Racial Cognition & Bias in Public Policy

Too often in society we see the negative effects of policy proposals that ignore or do not fully address race-based disparities of opportunity and outcome. In many cases, one of the most important missing components is psychological-based research that could help inform these types of laws. In order to move towards a more just and fair society, not only is it imperative to have a normative debate on how to approach race in our daily lives, but formulate policies that adhere to these best practices. In many sectors of our society like criminal justice, employment, housing, healthcare, and education, we see the negative consequences of racial bias, implicit or otherwise. I argue that taking a “color-blind” approach to public policy ignores and perpetuates systemic racism. We must acknowledge race-based disparities and take active, anti-racist measures to curb these biases in our society, whether they are implicit or explicit, in order to reduce inequality across the social and economic spectrum.

In contemporary American society, we have done a lot of positive work to eliminate explicit racial and cultural oppression such as the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, through academia by offering degrees in various cultural studies, and promoting diversity in the workplace, media, and schools. Some of these tactics help eliminate racism through laws and punishment, while others help normalize race through education and your environment in order to cut down on irrational racial bias or behavior. After the first Black president was elected to office, many people believed that the US had moved to a post-racial society, which would most likely promote what Kelly et al. (2009) described as an eliminativist view that seeks to do away with racial categories. Since a Black man was able to attain the epitome of power and success, some argued that maybe there was no longer a need to address racial differences and attend to racial disparities in the US anymore. Of course, it became clear with the continued racial wealth gap and achievement disparities under Obama, and the election of Donald Trump, an infamous race-baiter, that eliminating racial categories was not a viable option. This is why I will frame my argument using the theory of conservationism, which calls for “the eradication of racism, but holds that racial categories themselves should not be completely eliminated” (Kelly 2009). With this theory, it is possible to recognize and celebrate racial and ethnic differences and account for them when proposing public policy.

While much of the philosophical debate on racism revolves around the attitude and behavior towards an individual or group, I am more concerned with understanding racism as a societal outcome. This means, rather than focusing on the moral blame of an individual racist or biased act, I will be centering this paper around the moral wrong that arises when any group is marginalized based on their race or ethnicity. Conservationism acknowledges that categorizing or grouping people by race may be natural, but racism is not. While all explicit racist attitudes should be considered irrational, some implicit biases are unavoidable natural ways of associating and grouping the environment around us. This makes that type of racial cognition a “rational” behavior, but something we should actively try to overcome. That is why I, like Kelly, believe “that a rational attitude may still be an immoral one”(Kelly 2009).

Although people have set up society to elevate some and oppress others, psychology has helped us understand that some of our biases can be explained by nature. In its simplest form, Kelly explains that implicit biases are “a tendency to associate one concept with another, in the way that, for instance, the concept salt might prime the concept pepper” (Kelly 2008). This is considered a natural and rational behavior. But in its worst form, tests like the IAT show how our implicit biases can have harmful effects when White sounding names on resumes receive 50 percent more callbacks than their Black counterparts, and even deadly consequences when police officers associate Black faces with handguns (Kelly 2008). While the nature of these actions being implicit or explicit may be relevant to moral blame or punishment, the negative outcomes suggest there is a moral responsibility to curb these actions no matter how rational or intentional.

From this perspective, rationality and morality can and should be separate, which makes the implicit and explicit nature of an action irrelevant to my case. Elizabeth Anderson explains, “Democratic equality applies judgments of justice to human arrangements, not to the natural order. This helps us see that people, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies. It locates unjust deficiencies in the social order rather than in people’s innate endowments” (Anderson 1999). This means it is our job, in this semi-functioning democracy, to eliminate those oppressive actions and outcomes, no matter how they were formulated. Accepting racial cognition that comes from a natural, evolutionary, and even unconscious position means that we would also have to accept the avoidable prejudice that stems from them in society.

Extreme instances of racial bias such as racial profiling in law enforcement or employment discrimination have been banned and deemed unconstitutional, but without recognition of the implicit nature of bias, even these well-intentioned laws have been ineffective. For example, a 2010 Arizona law evaded the question of race by making it legal for police to question individuals about their citizenship or immigration status based on “reasonable suspicion”. The law, in keeping with color-blind rhetoric of not naming race, still led to a disproportionate number of Latinx/Hispanic looking people being accosted by police. In a similar example Glaser et. al. explain that, “The current jurisprudence on employment discrimination requires, in most cases, evidence of intent to discriminate” (Glaser 2014). Since most discrimination cases cannot be proved as an intentional act, this “has led legal scholars to call for changing how discrimination cases are litigated and adjudicated” (Glaser 2014). For these reasons, it is appropriate to incorporate psychological studies of racial cognition that could inform police and employer training and reform laws that are disproportionately harmful to a certain group of people. Since it is hard to prove when the police or employers are explicitly discriminatory, statistical and psychological research can help identify how their practices are perpetuating a moral wrong.

These examples show how, “One of psychology’s established influences on public policy is the understanding that decision-making under uncertainty is often irrational” (Glaser 2014). Glaser et. al. explain that contrary to popular belief, people do not rationally maximize utility. Instead, it is common for individuals to “engage in heuristic processing, using cognitive shortcuts to make judgments” (Glaser 2014). We see this in the classroom when students are subjected to teacher expectancy effects and stereotype threat or when employers, lenders, and landlords make snap judgements based on the name at the top of the application. This is why psychologists like Kelly aim “to demonstrate the need for normative racial philosophy to more closely engage the contemporary psychology of racial categorization and racial prejudice” (Kelly 2009).

Racial bias and diversity training, and policies that are informed by psychological research have done a lot of good for society. They not only save lives in a police officer’s line of duty, but also help health professionals close the racial patient health outcome gap where, “Physicians’ implicit racial biases have been shown to predict their treatment decisions” (Glaser 2014). We have also seen how the introduction of affirmative action has helped close the achievement gap by promoting social mobility (Maxwell 2019). Furthermore, we now understand that children who are exposed to educators that share their race and gender perform better in the classroom (Miller 2018). For these reasons and many others, it shows how using psychology and the theory of conservationism are imperative to seeking equitable racial outcomes in a country that is built on the principle of equal opportunity.

These policy and educational interventions mentioned above can be described as anti-racist because they actively pursue equality of opportunity amongst racial groups, instead of ignoring these differences. While psychologists have helped expose problems of bias and philosophers analyze the moral or ethical consequences, scholars from other disciplines can also contribute important ideas that help shape our societal approach to race and racism. Ibram Kendi, the founding director of The Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, is helping change the normative debate about racism in America. Conventional wisdom holds that racist ideas and actions come from individual hate and ignorance. However, Kendi and his team of visionaries have set out to combat our racist society by offering practical policy solutions that will cut through the noise and get right to the heart of racial inequity. Instead of the foundation of racism being ignorance and hate, Kendi believes “The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policy-makers erecting racist policies out of self-interest” (Kendi 2019). Kendi and other contemporary progressive thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and some Democratic lawmakers have called for reparations, which Kendi calls, “the only foreseeable policy that can dramatically close the growing racial wealth gap” (Kendi 2019). Kendi uses support for reparations as his litmus test for a person perpetuating racism or being anti-racist because of the policy’s unique ability to address “one of the most damaging racial inequities of our time, of all American time — the racial wealth gap” (Kendi 2019). Although Kendi does not relate the history of self-interested racist policies to psychology, the theory of self-interest is also known as psychological egoism, which I believe can help explain racism in our society, and why it is so hard to eradicate.

Although the theory of psychological egoism describes human nature as being self-interested, it does not mean our society should not be set up through an altruistic framework that combats some of those natural, yet immoral tendencies. Most Americans and their representatives believe the Constitution is not only built on a legal framework, but a moral one, which applies to the well-being of all citizens. At a macro level, the way our capitalist system is set up inherently benefits the most wealthy and powerful, which in turn disadvantages the most oppressed and marginalized in our society. I am interested, like Kendi, in reforming policies that exacerbate the self-interested nature of human beings that leads to our tendency to abandon and oppress large swaths of the population. To do this, would be to realize the altruistic potential of civil society, which is able to overcome some of the most egregious moral wrongs that have been sustained throughout our history. In recent decades, similar critiques have been launched at capitalism and racism, both based on self-interest, and both require countervailing policies to curb their worst abuses. Like economic markets, when people are left to work out the abuses generated from their own lack of self-regulation, our faults are likely to be perpetuated. It is then no wonder why there are so many correlations between socioeconomic status and race. As long as self-interest and egoism are propped up as the natural and traditional way of fulfilling the American Dream, we cannot be expected to achieve a more just and equitable society.

In the end, it is clear that American society has a long way to go in the fight for justice and equality for all. The past few decades have done a lot of good to shift the belief-formation and justification of racial cognition and inequality by challenging the conventional color-blind policy approach. The fact that as a nation, we have begun to discuss reparations as a legitimate policy proposal and recognize environmental racism and the racial health disparities in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic is a testament to our progress. Through the continued incorporation of “traditional philosophical methods and concerns with sociological, psychological, and historical ones” (Alcoff 2013), we can challenge and improve upon the political and racial epistemology that guides public policy.

Works Cited

Alcoff, Linda (2013). How is epistemology political? In Radical Philosophy (pp.65–85).

Anderson, E. (1999). What Is the Point of Equality? Ethics,109(2), 287–337. doi:10.1086/233897

Glaser, J., Spencer, K., & Charbonneau, A. (2014). Racial Bias and Public Policy. Berkeley, CA: University of California. doi: 10.1177/2372732214550403

Kelly, D., Machery, E., & Mallon, R. (2009). Race and Racial Cognition. In The moral psychology handbook (pp. 432–471).

Kelly, D., & Roeddert, E. (2008). Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias. Purdue University, New York University. doi: 10.1111/j.1747–9991.2008.00138.x

Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to Be an Antiracist. Random House Publishing Group.

Kendi, I. X. (2019, June 19). There Is No Middle Ground on Reparations. Retrieved from https:// www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/ibram-x-kendi-opposing-reparations-racist/ 592060/

Maxwell, C., & Garcia, S. (2019, October 1). 5 Reasons to Support Affirmative Action in College Admissions. Retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/ 2019/10/01/471085/5-reasons-support-affirmative-action-college-admissions/

Miller, C. (2018, September 10). Does Teacher Diversity Matter in Student Learning? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/upshot/teacher-diversity-effect-students- learning.html