Racial issues continue to plague us. After every new incident (the deadly neo-Nazi march and confrontations with protestors in Charlottesville this past August a blatant example), we rehash all the arguments for how best to combat racism and racial division. In his introduction to our special section in this issue, Deputy Editor Benjamin Radford notes, “One thing that is missing from the debate is evidenced-based guidance on what psychology and sociology can teach us about what’s effective in reducing racism and prejudice.” Psychologists Craig A. Foster (with Steven M. Samuels), Stuart Vyse, and Terence Hines attempt to rectify that situation. They contribute short essays describing what research shows are the most effective—and least effective— ways to deal with racism. The research offers no guarantees but does give some hope that personal engagement and other innovative approaches can, sometimes, change some people’s minds.
We follow that with an article on the important research by Stanford University psychology professor and MacArthur Fellow Jennifer Eberhardt into subconscious racial bias. She doesn’t just carry out ground-breaking (and troubling) psychological experiments into how we perceive race. She works directly with local metropolitan police departments in sharing lessons learned and preparing strategies to avert conflicts and misunderstandings. As an assistant chief of the Oakland Police Department says, Eberhardt is almost embedded, attending staff meetings, giving feedback, tracking data, and providing training. Eberhardt’s research may be deeply disturbing in showing how prevalent unconscious bias is in almost all of us and how it seeps into almost everything. But she now focuses less on delineating the problem and more on finding solutions. “People need to have hope,” she says.
One key to her training struck me as especially constructive. It treats bias as a common human condition to be recognized and managed, rather than as a deeply offensive personal sin, and this makes police and others less defensive. Another police chief says her work “has really helped advance the discussions and put it in the framework of science, which takes a lot of the emotion out of it.”