One of the first posts I ever wrote for Daylight Atheism, “On Presuppositions“, discusses how implicit prejudices about race and gender influence our actions – even among people who don’t consciously endorse those prejudices. The post discussed the famous Implicit Association Test, which shows among other things that the vast majority of people take less time to link positive concepts with whites and negative concepts with African-Americans than to do the opposite.
The IAT is one demonstration of how these poisonous memes are circulating in society, whether we perceive them or not, and affect our choices and our reactions at an unconscious level. In an individual case it can be hard to see, but when you step back and look at the larger set of data, an undeniable pattern emerges.
For future reference, today I want to provide a list of links I’ve collected over the past several years that back up this point when it comes to racial prejudice. I don’t expect this to sway a hardcore bigot, but for those who are still on the fence, I’m hoping it will be a valuable resource showing that this phenomenon is real. I’ll update this page with new studies as I come across them, and if you have other examples, feel free to list them in the comments.
• Employers’ Replies to Racial Names, National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2003:
Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. This would suggest either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower productivity.
• Race, Ethnicity, and NIH Research Awards, Science, August 2011:
We investigated the association between a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 applicant’s self-identified race or ethnicity and the probability of receiving an award… After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding.
• For People Of Color, A Housing Market Partially Hidden From View, NPR, June 2013:
A new study has found that blacks, Latinos and Asians looking for homes were shown fewer housing options than whites who were equally qualified. And fewer options meant higher housing costs.
• Reviewers will find more spelling errors in your writing if they think you’re black, Vox, April 2014:
In an experimental context, when reviewers were told the author of a legal brief was black they consistently rated identical pieces lower in quality and identified more spelling, grammar, factual, or analytical errors.
• Professors Are Prejudiced, Too, The New York Times, May 2014:
Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities. We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities.
• “How Not to Pick Judges“, The New York Times, May 2014:
The data show that, even when matching comparable candidates, the bar association rates minorities and women significantly lower than their white or male counterparts. For example, African-Americans are 42 percentage points less likely to receive a “well qualified” (or “exceptionally well qualified,” when that category was still being used) rating than are whites who have comparable educational and professional qualifications and are nominated by the same president.
• “Deadly Force, in Black and White“, ProPublica, October 2014:
Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.
• When ‘Deshawn’ And ‘Greg’ Act Out In Class, Guess Who Gets Branded A Troublemaker, Huffington Post, April 2015:
When it came to a student’s first infraction, there was no difference in the teachers’ attitudes toward the white and black students. After reading about a second infraction, however, the teachers were more likely to feel troubled by the black students’ behavior, to want to mete out severe punishment, and to label the student a troublemaker.
• Discretion and Disproportionality: Explaining the Underrepresentation of High-Achieving Students of Color in Gifted Programs, AERA Open, January 2016:
We document that even among students with high standardized test scores, Black students are less likely to be assigned to gifted services in both math and reading, a pattern that persists when controlling for other background factors, such as health and socioeconomic status, and characteristics of classrooms and schools.
• Study shows African Americans discriminated against in access to US local public services, University of Southampton, August 2015:
Requests for information from local public services, like sheriffs’ offices, school districts and libraries, across the United States are less likely to receive a reply if signed by ‘black-sounding’ names, according to new research conducted by economists at IZA and the University of Southampton… The difference in response was most evident in correspondence to sheriffs’ offices, with ‘black-sounding’ names seven per cent less likely to receive a response than ‘white-sounding’ names.
• ‘Black’-sounding name conjures a larger, more dangerous person, University of California, October 2015:
In a study exploring racial bias and how people use their mind’s-eye image of an imagined person’s size to represent someone as either threatening or high-status, UCLA researchers found that people envisioned men with stereotypically black names as bigger and more violent.
• A Good Woman (or Minority) Chemist Is Apparently Hard to Find, Undark, March 2016:
It would be easy to attribute this to a diversity problem within the chemical sciences writ large. In the United States at least, chemists are still disproportionately white and male. But the awardees don’t reflect the actual demographics of the American Chemical Society, where just under a third of its members are women, and 20 percent identify as non-white.
• Poor white kids are less likely to go to prison than rich black kids, The Washington Post, March 2016:
About 10 percent of affluent black youths in 1985 would eventually go to prison. Only the very wealthiest black youth — those whose household wealth in 1985 exceeded $69,000 in 2012 dollars — had a better chance of avoiding prison than the poorest white youth.
• ‘Resume whitening’ doubles callbacks for minority job candidates, study finds, The Guardian, March 2016:
Minority job applicants who resort to “resume whitening” – a practice in which candidates alter any information on their resume that indicates their ethnicity – are more than twice as likely to receive a callback than those who don’t, a new study has found.
• Women and Minorities Are Penalized for Promoting Diversity, Harvard Business Review, March 2016:
Participants rated nonwhite managers and female managers as less effective when they hired a nonwhite or female job candidate instead of a white male candidate. Similar to our first study, it didn’t matter whether white male managers chose to hire a white male, white female, nonwhite male, or nonwhite female — there was no difference in how participants rated their competence and performance. Basically, all managers were judged harshly if they hired someone who looked like them, unless they were a white male.
• The disturbing reason some African American patients may be undertreated for pain, The Washington Post, April 2016:
A 2000 study out of Emory University found that at a hospital emergency department in Atlanta, 74 percent of white patients with bone fractures received painkillers compared with 50 percent of black patients. Similarly, a paper last year found that black children with appendicitis were less likely to receive pain medication than their white counterparts. And a 2007 study found that physicians were more likely to underestimate the pain of black patients compared with other patients.
• Teachers’ implicit bias against black students starts in preschool, study finds, The Guardian, October 2016:
[Research] demonstrates that black boys are viewed as four and five years older than they are. Research demonstrates that racial disparities in school discipline exist in the most subjective of categories – “willful defiance”, “insubordination”, “disrespect”. Those racial disparities decrease significantly for the most objective of categories: possession of alcohol on campus, possession of drugs with intent to distribute, possession of a loaded weapon.
• Asian Last Names Lead To Fewer Job Interviews, Still, NPR, February 2017:
The study found that job applicants in Canada with Asian names — names of Indian, Pakistani or Chinese origin — were 28 percent less likely to get called for an interview compared to applicants with Anglo names, even when all the qualifications were the same.
• Minority Neighborhoods Pay Higher Car Insurance Premiums Than White Areas With the Same Risk, ProPublica, April 2017:
But a first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica and Consumer Reports, which examined auto insurance premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri, has found that many of the disparities in auto insurance prices between minority and white neighborhoods are wider than differences in risk can explain. In some cases, insurers such as Allstate, Geico and Liberty Mutual were charging premiums that were on average 30 percent higher in zip codes where most residents are minorities than in whiter neighborhoods with similar accident costs.
• Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect, PNAS, June 2017:
Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops… We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police–community trust.
• Study: anti-black hiring discrimination is as prevalent today as it was in 1989, Vox, September 2017:
In total, the researchers produced 24 studies with 30 estimates of discrimination for black and Latino Americans, collectively representing more than 54,000 applications submitted for more than 25,000 positions.
They concluded that, on average, “white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans” while “[w]hite applicants receive on average 24% more callbacks than Latinos.”
• Pinpointing Racial Discrimination by Government Officials, The New York Times, October 2017:
The researchers sent roughly 20,000 emails to local government employees in nearly every county. The emails posed commonplace questions, like “Could you please tell me what your opening hours are?”
…But emails with black-sounding names were 13 percent more likely to go unanswered than those with white-sounding names. This difference, which appeared in all regions of the country, was large enough that it was statistically unlikely to have been a matter of mere chance.
• New Report Reveals Racial Discrimination by Auto Dealerships, National Fair Housing Alliance, January 2018:
Though all testers dealt with the elusive practices of dealerships, testers of color endured more economically disadvantageous and biased treatment. Non-white testers often received more costly pricing options than their White counterparts for the exact same vehicle — down to the vehicle identification number. Auto dealers used various pricing tactics to discriminate. For example, dealers helped White testers by offering rebates or helping to bring down interest rates more often than they did for Non-white testers. Non-white testers were more often presented with higher-cost financing options, even though they were better qualified than their White counterparts.
• Women of Color in Academe Make 67 Cents for Every Dollar Paid to White Men, The Chronicle, June 2018:
Specifically, the brief found that women of color are underrepresented in academe, compared with their representation in the U.S. population at large — especially in more lucrative faculty, professional, and administrative roles, versus lower-paying staff positions. And in three out of four job types (professional, staff, and faculty) women of color are paid less than white men, men of color, and white women.
• The devaluation of assets in Black neighborhoods, Brookings, November 2018:
According to our analysis, differences in home and neighborhood quality do not fully explain the devaluation of homes in Black neighborhoods. Homes of similar quality in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less ($48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses) in majority Black neighborhoods, compared to those with very few or no Black residents.
• Inside 100 million police traffic stops: New evidence of racial bias, NBC News, March 2019:
Using information obtained through public record requests, the Stanford Open Policing Project examined almost 100 million traffic stops conducted from 2011 to 2017 across 21 state patrol agencies, including California, Illinois, New York and Texas, and 29 municipal police departments, including New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and St. Paul, Minnesota.
The results show that police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items.
• Nonprofits Led by People of Color Win Less Grant Money With More Strings, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, May 2020:
The authors analyzed three years of informational tax returns of 164 U.S. groups that were winners, finalists, or semifinalists in Echoing Green’s highly competitive fellowship program. They examined three years of funding data for each group that applied from 2012 to 2015 to determine funding levels and other available information. The authors found that white-led groups had budgets that were 24 percent larger than those led by people of color. It also found that groups led by black women received less money than those led by black men or white women.
…Even when nonprofits with leaders of color won grants, differences remained. The research found that the unrestricted assets of groups with leaders of color were 76 percent smaller than those led by whites.
• Disaster loans foster disparities in Black communities, E&E News, June 2020:
Across the U.S., the SBA has distributed nearly $40 billion in taxpayer-funded disaster loans in a racially disparate manner that has given white areas billions of dollars more to rebuild than Black areas, according to an E&E News analysis of 1.4 million SBA loan records since 2001.
The SBA has approved disaster loan applications in largely white areas at nearly twice the rate that it has approved applications in areas where Black residents are a majority. E&E News analyzed a database listing the outcome of every application from 2001 to 2018, the ZIP code of the property for which a loan was being sought and Census Bureau data on the racial population in the nation’s 33,000 ZIP codes.
In ZIP codes where a majority of people are Black, the SBA approved 28% of the applications.
In ZIP codes where at least 90% of the population is white, the SBA approved 52% of the applications.
• Researchers expected ‘outrageously high’ discrimination against Black renters. What they found was worse than imagined, The Boston Globe, July 2020:
The results indicate that whites paying market rent were able to arrange to view apartments 80 percent of the time. Similarly situated Black market-rate testers seeking to view the same apartments were able to visit the property only 48 percent of the time, the study said.
…When agents dealt with Black testers, the incidence of “ghosting” — or no follow-up calls from the agent — was much higher. White testers continued to hear back from agents 92 percent of the time. Black testers heard back only 62 percent of the time, Suffolk officials said.
• Black Business Owners Had a Harder Time Getting Federal Aid, a Study Finds, New York Times, July 2020:
From late April to late May, the researchers and the nonprofit, which advocates better access to capital for low-income and minority communities, sent pairs of would-be loan applicants to branches of 17 banks. In each pair, a Black borrower and a white borrower shared similar credit and asset characteristics, so the only difference between them was their race…
The Black borrowers were offered different products and treated significantly worse by employees than white borrowers were in 43 percent of the tests, the study found.
• 10 myths about the racial wealth gap, Axios, July 2020:
Education also makes much less difference than being white, as Black Americans with Master’s degrees have about a 7% chance of becoming a millionaire compared to a 37% chance for white Americans, St. Louis Fed data show.
• New Report Reveals Thousands of Infractions Enforced Against Black, Latinx and Unhoused Californians for Sitting, Sleeping, and Standing, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, September 2020:
Police in California issued over 250,000 non-traffic infraction citations in fiscal year 2017-18. Data from this report show deep racial disparities in the enforcement, including:
Black adults in California are up to 9.7 times more likely to receive a citation for local infractions than white adults.
The Los Angeles Police Department gave 63% of all citations for “Loitering-Standing” to Black adults.
Black adults in San Diego were 4 times more likely to receive non-traffic infractions than white adults.
The most common non-traffic infraction citation given by the Long Beach Police Department was for jaywalking (“Walking on Roadway”). Only 11% of adults in Long Beach are Black, but police gave Black adults 36% of all non-traffic infractions issued.
• White and female teachers show racial bias in evaluating second grade writing, Hechinger Report, November 2020:
In an experiment, teachers evaluated the same second-grade writing sample more harshly when there were clues that it had been written by a Black boy than when it appeared to have been written by a white boy.
“Teachers were 4.7 percentage points more likely to consider the white child’s writing at or above ‘grade level’ compared to the identical writing from a Black child.” wrote the University of Southern California researcher, David Quinn, describing his June 2020 study in an article published Nov. 2 in the journal Education Next.
• Black California couple lowballed by $500K in home appraisal, believe race was a factor, ABC News, March 2021:
The home appraised for $989,000, or just $100,000 more than what the Austins got it appraised for prior to their renovations, despite $400,000 in costs.
…The family immediately called their lender and pushed back. After a month of escalating their complaints, The Austins were approved for a second appraisal.
When the day came for inspection, they got creative with the process.
“We had a conversation with one of our white friends, and she said ‘No problem. I’ll be Tenisha. I’ll bring over some pictures of my family,'” Austin said. “She made our home look like it belonged to her.”
The home appraised for $1,482,000, or roughly $500,000 more than it appraised for just weeks prior.
• Black homeowner had a white friend stand in for third appraisal: Her home value doubled, USA Today, May 2021:
During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic last year, the first two appraisers who visited her home just west of downtown Indianapolis, valued it at $125,000 and $110,000, respectively.
But that third appraisal went differently.
To get that one, Duffy, who is African American, communicated with the appraiser strictly via email, stripped her home of all signs of her racial and cultural identity and had the white husband of a friend stand in for her during the appraiser’s visit.
The home’s new value: $259,000.