Discrimination against blacks linked to dehumanization, study finds

Jray · 02-12-08, 10:27 PM

Quote:

Discrimination against blacks linked to dehumanization, study finds

Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers.

Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. "This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work—intuitions—you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] was—how we were able to pick it up every time."

The paper, "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," is the result of a series of six previously unpublished studies conducted by Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State University psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff (the lead author and a former student of Eberhardt's) and Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively. The paper is scheduled to appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces. The researchers consistently discovered a black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other non-white groups, such as Asians. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.

"Despite widespread opposition to racism, bias remains with us," Eberhardt said. "African Americans are still dehumanized; we're still associated with apes in this country. That association can lead people to endorse the beating of black suspects by police officers, and I think it has lots of other consequences that we have yet to uncover."

Discrimination against blacks linked to dehumanization, study finds

Two generations after Civil Rights and white america still thinks we're apes.

1069 · 02-12-08, 11:01 PM

Quote:

Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.

When I was a child, I had a book of fairy tales and nursery rhymes that was maybe a hundred years old. it had been passed down in my family.
It had a story called "Little Black Sambo".
Little Black Sambo lived in Africa. He went for a walk one day, and a tiger chased him. It chased him around a tree, and he grabbed it by the tail, and it chased its own tail around and around and around the tree so fast that it melted into pancake batter. Then Little Black Sambo's mom cooked it into pancakes, and Little Black Sambo and his mom and dad ate them.

At least that's how I remember the story; I haven't read that story since I was about five.
But what I really remember was the illustrations. Little Black Sambo and his whole family looked like monkeys. Their hair looked like dozens of little tiny balls on their heads. Their lips were white, and covered half their faces. Monkey people. I didn't understand that they were stylized negroes, caricatures of black people.
I didn't realize they were supposed to look like people at all, even though they wore some sort of rudimentary clothes.
I thought they were supposed to be monkeys, or monsters. Creatures.
They scared me.

It is dehumanizing indeed; most of all to the troglodytes who depicted people of color thus.
If you'd told me back then that Little Black Sambo was not a monkey-monster but was supposed to be a black child, I wouldn't have believed you.
If you'd told me that was how the illustrator of the storybook perceived black people to look, I would have said, "Well, he's stupid, then. And crazy."

Looking at such relics with a modern eye, the only people diminished or dehumanized are the sorry-arsed whites who engaged in these vulgar and foolish efforts at dehumanizing others.
They are the pitiable ones.

mikhail · 02-12-08, 11:37 PM

I resent this the experiment doesent really prove anything.Someone being shown flashing images is far from think black people are subhuman.

Hatuey · 02-12-08, 11:40 PM

With specimens like these

I really don't blame them.

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Seriously though how many books nowadays picture black people as monkeys? Did you know that you can't even buy the old version of Tin Tin in the Congo? The reason for this being that the new revised version has been changed so that people understand that the Africans are a representation of the naive views Europeans had concerning Africans. It's ridiculous.

WI Crippler · 02-13-08, 09:47 AM

I thought we were all apes of some kind.

I've been in bathrooms where poo was smeared on the walls. I don't think we are as far removed from our ancestry as we'd like to think.