deficit Puts Officers at Risk

According to some police trainers, the respect deficit that officers exhibit toward black drivers could put their own safety at risk. This happens for two reasons. First, when officers act disrespectfully towards a civilian during a police stop, they risk giving that person a low opinion of police officers as a whole—if that person is stopped again in the future, they’re less likely to comply with officers’ requests, which could escalate the situation and put the officers’ safety at risk.

Second, disrespectful language is often a sign that an officer is viewing a civilian as less than human. In that case, the officer is more likely to underestimate the harm that person is capable of doing and might let their guard down too quickly. If the situation escalates from there, the officer will be less prepared to respond because they won’t see it coming.

The Cash Bail System

If a black person does wind up in jail after a discretionary stop, they’ll face racial bias yet again through the cash bail system. In the United States’ cash bail system, bail is money used as collateral to ensure that, if they’re released, the person in jail will return for their official trial and subsequent court dates (if they don’t return, they’ll lose that money for good). If the person (or someone they know) can post bail, they’re free to go home until the trial; if not, they’re stuck in jail—sometimes for months. (Shortform note: Opponents of bail reform argue that, without collateral, people won’t show up for their court dates and so won’t face justice. However, states that have implemented bail reforms didn’t see significant changes in court appearances—most of the time, people still showed up, even without having money on the line.)

The court decides the bail amount for each person based on things like job stability and criminal record, which puts anyone who isn’t rich and white at a distinct disadvantage. According to Eberhardt, young black men are at particular risk—on average, they’re charged 35% more than white arrestees.

In some places, strong bail reform efforts have replaced cash bail with computerized risk assessments and judicial discretion in pretrial detention decisions. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t eliminate racial bias from the process. Judges are still human and subject to implicit biases, and even computer algorithms can reflect bias—in Florida, an independent investigation found that a computerized risk assessment system was 45% more likely to rate black defendants as “high risk” than white defendants (and thus set their bail much higher than for white arrestees), even when taking criminal history, age, and gender into account.

The effects of pretrial detention can be devastating, even for people who ultimately aren’t convicted of a crime. When people are locked up for months awaiting trial, they’re unable to work, pay rent, or take care of their children—and can lose their jobs, homes, and custody rights as a result. Those consequences come from merely being arrested and not having money for bail, not from actually committing a crime, which means an innocent person can lose everything solely because they’re not wealthy—and because black people are more likely to face high bail prices and thus longer pretrial detentions, they’re more likely to face these negative effects.

Cash Bail Costs Billions, But Doesn’t Make Communities Safer

Cash bail is an expensive system to maintain: The direct cost of holding people in jail before their trial is $14 billion annually. However, that number doesn’t take into account the indirect costs of cash bail. People who are held pretrial are more likely to take a plea bargain and therefore more likely to face prison time, which can cost taxpayers hundreds of dollars a day. Additionally, without the jailed person’s income, their families may need to rely more on publicly-funded social services. All told, experts estimate that the cash bail system costs up to $140 billion per year to maintain.

The purpose of cash bail is twofold: to ensure people show up to court and to promote public safety by keeping dangerous criminals off the streets. However, research shows that the cash bail system does neither of those things; in fact, holding people in jail before their trial can actually increase the overall amount of local crime. One study found that people who are held in jail for two to three days are a full 40% more likely to commit another crime before their trial than people who spent the pretrial waiting period at home. Another study found that pretrial detention can also increase the likelihood of committing crimes after being released from jail. Furthermore, people are just as likely to show up for their court dates if they’re allowed to go home instead of waiting in jail.

Plea Bargains

People stuck in jail because they can’t afford bail are often faced with a desperate choice: remain in jail and risk losing their livelihood, or take a plea bargain and plead guilty to a crime they did not commit in exchange for their freedom. Eberhardt reports that a full 94% of criminal cases are settled by plea bargain, without ever going to trial. For black defendants, even accepting a plea bargain doesn’t always guarantee freedom—prosecutors are more likely to present plea bargains involving prison time to black defendants than any other race.

Unfortunately, like long pretrial detentions, plea bargains can have devastating long-term effects. Pleading guilty to a crime leaves people with an official criminal record, which can make it difficult or impossible to find employment, rent housing, get student loans for college, and even vote. The system creates a vicious cycle: People are held in jail for not having money, which robs them of access to resources to make money, which mires them further in poverty, which increases the likelihood that they’ll be arrested and detained all over again. That vicious cycle disproportionately affects black people, which further cements the common mental association between black people and crime.

Plea Bargains: A Lose-Lose Situation

Although taking a plea bargain might reduce a person’s jail sentence, it can still have devastating downstream effects. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander details the penalties inflicted on people with a criminal record. Here’s a summary of those penalties:

Housing Penalties:

• Public housing agencies can deny applications from people with criminal records.

• Family members might be reluctant to let relatives with criminal records stay with them because the whole family can be evicted if the landlord believes any criminal activity is happening.

Employment Penalties:

• Licensing for some professions prohibits those with a felony record.

• In most states, private employers can legally discriminate based on criminal history.

• Industries that typically hire more felons (like manufacturing) are disappearing due to outsourcing.

• People with certain criminal convictions may have their driver’s licenses suspended, making it harder to access jobs.

Financial Penalties:

• Jail time comes with a host of mandatory fees: booking fees, jail per diems, public defender application fees, drug testing fees, and so on. People often struggle to pay these because of the employment penalties listed above.

• People convicted of drug-related felonies are banned from receiving federal benefits like food stamps and welfare for life, as dictated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

• This system limits economic opportunities so much that it actively pushes many people with criminal records into a life of crime, which they see as their only avenue to make enough money to survive.

Unequal Sentencings

If a case does go to trial, the outcome is heavily influenced by racial bias. This is especially true in states where the death penalty is still legal. The death penalty only applies to murder cases, and jurors typically hand down a death sentence when they feel the crime is so heinous that execution is the only way to bring justice to the victims. Eberhardt argues that this is a value calculation: If the victims’ lives were more valuable than the murderer’s, then the only way to balance the scales is to end the murderer’s life as well.

Aside from any other concerns about the morality of the death penalty, there is a flaw in its basic logic: Social, political, and economic institutions in the U.S. have always considered white lives to be more valuable than black lives. That bias is clear in death penalty statistics: When a murder victim is white, the murderer is significantly more likely to receive a death sentence than if the victim is black. According to Eberhardt, that disparity both reflects and reinforces the biased belief that white lives are precious and deserve justice, but black lives are expendable. This logic also explains why juries are more likely to sentence black defendants to death than white defendants, regardless of the race of the victim.

Racial Bias Influences Jury Selection

One reason juries may be so prone to anti-black racial bias is that they are often overwhelmingly white. A 2010 study of eight southern states found evidence of widespread racial discrimination in jury selection, especially in cases where the defendant is eligible for the death penalty if they are found guilty. In some places (like Houston County, Alabama), this discrimination is so extreme that prosecutors dismissed over 80% of qualified black jurors in cases involving the death penalty.

Dismissing eligible jurors based on race has been illegal since 1875, and the Supreme Court upheld that law in the landmark Batson v. Kentucky ruling; however, prosecutors have found ways around the law by dismissing jurors for trivial factors, like having dyed hair. In 2005, a Texas man appealed his death sentence because prosecutors had eliminated 10 of the 11 eligible black jurors for his case; the Supreme Court ruled that his sentence should be overturned because there was significant racial bias in the jury selection.

Racial bias in the justice system isn’t an accident. In 1987, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for a black man convicted of killing a white police officer in Georgia. In the majority opinion for McCleskey v. Kemp, Justice Lewis Powell cited a study documenting significant racial disparities in 2,500 similar cases in Georgia—while he admitted that race was the reason for the discrepancy, he reasoned that those disparities were “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system,” not evidence of a structural problem. That ruling effectively codified racial bias into law and made it nearly impossible to officially challenge that bias in any part of the criminal justice system.

(Shortform note: The McCleskey ruling set a legal precedent that activists have been fighting ever since. Essentially, the ruling makes it possible to seek legal recourse for racial discrimination in the justice system only if the defendant can prove that racial bias was directed at them personally by a judge, jury, or police officer. In other words, the implicit racial biases that are baked into the system itself are just background noise, regardless of the unfair legal landscape they create.)

Exercise: Imagine a Better System

Eliminating institutional bias in the American criminal justice system is a tall order. Think about what your approach would be to this problem.

• Imagine you’ve been tasked with revamping the criminal justice system so that people of every race are treated fairly. What’s the very first thing you would change? Why?

• What other changes do you think would have the biggest positive impact on the system, and why?

• What concrete action can you take today to support one of those important changes? (For example, if ending cash bail is important to you, you could research organizations that advocate for bail reform.)

Chapter 9: From Implicit Bias to Explicit Racism

Until now, we’ve focused on the role of implicit biases that people often aren’t even aware they have. However, in the right circumstances, those implicit biases can bubble up to conscious awareness and become explicit racism. This was the case in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) before a “Unite the Right” rally. That march and its aftermath marked a fundamental change in the national conversation about race.

In this chapter, we’ll examine the violent Charlottesville march in more detail, the impact it had on UVA students, and what role universities should play in combating racial bias on campus.

The Unite the Right Rally

The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was the culmination of growing racial and political tensions across the country. To fully understand the way those events impacted how we think about implicit and explicit bias, we need to understand what happened before, during, and after the rally itself.

Before the Rally

The rally itself was originally meant to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Civil War General Robert E. Lee from a park in downtown Charlottesville. The statue’s proposed removal was part of a city-wide effort to ensure the city’s public memorials depicted the real history of Charlottesville—including its role as a major slave-exporting state. For city officials, removing Confederate symbols was a way of recognizing that legacy and the unimaginable harm it inflicted on generations of black families. (Shortform note: The fate of the Robert E. Lee statue was contested in court for a full five years until April 2021, when the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the city could remove the statue as well as a nearby statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.)

The city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces faced enormous backlash from the moment it considered removing the Lee statue. White Virginians argued that the statue represented Southern pride and cultural identity and that Confederate heroes were a symbol of the glory of the Old South. That attitude is an example of the “lost cause theory,” which describes the way many white Southerners draw on the myth of the “glorious lost cause” of the Confederacy as a source of identity and pride. As a result, they take any criticism of Robert E. Lee as a personal affront.

However, the problem with the Lee statue isn’t just that it glorifies the racist values of the Old South. The statue itself wasn’t erected until 1924, nearly 60 years after the Civil War, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was an active and powerful force in the region. Erecting the statue was an act of intimidation that literally cemented the KKK’s dangerous ideology in Charlottesville under the guise of a war memorial.

Confederate Monuments Are Symbols of the “Lost Cause”

Removing Confederate monuments is a growing trend—in 2020, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that over 160 Confederate symbols were removed from public property, including 71 in Virginia alone (in this case, “symbols” includes physical monuments and graphic images as well as public buildings, parks, and roads named after Confederate figures). However, the same report found that over 2,100 Confederate symbols are still on display across the country, most of which are clustered in the Southern states. The SPLC began tracking displays of Confederate symbols after a white supremacist killed nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

However, many white Southerners argue that removing these symbols is a way of erasing Southern history. This is a central tenet of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, which began in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and became part of the public consciousness through films like Gone With the Wind that glorify Southern antebellum life—slavery included. Many argue that this image of the chivalrous Old South is false, and that it has replaced the brutal historical reality of slavery in the minds of many Southerners.

Modern believers in the “lost cause” resist the push to remove Confederate monuments because they believe that the Civil War was more about states’ rights than slavery, that most slaves were kept in humane conditions, and that enslaved people were endlessly loyal to their enslavers. Therefore, they categorically deny that Confederate symbols are symbols of racism.

During the Rally

To protest removing Confederate statues, various far-right groups descended on Charlottesville as part of the “Unite the Right” rally. The night before the official rally, a group of hundreds of neo-Nazis marched through the University of Virginia’s campus carrying tiki torches and chanting racist and anti-Semitic epithets. Violence erupted when the mob encountered a group of UVA student protestors: The marchers beat students and university administrators with their torches and sprayed mace into the crowd until police arrived on the scene. (Shortform note: In Caste, author Isabel Wilkerson recounts the same events, but with an important bit of added context: The march through UVA’s campus was a reenactment of the 1933 torchlight parade that celebrated Hitler becoming the new chancellor of Germany. The demonstration also invoked images of the Ku Klux Klan, who also marched by torchlight in the 1920s and ‘30s.)

The violence on campus was merely a prologue to the rally itself. On the morning of the rally, before the official rally began, groups of neo-Nazis surrounded a synagogue, shouting “Heil Hitler” as Jewish worshippers held Shabbat service inside. Later, in downtown Charlottesville, hundreds of heavily armed far-right protesters clashed with several thousand counterprotesters. The tension between the groups quickly escalated from shouting to all-out brawling. That violence turned deadly when a self-professed neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

After the Rally

In November 2017, three months after the deadly rally, Dr. Eberhardt visited the University of Virginia to interview students, administrators, and local government officials about their experiences. Across these interviews, two common themes emerged:

Theme #1: Conflicting Identities

We all have multiple aspects of our identities. When those identities aren’t in conflict, we may not even think about them (for example, you may not give much thought to being both a parent and an employee until work conflicts with family time).

The people of Charlottesville felt this tension of multiplicity acutely in the aftermath of the rally. For example, Eberhardt learned that white students who grew up in the area had to reconcile their liberal politics with their Southern heritage and the racism in their own families and communities. Young white men in particular felt a seismic shift—many of the violent marchers had looked like them, and as a result, classmates and even security officers now looked at them with the mix of fear and suspicion that black men often face everywhere they go.

For students of color, this identity tension arose between how they saw themselves (as carefree college students) and how others might see them (as a hated minority). Where they may have felt mildly uncomfortable in a room full of white classmates before, many students felt acutely unsafe in the rally’s aftermath and were constantly on the alert for potential violence, making it impossible to focus on learning. Additionally, students and faculty members with children had to juggle their identities as activists devoted to protesting injustice with their identities as parents who need to protect their children from a dangerous situation.

Identity Tension Among Famous People of Color

Having conflicting identities is a common experience for people of color. How to Be an Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi describes the “dueling consciousness” between how people of color see themselves and how others see them. In Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama describes a similar feeling of being torn between two worlds as a black woman in the public eye. For mixed-race people like comedian Trevor Noah, this tension is often particularly acute. In Born a Crime, Noah describes growing up in South Africa near the end of apartheid and being seen as an outsider by both white and black kids at school.

Theme #2: Protecting Free Speech and Preventing Hate Speech

In the rally’s aftermath, many UVA students felt betrayed by the university, which they felt was more concerned about the marchers’ right to free speech than about the safety of black and Jewish community members. This is a common trend: Universities are often skittish about quelling white supremacist uprisings because they fear being accused of violating first amendment rights. Many of the students Eberhardt interviewed reported that this also happened at the classroom level—professors stayed quiet when students made racist remarks in their classrooms because they feared being seen as “pushing an agenda,” putting the burden on non-white students to defend themselves and making it impossible to focus on learning.

That tension between freedom of speech and protecting people from hate speech was also evident in the police response to the rally. Body camera footage shows police officers refusing to get involved when marchers physically attacked counter-protesters; many people Eberhardt spoke to described being rescued from violent attacks by armed Antifa members while police looked on. A later investigation found that the police department’s hesitation was an attempt to manage its public image in the aftermath of a Ku Klux Klan rally the previous month, during which police had given KKK members an armed escort out of the rally before unleashing tear gas into the crowd of counter-protesters. Many people in Charlottesville saw this as yet another example of the city prioritizing freedom of speech over the lives of racial and religious minorities.

Should Hate Speech Be Protected on Campus?

The debate over free speech protections on college campuses is not a new one, but it has changed over time. In the past, college students were often the ones invoking their First Amendment rights in the face of official censorship; now, however, the opposite is often true, with students calling on their universities to ban controversial speakers entirely, which is itself a form of censorship.

For many, the push to ban certain speakers is an alarming trend. In The Coddling of the American Mind, authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that universities have become “fragile” environments that cater to students’ opinions at the expense of true academic freedom. They argue that universities should prioritize freedom of speech over issues of social justice because the purpose of a university is to discover truth, not to protect people’s feelings. Other writers argue that censorship is not only morally wrong, it also robs majority students of the chance to experience just how hateful racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric can get, which could spur them on to activism.

On the other hand, allowing unrestricted hate speech on campus can have serious consequences, like the violence that erupted on the University of Virginia campus the night before the Charlottesville rally. The threat of violence also means that universities have to spend more on security for controversial speakers—one month after the Unite the Right rally, the University of California Berkeley spent $800,000 on security for a 15-minute speech by alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.

Ultimately, federal law protects full freedom of expression on public campuses, and most students and scholars agree that universities should promote free discussion by hosting a variety of speakers. However, that doesn’t mean racist or hateful speech should go completely unchallenged. The Southern Poverty Law Center released a guide for students to respond to alt-right campus speakers; they recommend hosting an alternative event that promotes inclusive values rather than protesting controversial speakers directly. And legal experts recommend that university administrators focus on building strong campus communities and avoid using the First Amendment as an excuse to ignore the real pain their students may be feeling.

The Resurgence of Explicit Racial Bias

The Charlottesville march was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades, but the hatred that fueled it had been simmering beneath the surface for generations. For social scientists, the most shocking part of the march wasn’t the hateful words the marchers said but the brazenness with which they said them. Before that point, white people abided by an unspoken social contract of “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it came to racism, allowing progressive people to avoid the discomfort of talking openly about race and prejudiced people to avoid the social taboo of blatant racism. However, the Charlottesville rally made it clear that the old rules no longer applied—suddenly, the social cost of being openly racist wasn’t so terrible.

(Shortform note: Virginia’s governor at the time of the rally, Terry McAuliffe, summed up the resurgence of explicit racism this way: “They used to wear hoods. They used to do it at night. They don’t wear hoods anymore, and they do it in broad daylight.”)

What prompted that change? Experts think that the sudden resurgence in white nationalism and explicit racial bias happened because suddenly, white people are “outnumbered.” The population is diversifying more and more, and white people (particularly white men) are no longer the unquestioned rulers of society. No longer being the dominant social group makes many white people feel threatened, so they embrace white supremacist ideas more openly as a coping mechanism. Unfortunately, that resurgence of explicit racial bias is likely to continue as white people are projected to become a racial minority in the United States somewhere around the year 2050.

“Unite the Right” Was a Prelude to the 2021 Capitol Attack

The Unite the Right rally marked a cultural shift in part because it was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades. The rally was organized by members of the alt right movement, which is a banner term for a variety of groups that share a common white supremacist ideology. According to the Anti-Defamation League (a nonprofit that studies discrimination and anti-Semitism), the alt right’s move from online activism to in-person demonstrations like the Unite the Right rally was partly inspired by the election of Donald Trump.

Four years later, on January 6th, 2021, pro-Trump extremists stormed the United States Capitol building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. The documentary Trump’s American Carnage traces the roots of this attack back to Charlottesville and argues that the president’s failure to condemn white supremacy in Charlottesville emboldened the far right groups who ultimately participated in storming the capitol (indeed, many of the same protestors attended both events).

Exercise: Reflect on Your Own Biases

Implicit racial bias can creep into your thoughts or actions even when you’re actively trying to avoid it. Take a moment to explore your own relationship to racial bias.

• As you read this guide, which examples of racial bias did you recognize from your own past thoughts or behaviors? For example, maybe you’ve noticed yourself locking your car door without thinking when a black person walks by. (Remember, biases are the automatic result of living in a culture that values one group over another. Everyone holds some form of racial bias.)

• When you think about your own biases, what emotions come up for you? Why?

• After reading this guide, what can you do to actively combat the effects of bias in your own life? For example, if you’re an educator, maybe you plan to implement the “values journal” idea from Chapter 8 to help black students feel safer to learn.