One of the consequences of aversive racism or unconscious bias is that you don’t discriminate in a situation where what’s right and wrong are clearly defined because you know what you’re supposed to do when you do it. Prejudice is bad and when we think about it, we always do the right thing. John Dovidio: That’s the biggest challenge because most of us are really well practiced at convincing ourselves that we’re not prejudiced. Most white Americans, the majority of white Americans, about two-thirds to three-quarters, have the unconscious, implicit, racial biases.Īudrey Hamilton: How do people work on getting rid of these biases if they don’t know they’re biased? But the majority of white Americans, because they’ve grown up in a culture that has been historically racist in many ways, because they’re exposed to the media that associates violence, drugs and poverty with certain groups. John Dovidio: Yeah, there’s research that shows that only a small proportion of Americans today have old-fashioned kind of racism, explicit kind of racism. That’s where the name aversive racism comes from.Īudrey Hamilton: Would you say most people have some biases against people from different racial or ethnic groups? You know, what are the consequences of those types of implicit, what we would say, unconscious biases? Instead of feelings of hatred, it’s more like feelings of avoidance and discomfort. That people still have negative feelings, but they may not be aware of those negative feelings. And what we think is that racism has become more subtle since then. But since the 1960s when there was civil rights legislation, it changed the way we thought about race because it was not only immoral to think that way, but it was illegal to discriminate. John Dovidio: We used to think about racism in a very simple way – that people had negative thoughts, negative feelings, hatred toward a group. His work explores techniques for reducing these conscious and unconscious biases.Īudrey Hamilton: Your work focuses on what you call “aversive racism.” Can you explain what that means and how it differs from just racism? He has studied issues of social power and social relations, both between groups and between individuals. John Dovidio is a psychology professor at Yale University and one of the leading researchers on racism, particularly subtle or unconscious racism. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is “Speaking of Psychology.” But being aware of them is the first step toward improving relations among different racial groups. We speak with one psychologist who has been studying a more modern form of prejudice and says ridding ourselves of those biases is practically impossible. To lodge a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission, visit Hamilton: Understanding our own racial biases is something we all struggle with, even when we aren’t aware of those struggles. The complaint process is simple, free and flexible. If you experience racial discrimination or hatred you can make a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission. Racial discrimination also happens when there is a rule or policy that is the same for everyone but has an unfair effect on people of a particular race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin or immigrant status like a company saying employees must not wear hats or other headwear at work, which is likely to have an unfair effect on people from some racial/ethnic backgrounds. Racial discrimination happens when a person is treated less favourably than another person in a similar situation because of their race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin or immigrant status like refusing to rent a house to a person because they are of a particular racial background or skin colour. Some actions may not be against the law if they are “done reasonably and in good faith”. The law aims to strike a balance between the right to communicate freely (‘freedom of speech’) and the right to live free from racial hatred.
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