I.
Introduction
We live in an era of racial cognitive dissonance. The vast majority of people value
the idea of racial fairness, yet studies show that race influences our perceptions and
actions in every important life domain. This puzzling disjuncture between our
values and our behavior can be explained by processes at work in our minds.
Despite an explicit adherence to egalitarian norms, popular culture in the United
States continues to be saturated by stereotypes and caricatures. Outside of the
occasional television judge or doctor, black and Latino men are generally presented
as criminals; black women are too often portrayed as angry, and Latinas are “fiery.”
Asian American women are “seen” as deferential or vain and Asian American men
as technically skilled, but socially awkward. Those who appear to be of MiddleEastern descent are presumed to be non-citizens or worse, terrorists. And Native
Americans are rendered virtually invisible (Cross, 2013). From health care to
education, from hiring to criminal justice, these stereotypes have broad implications
for our public lives, helping to shape our experience, often without our conscious
awareness.
The United States is not alone in its struggle to reconcile increasingly egalitarian
norms with cultural and structural marginalization of peoples seen as “other.” As
the parallels between our debates over Central American immigration and debates
in Western Europe about immigration and assimilation of African peoples
demonstrate, we are all struggling with the contrast of our principles with the
lasting institutional and interpersonal effects of racism. Negative stereotypes about
the Roma peoples and those of North African descent abound in Europe. European
Australians and New Zealanders continue to hold negative associations about
Aboriginal peoples in both countries. These problems all have in common the same
underpinning. Long after the norms and beliefs supporting prejudice have been
formally and publicly rejected and the institutional barriers that keep detrimental
ideologies of prejudice and intolerance alive have been torn down, informal
interactions can sustain lasting exclusion. These informal interactions reinforce
institutionalized prejudice, making both more difficult to combat.
The current moment finds us struggling to effect change. Even as overt bigotry
declines, inequality remains, and our cultural language for understanding racial
inequality has not evolved in kind (Goff, Steele, & Davies, 2008). Despite the broad
difficulties cultures have resolving their egalitarian values with the lived
experiences of minority communities, the rhetoric available to most has not changed
significantly from Civil Rights language focused on equal treatment and
denouncements of bigotry. Meanwhile, social scientists have become increasingly
sophisticated in their understanding of the limits of using conscious value changes
to alter behavior. Rather, the mind sciences’ consensus is that implicit bias is far
more prevalent than our conscious values in determining our actions. The social
sciences thus offer us both new language and interventions aimed at changing real
world outcomes. Consequently, America Healing, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s
(WKKF) racial healing and racial equity effort, has implemented a strategy focused
on supporting both documentation of current inequalities and interventions that,
through an emphasis on the emotional architecture of discrimination, show the
promise of creating real-world change. This strategy reflects an understanding that
structural change—indeed racial equity—requires shifts in narrative norms and
behaviors. This paper outlines the mental processes that undergird prejudice,
explores outcomes of these processes, and highlights interventions based on insights
from the social and mind sciences that are having positive real world outcomes.
2
II.
Stereotypes, Perceptions and Bias
Stereotypes often influence our perceptions and actions without our conscious
awareness, a phenomenon social scientists refer to as “implicit bias” (Nosek,
Greenwald & Banaji, 2007). Implicit bias can help us understand why a teacher
who sees a black 6th grade boy speaking loudly to another student issues a
suspension for disruptive behavior but suspends a white 6th grade boy only when he
is physically fighting (Skiba et al., 2002). The teacher is likely to consider herself a
fair teacher who treats students the same regardless of race, but she viewed the
boys’ behavior through the lens of implicit bias.
While it is deeply disturbing to realize that we may act in a way that is inconsistent
with our values, an understanding of implicit bias offers hope. Racial inequities
have often seemed intractable. Yet research results tell us that we can identify and
change the conditions in which behaviors associated with implicit bias are most
likely to occur.
These changes will only occur, however, if we engage on multiple levels. With the
long-term goal of upending underlying negative stereotypes, we must work to
challenge the media’s perpetuation of distorted images. In the short-term,
interventions are being made available within important life domains that allow
people to overcome the otherwise unconscious effects of bias, allowing our conscious
minds and egalitarian values to triumph and true racial healing to begin.
A. Mechanisms of Bias
Bias is a natural function of the way our brains make sense of the world. Every
moment of our lives, we are simultaneously encountering an enormous amount of
stimuli and contending with our memories and emotions. Our ability to navigate
the world is possible only because most of our mental processing occurs without our
conscious awareness. Our brains have already created categories (or “schemas” to
use the scientific term) for most of the sights and sounds we encounter. (Macrae &
Bodenhausen, 2000). As we go about our lives, we automatically categorize stimuli,
and we react equally automatically based upon these categorizations. This process
is referred to as “implicit social cognition.”
The schemas our brains devise include people. Our minds use visual and aural cues
to make judgments about what schema or category a particular person fits within,
and we frequently act based on these schemas. Often, this entire process occurs
automatically and, generally speaking, it serves us very well. We know to respond
differently to a very small person with little hair and chubby cheeks who is crying
(we often pick them up and hold them) than to a person of our own size who is
crying. The first fits into the category “baby” and the second “adult.”
3
Our unconscious processes can be wrong, of course. Generally these errors are
meaningless. Treating a small flat object playing a song as an mp3 player and not a
cell phone may cause us to miss a phone call, but otherwise it has no important
consequences. Categorization of people, however, can be more fraught when the
category has salience in a culture and has been associated with negative attributes.
In such instances, our automatic reliance upon the category runs the risk of
activating stereotypes that hamper our assessment of how to respond to a given
situation (e.g. Hamilton & Sherman, 1994). For example, the widespread
stereotype of black criminality makes it significantly more likely that people will
respond to a cell phone in the hands of a black man as a gun than if the same
scenario occurred with a white man (Correll, et al, 2002).
Studies across the globe, e.g. (Turner & Crisp, 2010), (Arcuri, 1008) (Xu, 2009)
demonstrate that implicit bias is far from a uniquely American phenomenon and is
not limited to race. The cognitive tendency to divide ourselves into different
categories helps explain how children exhibit racial and ethnic biases from a young
age (Levy and Hughes, 2009) in cultures which weight particular groups with
negative attributes. As early as pre-school, children from dominant groups have
been shown to hold prejudices, including for example, white children against black
children in the United States (Baron & Banaji, 2006) and European Australians
toward Aboriginal Australians (Black-Gutman & Hickson, 1996).
Why are these negative stereotypes so powerful despite the egalitarian norms we
purport to hold? Media plays a significant role. Black men and boys, for example,
are systematically portrayed in negative ways in both news and entertainment
programming, which can have the effect of activating and exacerbating racial
stereotypes (Dixon, 2008). Social psychologists report that these stereotypes are
robust, frequent and lead to a wide variety of negative associations, including
people’s categorization of ambiguously aggressive behavior (Devine, 1989), their
decision to categorize nonweapons as weapons (Payne, 2006), the speed at which
people will shoot someone holding a weapon (Correll, et al., 2002), and the
likelihood that they will shoot at all (Greenwald et al 2003; Eberhardt, Goff, Davies
& Purdie, 2004).
Social psychologists assess implicit bias levels by measuring people’s reactions to
stimuli. A widely used measure of implicit bias is the “Implicit Association Test”
(IAT) which is housed on the website of Project Implicit. The IAT is a computer
task that asks participants to link pictures of white faces or black faces with either
“Good words” (e.g. Joy, Love, Peace) or “Bad words” (Nasty, Evil, Awful) by pressing
a particular key on the computer’s keyboard. Project Implicit has found that most
people respond more quickly when white faces and Good words are assigned the
same key and black, Latino or Asian faces and Bad words the same key than the
reverse. The more difficult a person finds it to associate the faces of people of color
with Good words, the more they are understood to hold the negative associations
4
that constitute implicit bias (Nosek, Greenwald & Banaji, 2007). Other measures of
implicit bias include physiological responses to images of black faces, and brain
imaging shown in fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans (Phelps,
2000).
Because so many of our actions are a result of our unconscious associations, implicit
bias can result in behaviors that are contrary to our conscious values and influence
behaviors that range from uncomfortable body posture (Dovidio, Kawakami, &
Gaertner, 2002; Goff, Steele, & Davies, 2008) to the actual execution of death
eligible inmates (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). In other words, in
domains such as criminal justice, employment, education and health treatment,
there are real and measurable effects of implicit bias and other psychological
mechanisms that produce racial disparities the majority of us find injurious and
objectionable (Jost, Rudman, Blair, Carney, Dasgupta, Glaser, Harding, 2009). We
should note that a few researchers, notably Philip Tetlock and Gregory Mitchell
(2009), dispute the evidence that implicit bias, particularly as measured by the IAT,
reliably predict class-wide discrimination on tangible outcomes. However, Tetlock
and Mitchell are considered to be outliers and each element of their critique has
been subject to withering criticism by leaders in the field and suspicion outside of it,
in part because of their for-profit consulting business which allows them to serve as
expert witnesses for large corporations, refuting the science. For a point-by-point
refutation, see Jost et al., 2009, in their article entitled: “The existence of implicit
bias is beyond reasonable doubt: A refutation of ideological and methodological
objections and executive summary of ten studies that no manager should ignore.”
III.
Countering the Effects of Implicit Bias
Countering the harmful effects of implicit bias requires two interrelated strategies.
On a macro level, we must seek over time to alter the negative attributes associated
with different racial and ethnic groups (Kang et al, 2012). At the same time, we
must implement context-specific interventions that ameliorate the effects of race on
behavior. These include bringing attention to the role of racial stereotypes on
particular behavior, which allows people to override consciously the automatic
assumptions and behaviors (Sommers, 2007) and creating contexts that decrease
the salience of race (Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001). These paths illustrate how
understanding implicit bias is a crucial component of racial healing.
A. Narrative Shift, Normative Shift, Behavior Change
The first path will require a dramatic change in media narratives around race. This
work has already begun. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s America Healing initiative
has funded organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, American
Values Institute, Applied Research Center, the Center for Social Inclusion, and
5
Opportunity Agenda, among others, all of whom are working on cultural strategies
to change media practices.
The work of these organizations is vital because, like schemas, narratives help us
navigate the world. Just as we filter stimuli into categories, we translate and
interpret our experiences through stories containing plots, intentions, actions and
outcomes. Stories play a critical role in creating meaning, identity and normative
behavioral rules across cultures and religions. Thus, narrative can both reinforce
stereotypes, and be a key tool through which stereotypes—and behaviors—can
change.
Public campaigns by Kellogg Foundation grantees including the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU), the Advancement Project, the Equal Justice Society, and
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to raise
awareness of racial profiling of young black and Latino men by police represents a
striking example of a successful challenge to a negative association that has led to
both a normative shift and behavior change. This success can be illustrated by both
traditional social science research outcomes and a burgeoning move among police
departments to work with social scientists to alter racialized practices as part of the
Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity, which is supported in part, by the
Kellogg Foundation.
This effort’s success is particularly impressive in light of the obstacles it faces. Not
only is the stereotype of black criminality among the most hardened of negative
associations (Eberhart, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns & Johnson (2006), but researchers
also find that people generally feel greater levels of empathy and concern for “ingroup” than “out-group” members. Using fMRIs to measure activity level in the
brain and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure corticospinal
activity, researchers have found that “in-group” bias leads whites to feel greater
empathy for other whites than blacks when witnessing members of both groups
experiencing pain (Xu, Zuo, Wang, Han 2009; Avenanti 2010). Indeed, in the 2010
study, whites even showed a higher level of region-specific brain activity for a
lavender hand than a black hand.
Yet in a study conducted by the American Values Institute, researchers found that
white participants showed greater outrage when viewing video clips of a young
black and a young Latino man arrested for no apparent reason than a young white
man in the identical situation.
6
The chart above shows that almost seventy percent of whites strongly agreed that
the treatment of the young black man was not deserved, sixty percent strongly
agreed that the treatment of the young Latino man was not deserved, while under
fifty percent strongly agreed that the treatment of the young white man was not
deserved. The majority of whites generally agreed that the treatment of all three
young men was not deserved, but the level of outrage and concern was particularly
high for the young black and young Latino men. This data suggests that public
campaigns raising awareness about police harassment of (in particular) young black
men has been successful. Why are public campaigns naming race as significant
important? Because when race is under the surface, our automatic associations
tend to dictate our responses.
The difference between white reactions to a scenario in which race is present but
not expressed and a scenario in which race is made explicit is strikingly shown in a
study of juries by Professors Sam Sommers and Phoebe Ellsworth (Sommers &
Ellsworth, 2009). In this study, mock jurors were presented a case involving a
boyfriend who was being tried for assault after allegedly hitting his girlfriend in a
bar. The four potential scenarios included 1) a white boyfriend and black girlfriend,
2) a black boyfriend and white girlfriend, 3) a white boyfriend who, before hitting
his black girlfriend, was heard to say, “how dare you laugh at a white man in
public,” and 4) a black boyfriend who, before hitting his white girlfriend, was heard
to say, “how dare you laugh at a black man in public.”
Most people presume that white jurors will convict at higher rates and recommend
higher sentences for the black defendants in both situations, but particularly when
race is explicitly mentioned. In actuality, white jurors treat white and black
7
defendants identically when race is explicit; when race is not mentioned, however,
white jurors judge black defendants more harshly. Researchers conclude that when
the scenario is clearly racialized, white jurors are careful to ensure that race does
not affect their decision-making (Sommers & Ellsworth 2009).
These examples explain why it is crucial to retain the space to talk about race.
When people are consciously aware that race may be at play, they act consciously to
ensure that their behavior is consistent with their values. Naming the practice of
stopping black and Latino men at significantly higher rates “racial profiling” has
countered the tendency of people to show greater concern for members of their own
group. And as police chiefs have joined together to create the Consortium for Police
Leadership in Equity, their work is changing behavior on the ground.
B. Challenging Behaviors: Context-Specific Interventions
While some organizations are working to shift the cultural landscape in order to
change perceptions and associations, others are engaging in context-specific
interventions to change behavior. In this space, it is crucial to have empirically
grounded understandings of where the racialized harms are most dire and then to
diagnose and implement interventions to respond to these harms. America Healing
has been at the forefront on both fronts in domains including education, the courts,
health care, child welfare and employment.
1. Education
In light of the importance of education to our children’s futures, many organizations
are developing interventions to counter teachers’ unconscious stereotyping of
children of color. Implicit bias is a fact of human biology, not a moral failing. We
all—teachers, parents and students—carry stereotypes, assumptions and biases
into the classroom with us, and these collectively contribute to the achievement gap.
Ameliorating the effects of these biases is a key component to closing that gap.
One insight stemming from the implicit bias literature is that teachers who learn to
appreciate their students as individuals will be less likely to default to stereotypebased schema when viewing student behavior. Since individuation is particularly
challenging in middle and high school, American Values Institute research advisor
Joshua Aronson and Professor Pedro Noguera of New York University’s MetroEquity Center are developing an approach that involves short writing exercises
outside of class. One intervention would have students write brief essays on such
topics that individuate and humanize them, including their values, fears, goals and
struggles at home. In response, teachers would compose essays to each student
about what reading his or her essay meant to them (Aronson & Noguera, 2013).
8
Reading such narratives has been shown to reduce prejudice; it simply becomes
much harder to see a student as merely a representative of a group (e.g., “black
troublemaker”) if one has been given a window into his or her life (Wilson, 2011).
Furthermore, when people have individuating information about those that they
are working to help, they are likely to persist longer and experience greater success
in their efforts (Grant et al., 2007). The Equal Justice Society, a Kellogg Foundation
grantee focused on restoring Constitutional safeguards against discrimination, is
working with the California Teachers’ Association to develop a curriculum for
teachers to learn about implicit bias and how best to interrupt its effects.
2. Health Care
The effects of race in health care outcomes are catastrophic. The Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies, a Kellogg Foundation and America Healing anchor
organization, issued a study reporting that between 2003 and 2006, over thirty
percent of direct medical care expenditures for African Americans, Asian Americans
and Latinos were excess costs due to health inequalities. Eliminating these health
disparities over that time period would have reduced direct medical care
expenditures by $229.4 billion and saved over a trillion dollars in indirect costs
associated with illness and premature death.
Contrary to conventional wisdom that Asian Americans in the United States
experience fewer racialized harms, the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health
Forum, (also a Kellogg Foundation grantee and America Healing anchor
organization), found that 1 in 3 Korean Americans and 1 in 4 Native Hawaiians and
Pacific Islanders are uninsured and that fewer Asian American women receive
regular cervical cancer screenings than any other ethnic group. Additionally, only
forty-two percent of Asian Americans age fifty or older have received a colon cancer
screening; and the liver cancer rate among Vietnamese American men is more than
eleven times that of white men.
Some of these issues are structural in nature. As the Joint Center’s Place Matters
research has shown, racial and economic segregation correlates strongly with
negative health outcomes (Laveist, Gaskin & Trujillo). Yet research also shows that,
despite disparities in outcome, few physicians or health care providers show explicit
bias. Implicit bias helps explain the dissonance. White doctors tend to have
unconscious stereotypes of whites as intelligent, successful, and educated, and of
blacks as aggressive, impulsive, and lazy, leading to differential diagnoses and
treatment recommendations (Burgess et al, 2008).
In a 2007 study, researchers studied whether treatment recommendations by
emergency room residents at four academic medical centers were affected by
implicit bias levels. They found that implicit bias against blacks was negatively
correlated with the likelihood of recommending medication over surgery in treating
9
heart disease for black patients and positively correlated with likelihood of
recommending medication for whites. At the same time, physicians who were
aware that the study had to do with racial bias were more likely to recommend
medication to black patients even if they had higher levels of implicit pro-white bias
(Green et al, 2007). This suggests that doctors can recognize their implicit bias and
modulate their decisions accordingly. In addition, as in education, individuation—
in which the provider focuses on a patient’s individual attributes— as opposed
to categorization—in which the provider perceives the patient through the filter of
group membership (e.g., race)— shows significant promise (Burgess et al, 2007).
What these projects highlight is the ability to shift the frame from one of racial
struggle to one of racial healing. By evolving from the old Civil Rights narrative to
a new one that acknowledges the human tendency to do harm, and seeks both to
understand how to limit our own vulnerabilities to those tendencies and to raise
awareness of their consequences.
3.
Courts and the Criminal Justice System
The role of bias in the criminal justice system and the courts has been well
documented in the social science literature (for a summary, see Kang et al, 2012).
The harms of implicit bias in our criminal justice system are particularly acute for
juveniles of color. Juveniles of color are more likely to be arrested, to be referred to
court rather than diversion programs, to be charged generally and as adults, to be
detained, and to be locked up at disposition (Cahn & Robbins, 2010). Edgar Cahn
and Cynthia Robbins, of WKKF grantee Time Bank USA’s Racial Justice Initiative,
have devised a set of practices to interrupt the operation of bias at each stage as
well as a legal theory to litigate to compel that these practices are adopted (Cahn &
Robbins, 2010).
Some players in our justice system are voluntarily seeking input from social science
researchers to interrupt the operation of racialized psychological phenomenon that
result in biased outcomes. As noted above, the Consortium for Police Leadership in
Equity is on the forefront of such efforts with a path-breaking collaboration between
police departments and social scientists, led by UCLA Professor Phillip Atiba Goff.
Both federal and state judges have also begun to show interest in learning about the
potential for implicit bias to affect their decisions (Casey et al 2012). Several
organizations and academics, including American Values Institute and researchers
with whom we work, are involved in projects to educate judges about the possibility
that implicit bias affects behavior (e.g. Kang 2012). These trainings appear
successful in altering judges’ perceptions of themselves as objective, alerting them
to the possibility that implicit bias may affect important outcomes including their
decisions about sentencing.
10
Positive recommendations have included:
— Raise awareness of implicit bias: Individuals can only work to correct for
sources of bias that they are aware exist.
— Seek to identify and acknowledge real group and individual
differences: Attempting to be “color blind” prevents an acknowledgement
that race is salient. A positive approach to race is to cultivate a greater
awareness of and sensitivity to group and individual differences.
— Routinely check thought processes and decisions for possible bias:
Low effort information processing generally relies upon stereotypes and
therefore produces more stereotype-consistent judgments than more
deliberative, effortful processing.
— Identify distractions and sources of stress in the decision-making
environment and remove or reduce them: Decision makers who are
rushed, stressed, distracted, or pressured are more likely to apply stereotypes
than decision makers whose cognitive abilities are not similarly constrained
(Casey, et al, 2012).
4.
Employment
Organizations like the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), which is
funded by the Kellogg Foundation, have made great strides in addressing social
problems through the practical lens of employment. Through increasing wages,
improving environmental conditions, and programs like the Los Angeles
Metropolitan Transit Authority (LAMTA) Construction Careers Policy, where forty
percent of the LAMTA’s expected 23,400 construction jobs will be set aside for those
from poor communities, LAANE has been recognized as a national leader in fighting
the challenges of poverty.
Strategies derived from implicit bias research can be helpful in supporting the
efficacy of this work. Among the more popularly known empirical studies of
discrimination in hiring is the resume study in which employers in Boston and
Chicago were sent resumes that were identical but for the names: half of the
women were named Emily and half Lakisha and half of the men were named Greg
and the other half Jamal (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004). Emily and Greg fared
far better than their otherwise identical counterparts, receiving fifty percent more
callbacks. Many researchers attribute at least some of the disparity to implicit bias.
When busy human resources’ staff review resumes, they unconsciously attribute a
set of negative stereotypes to the names that suggest that the applicant is black.
Due to a phenomenon referred to as the “malleability of merit,” decision makers also
unconsciously alter their criteria to fit in-group members when hiring and making
performance evaluations.
11
Employers have an interest in eliminating implicit bias; these practices constitute
forms of unlawful employment discrimination, and preclude employers from hiring
and retaining meritorious employees. Many employers also recognize that there are
market reasons for having diverse work forces. As a result, large corporations
including Wal-Mart and Microsoft have begun seeking information about implicit
bias in an attempt to alter these practices. The recommendations made to judges
apply to employers as well.
When making hiring decisions, employers are encouraged to:
—
—
—
—
Develop clear and objective criteria
Use checklists to memorialize criteria
Take notes when making assessments
Articulate reasons for ultimate decisions
All will prevent reliance on “heuristics,” or short cuts, which are often shaped by
stereotypes and biases. In addition, for retention purposes, employers are
encouraged to:
— Engage in formal data collection
— Provide opportunities for anonymous feedback
— Understand that “color-blindness” will be insufficient either in decisionmaking or in cross-racial interactions
5. Child Welfare
Implicit bias in the context of deciding whether children stay with their families or
are placed in foster care is an issue of acute concern. Eliminating disproportionality
in the foster care system is an issue of both moral and practical concern. In 2006, an
estimated $4.1 billion in Title IV-E funds were spent on foster care. This included
$1.7 billion in maintenance and $2.3 billion in administration costs. If
disproportionality were eliminated for African American, Latino, and American
Indian children, a potential savings of $1.17 billion could be realized. Kellogg
Foundation grantees, including the National Indian Child Welfare Association
(NICWA), are at the forefront of developing initiatives that protect children. One
such initiative is between NICWA and the Western and Pacific Implementation
Center (WPIC), with the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of
Alaska in collaboration with fifteen other tribal partners to lead a four-year
implementation project that is designed to significantly reduce the disproportionate
out-of-home placement of Alaska Native children by the state’s child welfare
system.
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Conclusion
Although it may manifest differently in various contexts, the underpinnings of
marginalization and discrimination in the United States and abroad are very
similar. Implicit bias helps explain why, in an age defined by explicit egalitarian
values, discrimination has proven so frustratingly persistent. At the same time,
implicit bias research holds the key to designing interventions that alter behaviors
and outcomes for the better. We have well-developed mechanisms and social norms
to address explicit discrimination, but we need to develop strategies to ameliorate
the impact of bias. As evidenced in the public spheres outlined above, research,
communication and a focus on narrative and behavioral norms will all be essential
to the cause of racial equity and healing.
In fields as diverse as criminal justice, health care and education, both experiments
and real world applications demonstrate the utility of implicit bias insights.
Translating these insights into both cultural and communications strategies as well
as context-specific interventions that affect our institutions and our policies allows
us to address the specific problems of discrimination and the contexts that reinforce
that discrimination simultaneously. While these problems are worldwide, the
shrinking of our world via technology will enable us to respond strategically and
effectively around the globe. The existing research demonstrates that, armed with
an understanding into how prejudice functions at an unconscious level, we can
empower people to act according to their values, update the narrative of racial
progress, shift the framework of social justice workers and promote racial healing.
13
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