Unconcious Racism

The year is 2010. It has been over six decades since the height of the African-American civil rights movement in the United States. The notion that people are fundamentally different, taxonomically stratified, that racial qualities such as skin color can determine a persons worth is long past. After all, we’ve fought our great war. 620,000 hard working, blue blooded, dyed in the wool Americans were killed over States rights, over the discrepancy of constitutional promises and what it really means to be free. We’ve had our time of struggle, battling out the demons of Jim Crow, suffrage, educational segregation, and all other systematic masquerades of inequality.

The year is 2010 and we stand on the threshold of a new day. The dirty polarization of white versus black, good versus evil, the bitter versus the blessed flies in the face of our modernity. We are a new people – a melting pot of colors – who have moved past the great obsession of dividing and subdividing and sub-sub-dividing the human race. Even Jesus, after all, is taking on a new face, is moving away from the Nordic blond hair blue eyed image into a darker confluence of possible Arab, Armean, Berber, Roman, Greek, African, or Persian ancestry.


It is 2010 and things are different. I don’t have to be afraid of how the world views my “bi-racial” relationship, of the taboo mixing of racial lines, of the fact that my progeny would be neither black nor white, but something in between. Conscious racism, the kind of thing you might have seen in the movie Crash, is a thing of the past. People don’t judge other people based on the color of their skin? I mean, we have a black president, a product of Ann Soetoro, a white anthropology geek from the Midwest and Barack Hussein Obama, Harvard graduate and senior governmental economist from Kenya. We understand that the proportion of melanin in your skin has absolutely no biological connection with your intelligence or potential. People have changed. Times have changed. It’s a new day.

Or is it?


I was recently drawn to a book by one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, who is phenomenal at writing essays that challenge conventional wisdom and perception. This particular book, Blink, is about our adaptive unconscious mind, or the primitive part of our brain (which we often call intuition) that rapidly judges situations based on a narrow window of experience. Gladwell describes the ability to think fast as “thin-slicing”, and believes that it often produces spontaneous decisions that are as good if not better than carefully planned and considered ones. Take dating, for example. Isn’t it interesting how we can somehow feel out our date in the first ten seconds of meeting him or her, and that we intuitively know if they are right or wrong for us before ever getting to know them?

Gladwell tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in a kitchen in the back of a one-story house in a residential neighborhood. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it did not. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, "There's something wrong here," and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, the fireman thought it was ESP. What is interesting to Gladwell is that the fireman could not immediately explain how he knew to get out. From what Gladwell calls "the locked door" in our brains, the fireman just "blinked" and made the right decision. In fact, if the fireman had deliberated on the facts he was seeing, he would have likely lost his life and the lives of his men. Gladwell gives a wide range of examples of how thin-slicing in contexts such as gambling, war, and predicting divorce can be useful, and how having too much information – “paralysis by analysis” – can be detrimental.

The down side of our ability to thin slice is that it forms the unconscious basis for our stereotypes, and the social energy for a great deal of racist thought. Not only do we thin-slice situations, but we thin-slice people based on their body language, manner of dress, mannerisms, and skin color. This last factor is extremely powerful in a society that has a strong pro-white pattern of associations, where white = beauty, purity, and goodness, and black = ugly, impure, and bad. In North America, more than any country that I know, we are surrounded by cultural messages that link white with positive things (standard of beauty, intelligence, power) and black with negative things (crime, social decay, immorality). This image is constantly being reinforced, in the newspaper, in our entertainment, and it can’t help but affect our unconscious associations.

Gladwell gives the example of a job interview. He says that these unconscious associations will affect the way you behave in the presence of a black person. “It’s not going to affect what you’ll choose to say or feel or do. In all likelihood, you won’t be aware that you are behaving any differently than you would around a white person. But chances are you’ll lean forward less, turn away slightly from him or her, be a bit less expressive, maintain less eye contact, stand a little farther away, smile a lot less. The black applicant is going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance, and that will make him a little less certain of himself, a little less confident, a little less friendly. And what will you think then? You may get a gut feeling that the applicant really doesn’t have what it takes, or maybe that he is a bit standoffish, or maybe he doesn’t really want a job.” You see where this is heading?

This means that, despite the fact that it is 2010 and we may have made progress in regards to stamping down forms of conscious racism, unconscious racism is still deeply entrenched in our collective psyche. Even when we are consciously opposed to racism, our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.

This is a reality that, if Vivi and I come to the States, we will have to face. I have no illusions about this. The good news is, WE CAN CHANGE. We are not locked into our thin-slicing. “Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions. If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way – who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites – it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you CHANGE YOUR LIFE so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with the best of their culture." This is something I have actively pursued in my life, and feel that it is of grave importance on the road to equality.

So in conclusion, the year is 2010. Our hope, ultimately, is in each other.