![]() ![]() Its power derives from its being integrated into a unified system of racial differentiation and discrimination that creates, governs, and adjudicates opportunities and outcomes across generations. Systemic racism not only operates at multiple levels, it can emerge with or without animus or intention to harm and with or without awareness of its existence. ![]() Systemic racism permeates a society’s (a) institutional structures (practices, policies, climate), (b) social structures (state/federal programs, laws, culture), (c) individual mental structures (e.g., learning, memory, attitudes, beliefs, values), and (d) everyday interaction patterns (norms, scripts, habits). Simply put, systemic racism refers to the processes and outcomes of racial inequality and inequity in life opportunities and treatment. ![]() Systemic racism is said to occur when racially unequal opportunities and outcomes are inbuilt or intrinsic to the operation of a society’s structures. ![]() But these very societal-cognitive-social features can also be agents for change. The tutorial defines systemic racism, describes its origins in US history, shows how the resulting racialized societal structures have become built-in cognitive structures that propagate in social interactions, resisting change. Moreover, studying racial bias is interesting it will improve the science and it is the obvious path to ensuring a mutually respectful, peaceful society that flourishes economically, politically, and socially.Īt the Editor’s invitation, this article presents the social and behavioral science of systemic racism to a cognitive science audience. Cognitive science can illuminate the fine-grained levels of inbuilt racial bias because it has the methods and the theories to do so. Understanding these formidable challenges is necessary to understand and then dismantle them. Systemic racism is a unified arrangement of racial differentiation and discrimination across generations. At the level of most behavior, they are also controllable, even if many non-Black people rarely notice these relentless patterns. But because these responses are based on socially defined racial categories, they are racialized, and because they are negative, they reveal the roots of racism. Systemic racism operates with or without intention and with or without awareness. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.Īmerican racial biases persist over time and permeate (a) institutional structures, (b) societal structures, (c) individual mental structures, (d) everyday interaction patterns. Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. ![]()
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