Aversive racism, subtle racism

Research on aversive racism, subtle sexism, and heterosexism has shown that socialization and cultural conditioning fosters unconscious biases and misinformation about various marginalized groups in our society; some research even suggests that cultural conditioning can actually connect prejudices to emotions in a neurological manner. Thus, it is highly possible and even probable that most people have unconsciously inherited the cultural biases of their forebears and that of society. 

The concept of aversive racism is central to our understanding of microaggressions (Dovidio, Gaertner, Penner, Pearson, & Norton, 2009; Gaertner & Dovidio, 2005). Simply defined, aversive racism is a contemporary form of bias: It is an insidious and less conspicuous form of racism that hides in the assumptions/beliefs/values of well-intentioned people and is difficult to identify in its motivational manifestations. This is especially true when such biases are invisible to perpetrators and are unintentional in nature.

According to Dovidio and colleagues, aversive racists truly believe they are nonprejudiced, consciously hold egalitarian values, and would never deliberately discriminate; yet, they are likely to harbor unconscious biases that may result in discriminatory actions. Studies reveal that training and education may be successful in confronting and lessening conscious biases, stereotypes, and preconceived notions but that implicit biases generally remain untouched and unaffected.

Because most people experience themselves as good, moral, and decent human beings, they find it difficult to entertain the notion that they may have acted in a racist, sexist, or heterosexist manner. Thus, in addition to holding hidden biases, getting them to confront their prejudices and discriminatory actions threatens their self-image as someone who stands for equality, justice, and respect for everyone.

Two layers of resistance are present: (1) the unawareness and unintentionality of their prejudices and discriminatory actions and (2) the need to preserve their self-image as an unbiased and good person. If one’s prejudices are unconscious, if one’s discriminatory actions are unintentional, and if one’s self-image is locked into a belief of one’s inherent goodness, the challenges and questions become: How do we make the invisible visible? How do we reach people so that they can become aware of their biases? How do we make people see the harm perpetrated against socially devalued groups in our society?

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Terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain...

Baldwin does not seem to be trying to make whites feel bad or guilt trip them. In fact, he seems empathetic toward whites who are caught up in a history based on violence and lies and, seemingly, their evident desire to rationalize or justify it, but yet refuse to examine that history more closely, a refusal that makes them appear pathetically "incoherent:" 

"This is the place in which, it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America. The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea: Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present on the middle passage. I am not responsible for the textile mills of Manchester, or the cotton fields of Mississippi. Besides, consider how the English, too, suffered in those mills and in those awful cities! I, also, despise the governors of Southern states and the sheriffs of Southern counties; and I also want your child to have a decent education and rise as high as his capabilities will permit. I have nothing against you, nothing/ What have you got against me? What do you want? But, on the same day, in another gathering, and in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much."-James Baldwin

White Americans have not yet been able to do this...

"According to Baldwin, it is this guilt that keeps white America from looking honestly at itself, from addressing its history, and from seeing in that history the lingering racism of today. He states:

"The fact that Americans, white Americans, have not yet been able to do this- to face their history, to change their lives-hideously menaces this country. Indeed, it menaces the entire world. For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On- the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously con- trolled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be other- wise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations...And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror, one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view. In great pain and terror, because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, oneself, and attempts to recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating; one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history."-James Baldwin

Poem by an African American Woman

"Looking well in these books I see

Nothing in them rings a bell

Oh how I wish they’d speak to me

And my grandmother with the stories she’d tell

My family has refrained you see

From causing up a stir

They have been trained not to mention all the rape and the death

Making my history just a blur

Perhaps that s why you feel no shame

Just giving me one page

Erasing the source of my Family’s real name

To prevent me from tracing their rage

And you ask me why

There’s hopelessness and blindness

In the young ghetto children’s eyes

Well any strong tree uplifted and stripped of roots

Eventually will wither and die

And looking within these books I see

Nothing in them rings a bell

Oh how I wish they’d speak to me"

-Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequalty (Movie)

We keep this system in place by...

"As long as we are being taught that where you end up is about your effort then the fact of inequality between groups of people is going to come to be seen as natural evidence of some people’s superiority and other people’s inferiority.

If you don’t educate underprivileged folks because you figure it’s just a waste of money, if you don’t provide equal job opportunity or equal housing opportunity, and if you don’t really care if there’s disproportionate incarceration because you think “those folks are all bad anyway,” then you create this sort of snowball effect where the uneducated and those who can’t find housing and can’t find jobs will almost invariably have to find some way to survive that will involve in some cases criminal activity which then will land them in jail.

So ultimately, we sort of keep this system in place by a combination of actual practices in the job market, the school system, etc, also, the underlying ideological glue of the society"

-Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequalty (Movie)

If you are not part of the power structure...

"The reality is if you are not part of the power structure, if you are not one of those who make the decisions, I think you are hyper-aware of what is happening. You are hyper-aware of the decisions that are being made and how they impact you. For the folks who are in positions of power, they are not… they don’t need to think about it. They don’t need to critique it, it works for them."-Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequalty (Movie)

white privilege

“ When well-meaning white people who have never thought about privileged systems or whiteness, or race, start out, the teaching is very necessary to get them past blame, shame, and guilt. They were born into circumstances they didn’t invent. They were born into history they didn’t invent. Rather than have them do the solipsistic thing of getting all self-involved in this, it’s just very important to hold them, while they get into a rational frame of mind, that the big systems exist that they didn’t know about, they were born into them. We were not taught history, but this is history they are learning. The American myth of meritocracy doesn’t apply. Meritocracy means whatever you ended up with must be what you wanted and worked for, and what you earned and deserved individually. They’ve been taught that. It’s true, huge systems that one is born into will bear on what one can do with one’s life, and how won’t see. And that’s the part that has been missing from that education. So these white women breaking up over their first experience of hearing about racism, they are basket-cases partly because of their bad, bad, education, and their inability to see systemically, and it’s not their fault. But they need to be hustled past it as quickly as possible with some remedial words which I think I’ve just spoken here. You did not invent the systems you were born into. They are there, and you were taught not to see them and you’re a very student of what you’ve been taught.”-Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequalty (Movie)