The other thing that I want to focus on
because these forms of social relationships are quite overt and quite obvious,
people move out of neighborhoods or the kinds of things
that were demonstrated in the essays,
in places like the slaughterhouse or best friend's.
When those things happen,
they're quite self-evident in some ways,
and what we call overt forms of discrimination or overt forms of bias.
The other thing that is important to consider really goes beyond that,
to look at implicit bias because even as we
eliminate a lot of overt and institutional forms of discrimination,
that doesn't mean necessarily that implicit bias or what we
might call racial consciousness disappear in the same way or at the same time.
It's no doubt that we've made significant progress on
some fronts in dealing with overt forms of discrimination.
We've seen the dismantling of the Jim Crow system,
we have seen so many legally mandated forms of racial discrimination eliminated
and rendered unconstitutional by
Federal Courts and State Courts and especially the Supreme Court,
and into bans on interracial marriage.
We've seen congressional acts,
the passing of the Open Housing Ordinance in 1968,
and the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
We've seen efforts on the part of Federal Government, Federal Courts,
as well as efforts on the part of States and localities to end many of the overt forms of
racial discrimination that characterize the nation from
its colonial beginnings into the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and beyond.
But there's another question about implicit bias.
What does it mean, how does it manifest itself,
and how do we actually,
not only detect it,
but what can we do to sort of eliminate the kinds of consciousness or perceptions of
race that have a unfair and disproportionate impact on populations of color.
Now, one of the studies that was done of late,
came out of Yale University,
and it was conducted by Walter Gilliam.
And it was an interesting study because they recruited
135 teachers and they put them behind a window where they could see four kids,
one black boy, one white boy,
white girl, black girl.
And what they said to the teachers was that,
we want you to watch these kids and anticipate of any,
in anticipation of any bad behavior.
Now, it's important to point out upfront that there was no bad behavior,
and even during the course of the observations,
none of the kids behaved badly.
What the teachers didn't know was that the researchers were used
an eye gaze technology to try to track the kids that they focused on,
and to see exactly whether the teachers
were inclined to focus on some kids more than others.
And what they discovered was that the teachers were much more
likely to focus on the boys than the girls,
but also they discover that is to a significant extent,
the teacher's focus then on the African-American boy in anticipation of bad behavior.
At the end of the study,
and the researchers confronted the teachers,
or at least not so much confrontation,
but to explain to them what they had done and that they had to track their eye gaze,
and they also presented to them their findings.
The teachers were really surprised because they were not intentionally engaged and bias,
or one that is racial bias.
But it was an unconscious and implicit sort of thing that happened.
And so they decided to work with the teachers following that and all,
but one of the teachers decided to engage
in workshops to really talk about this, this kind of bias.
Because they were unaware that in a situation like that they were almost axiomatically,
just focusing on the African-American boy,
because of the ways in which they were
predisposed by longstanding biases that exist within society.
And so it was important,
not only to this study was important,
not only because it found a way to measure implicit bias,
but also it had very thoughtful ways about how to reconcile that,
how to engage the teachers and workshops,
so that the kids would not experience that.
Now they also, because of the other studies,
remind us that this is not something to take lightly.
It's not just this incidents or incident and wish the teachers were focusing on this kid,
they code a statistic showing that,
although African-American kids make up 19% of pre-K kids,
we're not talking elementary pre-K,
pre-kindergarten kids, they make up 19% of the population,
but there are more than one half of the population that's suspended nationally.
And so this sort of anticipation,
that African-American kids and particularly African-American boys are in trouble,
that they're likely to engage in bad behavior,
also results in a very disproportionate suspension and expulsion rate.
Another area where you get implicit biases, it's teacher expectations.
Another study done in 1916 that appeared in
an Economic Journal really looked at
teachers and the expectations of African-American children.
And what this study found is that,
African-American teachers were much more likely to have
higher expectations of African-American kids than non African-American teachers.
Again, pointing to the fact that teachers bring to the table a set of predispositions,
a kind of implicit bias that has a very negative impact on children.
This is not new research,
this is old research,
that is more general kind of research that was done,
even in the 60s called Pygmalion,
which when teachers were told certain things about kids they would
develop expectations and those expectations would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But in this particular instance, with this research,
they focus a lot on whether
the race of the teacher and the race of
the students made a difference in terms of expectations,
and found substantial support that in fact, that is the case.
James D. AndersonEdward William and Jane Marr Gutsgell Professor of Education
