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Scientism in the Philosophy of Implicit Bias Research, Part 2, Kamili Posey

SERRC —  October 2, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Kamili Posey, Kingsborough College, Kamili.Posey@kbcc.cuny.edu.

Posey, Kamili. “Scientism in the Philosophy of Implicit Bias Research.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 10 (2018): 1-15.

Kamili Posey’s article was posted over two instalments. You can read the first here, but the pdf of the article includes the entire piece, and gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41k

Image by Rigoberto Garcia via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

In the previous piece, I outlined some concerns with philosophers, and particularly philosophers of social science, assuming the success of implicit interventions into implicit bias. Motivated by a pointed note by Jennifer Saul (2017), I aimed to briefly go through some of the models lauded as offering successful interventions and, in essence, “get out of the armchair.”

(IAT) Models and Egalitarian Goal Models

In this final piece, I go through the last two models, Glaser and Knowles’ (2007) and Blair et al.’s (2001) (IAT) models and Moskowitz and Li’s (2011) egalitarian goal model. I reiterate that this is not an exhaustive analysis of such models nor is it intended as a criticism of experiments pertaining to implicit bias. Mostly, I am concerned that the science is interesting but that the scientism – the application of tentative results to philosophical projects – is less so. It is from this point that I proceed.

Like Mendoza et al.’s (2010) implementation intentions, Glaser and Knowles’ (2007) (IMCP) aims to capture implicit motivations that are capable of inhibiting automatic stereotype activation. Glaser and Knowles measure (IMCP) in terms of an implicit negative attitude toward prejudice, or (NAP), and an implicit belief that oneself is prejudiced, or (BOP). This is done by retooling the (IAT) to fit both (NAP) and (BOP): “To measure NAP we constructed an IAT that pairs the categories ‘prejudice’ and ‘tolerance’ with the categories ‘bad’ and ‘good.’ BOP was assessed with an IAT pairing ‘prejudiced’ and ‘tolerant’ with ‘me’ and ‘not me.’”[1]

Study participants were then administered the Shooter Task, the (IMCP) measures, and the Race Prejudice (IAT) and Race-Weapons Stereotype (RWS) tests in a fixed order. They predicted that (IMCP) as an implicit goal for those high in (IMCP) “should be able to short-circuit the effect of implicit anti-Black stereotypes on automatic anti-Black behavior.”[2] The results seemed to suggest that this was the case. Glaser and Knowles found that study participants who viewed prejudice as particularly bad “[showed] no relationship between implicit stereotypes and spontaneous behavior.”[3]

There are a few considerations missing from the evaluation of the study results. First, with regard to the Shooter Task, Glaser and Knowles (2007) found that “the interaction of target race by object type, reflecting the Shooter Bias, was not statistically significant.”[4] That is, the strength of the relationship that Correll et al. (2002) found between study participants and the (high) likelihood that they would “shoot” at black targets was not found in the present study. Additionally, they note that they “eliminated time pressure” from the task itself. Although it was not suggested that this impacted the usefulness of the measure of Shooter Bias, it is difficult to imagine that it did not do so. To this, they footnote the following caveat:

Variance in the degree and direction of the stereotype endorsement points to one reason for our failure to replicate Correll et. al’s (2002) typically robust Shooter Bias effect. That is, our sample appears to have held stereotypes linking Blacks and weapons/aggression/danger to a lesser extent than did Correll and colleagues’ participants. In Correll et al. (2002, 2003), participants one SD below the mean on the stereotype measure reported an anti-Black stereotype, whereas similarly low scorers on our RWS IAT evidenced a stronger association between Whites and weapons. Further, the adaptation of the Shooter Task reported here may have been less sensitive than the procedure developed by Correll and colleagues. In the service of shortening and simplifying the task, we used fewer trials, eliminated time pressure and rewards for speed and accuracy, and presented only one background per trial.[5]

Glaser and Knowles claimed that the interaction of the (RWS) with the Shooter Task results proved “significant,” however, if the Shooter Bias failed to materialize (in the standard Correll et al. way) with study participants, it is difficult to see how the (RWS) was measuring anything except itself, generally speaking. This is further complicated by the fact that the interaction between the Shooter Bias and the (RWS) revealed “a mild reverse stereotype associating Whites with weapons (d = -0.15) and a strong stereotype associating Blacks with weapons (d = 0.83), respectively.”[6]

Recall that Glaser and Knowles (2007) aimed to show that participants high in (IMCP) would be able to inhibit implicit anti-black stereotypes and thus inhibit automatic anti-black behaviors. Using (NAP) and (BOP) as proxies for implicit control, participants high in (NAP) and moderate in (BOP) – as those with moderate (BOP) will be motivated to avoid bias – should show the weakest association between (RWS) and Shooter Bias. Instead, the lowest levels of Shooter Bias were seen in “low NAP, high BOP, and low RWS” study participants, or those who do not disapprove of prejudice, would describe themselves as prejudiced, and also showed lowest levels of (RWS).[7]

They noted that neither “NAP nor BOP alone was significantly related to the Shooter Bias,” but “the influence of RWS on Shooter Bias remained significant.”[8] In fact, greater bias was actually found with higher (NAP) and (BOP) levels.[9] This bias seemed to map on to the initial results of the Shooter Task results. It is most likely that (RWS) was the most important measure in this study for assessing implicit bias, not, as the study claimed, for assessing implicit motivation to control prejudice.

What Kind of Bias?

It is also not clear that the (RWS) was not capturing explicit bias instead of implicit bias in this study. At the point at which study participants were tasked with the (RWS), automatic stereotype activation may have been inhibited just in virtue of study participants involvement in the Shooter Task and (IAT) assessments regarding race-related prejudice. That is, race-sensitivity was brought to consciousness in the sequencing of the test process.

Although we cannot get into the heads of the study participants, this counter explanation seems a compelling possibility. That is, that the sequential tasks involved in the study captured study participants’ ability to increase focus and increase conscious attention to the race-related (IAT) test. Additionally, it is possible that some study participants could both cue and follow their own conscious internal commands, “If I see a black face, I won’t judge!” Consider that this is exactly how implementation intentions work.

Consider that this is also how Armageddon chess and other speed strategy games work. In Park et al.’s (2008) follow-up study on (IMCP) and cognitive depletion, they retreat somewhat from their initial claims about the implicit nature of (IMCP):

We cannot state for certain that our measure of IMCP reflects a purely nonconscious construct, nor that differential speed to “shoot” Black armed men vs. White armed men in a computer simulation reflects purely automatic processes. Most likely, the underlying stereotypes, goals, and behavioral responses represent a blend of conscious and nonconscious influences…Based on the results of the present study and those of Glaser and Knowles (2008), it would be premature to conclude that IMCP is a purely and wholly automatic construct, meeting the “four horsemen” criteria (Bargh, 1990). Specifically, it is not yet clear whether high IMCP participants initiate control of prejudice without intention; whether implicit control of prejudice can itself be inhibited, if for some reason someone wanted to; nor whether IMCP-instigated control of spontaneous bias occurs without awareness.[10]

If the (IMCP) potentially measures low-level conscious attention, this makes the question of what implicit measurements actually measure in the context of sequential tasks all the more important. In the two final examples, Blair et al.’s (2001) study on the use of counterstereotype imagery and Moskowitz and Li’s (2011) study on the use of counterstereotype egalitarian goals, we are again confronted with the issue of sequencing. In the study by Moskowitz and Li, study participants were asked to write down an example of a time when “they failed to live up to the ideal specified by an egalitarian goal, and to do so by relaying an event relating to African American men.”[11]

They were then given a series of computerized LDTs (lexicon decision tasks) and primes involving photographs of black and white faces and stereotypical and non-stereotypical attributes of black people (crime, lazy, stupid, nervous, indifferent, nosy). Over a series of four experiments, Moskowitz and Li found that when egalitarian goals were “accessible,” study participants were able to successfully generate stereotype inhibition. Blair et al. asked study participants to use counterstereotypical (CS) gender imagery over a series of five experiments, e.g., “Think of a strong, capable woman,” and then administered a series of implicit measures, including the (IAT).

Similar to Moskowitz and Li (2011), Blair et al. (2001) found that (CS) gender imagery was successful in reducing implicit gender stereotypes leaving “little doubt that the CS mental imagery per se was responsible for diminishing implicit stereotypes.”[12] In both cases, the study participants were explicitly called upon to focus their attention on experiences and imagery pertaining to negative stereotypes before the implicit measures, i.e., tasks, were administered. Again it is not clear that the implicit measures measured the supposed target.

In the case of Moskowitz and Li’s (2011) experiment, the study participants began by relating moments in their lives where they failed to live up to their goals. However, those goals can only be understood within a particular social and political framework where holding negatively prejudicial beliefs about African-American men is often explicitly judged harshly, even if not implicitly so. Given this, we might assume that the study participants were compelled into a negative affective state. But does this matter? As suggested by the study by Monteith (1993), and later study by Amodio et. al (2007), guilt can be a powerful tool.[13]

Questions of Guilt

If guilt was produced during the early stages of the experiment, it may have also participated in the inhibition of stereotype activation. Moskowitz and Li (2011) noted that “during targeted questioning in the debriefing, no participants expressed any conscious intent to inhibit stereotypes on the task, nor saw any of the tasks performed during the computerized portion of the experiment as related to the egalitarian goals they had undermined earlier in the session.”[14]

But guilt does not have to be conscious for it to produce effects. The guilt produced by recalling a moment of negative bias could be part and parcel of a larger feeling of moral failure. Moskowitz and Li needed to adequately disambiguate competing implicit motivations for stereotype inhibition before arriving at a definitive conclusion. This, I think, is a limitation of the study.

However, the same case could be made for (CS) imagery. Blair et al. (2001) noted that it is, in fact, possible that they too have missed competing motivations and competing explanations for stereotype inhibition. Particularly, they suggested that by emphasizing counterstereotyping the researchers “may have communicated the importance of avoiding stereotypes and increased their motivation to do so.”[15] Still, the researchers dismissed that this would lead to better (faster, more accurate) performance of the (IAT), but that is merely asserting that the (IAT) must measure exactly what the (IAT) claims that it does. Fast, accurate, and conscious measures are excluded from that claim. Complicated internal motivations are excluded from that claim.

But on what grounds? Consider Fielder et al.’s (2006) argument that the (IAT) is susceptible to faking and strategic processing, or Brendl et al.’s (2001) argument that it is not possible to infer a single cause from (IAT) results, or Fazio and Olson’s (2003) claim “the IAT has little to do with what is automatically activated in response to a given stimulus.”[16]

These studies call into question the claim that implicit measures like the (IAT) can measure implicit bias in the clear, problem-free manner that is often suggested in the literature. Implicit interventions into implicit bias that utilize the (IAT) are difficult to support for this reason. Implicit interventions that utilize sequential (IAT) tasks are also difficult to support for this reason. Of course, this is also live debate and the problems I have discussed here are far from the only ones that plague this type of research.[17]

That said, when it comes to this research we are too often left wondering if the measure itself is measuring the right thing. Are we capturing implicit bias or some other socially generated phenomenon? Are the measured changes we see in study results reflecting the validity of the instrument or the cognitive maneuverings of study participants? These are all critical questions that need sussing out. The temporary result is that the target conclusion that implicit interventions will lead to reductions in real-world discrimination will move further away.[18] We find evidence of this conclusion in Forscher et al.’s (2018) meta-analysis of 492 implicit interventions:

We found little evidence that changes in implicit measures translated into changes in explicit measures and behavior, and we observed limitations in the evidence base for implicit malleability and change. These results produce a challenge for practitioners who seek to address problems that are presumed to be caused by automatically retrieved associations, as there was little evidence showing that change in implicit measures will result in changes for explicit measures or behavior…Our results suggest that current interventions that attempt to change implicit measures will not consistently change behavior in these domains. These results also produce a challenge for researchers who seek to understand the nature of human cognition because they raise new questions about the causal role of automatically retrieved associations…To better understand what the results mean, future research should innovate with more reliable and valid implicit, explicit, and behavioral tasks, intensive manipulations, longitudinal measurement of outcomes, heterogeneous samples, and diverse topics of study.[19]

Finally, what I take to be behind Alcoff’s (2010) critical question at the beginning of this piece is a kind of skepticism about how individuals can successfully tackle implicit bias through either explicit or implicit practices without the support of the social spaces, communities, and institutions that give shape to our social lives. Implicit bias is related to the culture one is in and the stereotypes it produces. So instead of insisting on changing people to reduce stereotyping, what if we insisted on changing the culture?

As Alcoff notes: “We must be willing to explore more mechanisms for redress, such as extensive educational reform, more serious projects of affirmative action, and curricular mandates that would help to correct the identity prejudices built up out of faulty narratives of history.”[20] This is an important point. It is a point that philosophers who work on implicit bias would do well to take seriously.

Science may not give us the way out of racism, sexism, and gender discrimination. At the moment, it may only give us tools for seeing ourselves a bit more clearly. Further claims about implicit interventions appear as willful scientism. They reinforce the belief that science can cure all of our social and political ills. But this is magical thinking.

Contact details: Kamili.Posey@kbcc.cuny.edu

References

Alcoff, Linda. (2010). “Epistemic Identities,” in Episteme 7 (2), p. 132.

Amodio, David M., Devine, Patricia G., and Harmon-Jones, Eddie. (2007). “A Dynamic Model of Guilt: Implications for Motivation and Self-Regulation in the Context of Prejudice,” in Psychological Science 18(6), pp. 524-30.

Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). “Imagining Stereotypes Away: The Moderation of Implicit Stereotypes Through Mental Imagery,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81:5, p. 837.

Correll, Joshua, Bernadette Park, Bernd Wittenbrink, and Charles M. Judd. (2002). “The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 6, 1314–1329.

Devine, P. G., & Monteith, M. J. (1993). “The Role of Discrepancy-Associated Affect in Prejudice Reduction,” in Affect, Cognition and Stereotyping: Interactive Processes in Group Perception, eds., D. M. Mackie & D. L. Hamilton. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 317–344.

Forscher, Patrick S., Lai, Calvin K., Axt, Jordan R., Ebersole, Charles R., Herman, Michelle, Devine, Patricia G., and Nosek, Brian A. (August 13, 2018). “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures.” [Preprint]. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dv8tu.

Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007). “Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, p. 165.

Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., Moll, J., Hermsen, S., & Russin, A. (2000). “Just Say No (To Stereotyping): Effects Of Training in Negation of Stereotypic Associations on Stereotype Activation,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 871–888.

Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., and van Kamp, S. (2005). “Kicking the Habit: Effects of Nonstereotypic Association Training and Correction Processes on Hiring Decisions,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 41:1, pp. 68-69.

Greenwald, Anthony G., Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Nosek, Brian A. (2015). “Statistically Small Effects of the Implicit Association Test Can Have Societally Large Effects,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 108, No. 4, pp. 553-561.

Mendoza, Saaid, Gollwitzer, Peter, and Amodio, David. (2010). “Reducing the Expression of Implicit Stereotypes: Reflexive Control through Implementation Intentions,” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36:4, p. 513-514.

Monteith, Margo. (1993). “Self-Regulation of Prejudiced Responses: Implications for Progress in Prejudice-Reduction Efforts,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65:3, p. 472.

Moskowitz, Gordon and Li, Peizhong. (2011). “Egalitarian Goals Trigger Stereotype Inhibition,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, p. 106.

Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2013). “Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis of IAT Criterion Studies,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 105, pp. 171-192

Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2015). “Using the IAT to Predict Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: Small Effect Sizes of Unknown Societal Significance,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 108, No. 4, pp. 562-571.

Saul, Jennifer. (2017). “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Epistemic Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, eds. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. [Google Books Edition] New York: Routledge.

Webb, Thomas L., Sheeran, Paschal, and Pepper, John. (2012). “Gaining Control Over Responses to Implicit Attitude Tests: Implementation Intentions Engender Fast Responses on Attitude-Incongruent Trials,” in British Journal of Social Psychology 51, pp. 13-32.

[1] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007). “Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, p. 165.

[2] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 167.

[3] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 170.

[4] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 168.

[5] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 168.

[6] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 169.

[7] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 169. Of this “rogue” group, Glaser and Knowles note: “This group had, on average, a negative RWS (i.e., rather than just a low bias toward Blacks, they tended to associate Whites more than Blacks with weapons; see footnote 4). If these reversed stereotypes are also uninhibited, they should yield reversed Shooter Bias, as observed here” (169).

[8] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 169.

[9] Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007), p. 169.

[10] Sang Hee Park, Jack Glaser, and Eric D. Knowles. (2008). “Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice Moderates the Effect of Cognitive Depletion on Unintended Discrimination,” in Social Cognition, Vol. 26, No. 4, p. 416.

[11] Moskowitz, Gordon and Li, Peizhong. (2011). “Egalitarian Goals Trigger Stereotype Inhibition,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, p. 106.

[12] Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). “Imagining Stereotypes Away: The Moderation of Implicit Stereotypes Through Mental Imagery,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81:5, p. 837.

[13] Amodio, David M., Devine, Patricia G., and Harmon-Jones, Eddie. (2007). “A Dynamic Model of Guilt: Implications for Motivation and Self-Regulation in the Context of Prejudice,” in Psychological Science 18(6), pp. 524-30

[14] Moskowitz, Gordon and Li, Peizhong (2011), p. 108.

[15] Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001), p. 838.

[16] Fielder, Klaus, Messner, Claude, Bluemke, Matthias. (2006). “Unresolved problems with the ‘I’, the ‘A’, and the ‘T’: A logical and Psychometric Critique of the Implicit Association Test (IAT),” in European Review of Social Psychology, 12, pp. 74-147. Brendl, C. M., Markman, A. B., & Messner, C. (2001). “How Do Indirect Measures of Evaluation Work? Evaluating the Inference of Prejudice in the Implicit Association Test,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5), pp. 760-773. Fazio, R. H., and Olson, M. A. (2003). “Implicit Measures in Social Cognition Research: Their Meaning and Uses,” in Annual Review of Psychology 54, pp. 297-327.

[17] There is significant debate over the issue of whether the implicit bias that (IAT) tests measure translate into real-world discriminatory behavior. This is a complex and compelling issue. It is also an issue that could render moot the (IAT) as an implicit measure of anything full stop. Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek (2015) write: “IAT measures have two properties that render them problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination. Those two properties are modest test–retest reliability (for the IAT, typically between r = .5 and r = .6; cf., Nosek et al., 2007) and small to moderate predictive validity effect sizes. Therefore, attempts to diagnostically use such measures for individuals risk undesirably high rates of erroneous classifications. These problems of limited test-retest reliability and small effect sizes are maximal when the sample consists of a single person (i.e., for individual diagnostic use), but they diminish substantially as sample size increases. Therefore, limited reliability and small to moderate effect sizes are not problematic in diagnosing system-level discrimination, for which analyses often involve large samples” (557). However, Oswald et al. (2013) argue that “IAT scores correlated strongly with measures of brain activity but relatively weakly with all other criterion measures in the race domain and weakly with all criterion measures in the ethnicity domain. IATs, whether they were designed to tap into implicit prejudice or implicit stereotypes, were typically poor predictors of the types of behavior, judgments, or decisions that have been studied as instances of discrimination, regardless of how subtle, spontaneous, controlled, or deliberate they were. Explicit measures of bias were also, on average, weak predictors of criteria in the studies covered by this meta-analysis, but explicit measures performed no worse than, and sometimes better than, the IATs for predictions of policy preferences, interpersonal behavior, person perceptions, reaction times, and microbehavior. Only for brain activity were correlations higher for IATs than for explicit measures…but few studies examined prediction of brain activity using explicit measures. Any distinction between the IATs and explicit measures is a distinction that makes little difference, because both of these means of measuring attitudes resulted in poor prediction of racial and ethnic discrimination” (182-183). For further details about this debate, see: Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2013). “Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis of IAT Criterion Studies,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 105, pp. 171-192 and Greenwald, Anthony G., Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Nosek, Brian A. (2015). “Statistically Small Effects of the Implicit Association Test Can Have Societally Large Effects,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 108, No. 4, pp. 553-561.

[18] See: Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2015). “Using the IAT to Predict Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: Small Effect Sizes of Unknown Societal Significance,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 108, No. 4, pp. 562-571.

[19] Forscher, Patrick S., Lai, Calvin K., Axt, Jordan R., Ebersole, Charles R., Herman, Michelle, Devine, Patricia G., and Nosek, Brian A. (August 13, 2018). “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures.” [Preprint]. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dv8tu.

[20] Alcoff, Linda. (2010). “Epistemic Identities,” in Episteme 7 (2), p. 132.

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Scientism in the Philosophy of Implicit Bias Research, Part 1, Kamili Posey

SERRC —  September 27, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Kamili Posey, Kingsborough College, Kamili.Posey@kbcc.cuny.edu.

Posey, Kamili. “Scientism in the Philosophy of Implicit Bias Research.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 10 (2018): 1-16.

Kamili Posey’s article will be posted over two instalments. The pdf of the article gives specific page references, and includes the entire essay. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41m

Image by Walt Stoneburner via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

If you consider the recent philosophical literature on implicit bias research, then you would be forgiven for thinking that the problem of successful interventions into implicit bias fall into the category of things that are resolved. If you consider the recent social psychological literature on interventions into implicit bias, then you would come away with a similar impression. The claim is that implicit bias is epistemically harmful because we profess to believing one thing while our implicit attitudes tell a different story.

Strategy Models and Discrepancy Models

Implicit bias is socially harmful because it maps onto our real-world discriminatory practices, e.g., workplace discrimination, health disparities, racist police shootings, and identity-prejudicial public policies. Consider the results of Greenwald et al.’s (1998) Implicit Association Test. Consider also the results of Correll et. al’s (2002) “Shooter Bias.” If cognitive interventions are possible, and specifically implicit cognitive interventions, then they can help knowers implicitly manage automatic stereotype activation. Do these interventions lead to real-world reductions of bias?

Linda Alcoff (2010) notes that it is difficult to see how implicit, nonvolitional biases (e.g., those at the root of social and epistemic ills like race-based police shootings) can be remedied by explicit epistemic practices.[1] I would follow this by noting that it is equally difficult to see how nonvolitional biases can be remedied by implicit epistemic practices as well.

Jennifer Saul (2017) responds to Alcoff’s (2010) query by pointing to social psychological experiments conducted by Margo Monteith (1993), Jack Glaser and Eric D. Knowles (2007), Gordon B. Moskowitz and Peizhong Li (2011), Saaid A. Mendoza et al. (2010), Irene V. Blair et al. (2001), and Kerry Kawakami et al. (2005).[2] These studies suggest that implicit self-regulation of implicit bias is possible. Saul notes that philosophers with objections like Alcoff’s, and presumably like mine, should “not just to reflect upon the problem from the armchair – at the very least, one should use one’s laptop to explore the internet for effective interventions.”[3]

But I think this recrimination rings rather hollow. How entitled are we to extrapolate from social psychological studies in the manner that Saul advocates? How entitled are we to assumes the epistemic superiority of scientific research on racism, sexism, etc. over the phenomenological reporting of marginalized knowers? Lastly, how entitled are we to claims about the real-world applicability of these study results?[4] My guess is that the devil is in the details. My guess is also that social psychologists have not found the silver bullet for remedying implicit bias. But let’s follow Saul’s suggestion and not just reflect from the armchair.

A caveat: the following analysis is not intended to be an exhaustive or thorough refutation of what is ultimately a large body social psychological literature. Instead, it is intended to cast a bit of doubt on how these models are used by philosophers as successful remedies for implicit bias. It is intended to cast doubt a bit of doubt on the idea that remedies for racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic discrimination are merely a training session or reflective exercise away.

This type of thinking devalues the very real experiences of those who live through racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. It devalues how pervasive these experiences are in American society and the myriad ways in which the effects of discrimination seep into marrow of marginalized bodies and marginalized communities. Worse still, it implies that marginalized knowers who claim, “You don’t understand my experiences!” are compelled to contend with the hegemonic role of “Science” that continues to speak over their own voices and about their own lives.[5] But again, back to the studies.

Four Methods of Remedy

I break up the above studies into four intuitive model types: (1) strategy models, (2) discrepancy models, (3) (IAT) models, and (4) egalitarian goal models. (I am not a social scientist, so the operative word here is “intuitive.”) Let’s first consider Kawakami et al. (2005) and Mendoza et al. (2010) as examples of strategy models. Kawakami et al. used Devine and Monteith’s (1993) notion of a negative stereotype as a “bad habit” that a knower needs to “kick” to model strategies that aid in the inhibition of automatic stereotype activation, or the inhibition of “increased cognitive accessibility of characteristics associated with a particular group.”[6]

In a previous study, Kawakami et al. (2000) asked research participants presented with photographs of black individuals and white individuals with stereotypical traits and non-stereotypical traits listed under each photograph to respond “No” to stereotypical traits and “Yes” to non-stereotypical traits.[7] The study found that “participants who were extensively trained to negate racial stereotypes initially also demonstrated stereotype activation, this effect was eliminated by the extensive training.

Furthermore, Kawakami et al. found that practice effects of this type lasted up to 24 h following the training.”[8] Kawakami et al. (2005) used this training model to ground an experiment aimed at strategies for reducing stereotype activation in the preference of men over women for leadership roles in managerial positions. Despite the training, they found that there was “no difference between Nonstereotypic Association Training and No Training conditions…participants were indeed attempting to choose the best candidate overall, in these conditions there was an overall pattern of discrimination against women relative to men in recommended hiring for a managerial position (Glick, 1991; Rudman & Glick, 1999)” [emphasis mine].[9]

Substantive conclusions are difficult to make by a single study but one critical point is how learning occurred in the training but improved stereotype inhibition did not occur. What, exactly, are we to make of this result? Kawakami et al. (2005) claimed that “similar levels of bias in both the Training and No Training conditions implicates the influence of correction processes that limit the effectiveness of training.”[10] That is, they attributed the lack of influence of corrective processes on a variety of contributing factors that limited the effectiveness of the strategy itself.

Notice, however, that this does not implicate the strategy as a failed one. Most notably Kawakami et al. found that “when people have the time and opportunity to control their responses [they] may be strongly shaped by personal values and temporary motivations, strategies aimed at changing the automatic activation of stereotypes will not [necessarily] result in reduced discrimination.”[11]

This suggests that although the strategies failed to reduce stereotype activation they may still be helpful in limited circumstances “when impressions are more deliberative.”[12] One wonders under what conditions such impressions can be more deliberative? More than that, how useful are such limited-condition strategies for dealing with everyday life and every day automatic stereotype activation?

Mendoza et al. (2010) tested the effectiveness of “implementation intentions” as a strategy to reduce the activation or expression of implicit stereotypes using the Shooter Task.[13] They tested both “distraction-inhibiting” implementation intentions and “response-facilitating” implementation intentions. Distraction-inhibiting intentions are strategies “designed to engage inhibitory control,” such as inhibiting the perception of distracting or biasing information, while “response-facilitating” intentions are strategies designed to enhance goal attainment by focusing on specific goal-directed actions.[14]

In the first study, Mendoza et al. asked participants to repeat the on-screen phrase, “If I see a person, then I will ignore his race!” in their heads and then type the phrase into the computer. This resulted in study participants having a reduced number of errors in the Shooter Task. But let’s come back to if and how we might be able to extrapolate from these results. The second study compared a simple-goal strategy with an implementation intention strategy.

Study participants in the simple-goal strategy group were asked to follow the strategy, “I will always shoot a person I see with a gun!” and “I will never shoot a person I see with an object!” Study participants in the implementation intention strategy group were asked to use a conditional, if-then, strategy instead: “If I see a person with an object, then I will not shoot!” Mendoza et al. found that a response-facilitating implementation intention “enhanced controlled processing but did not affect automatic stereotyping processing,” while a distraction-inhibiting implementation intention “was associated with an increase in controlled processing and a decrease in automatic stereotyping processes.”[15]

How to Change Both Action and Thought

Notice that if the goal is to reduce automatic stereotype activation through reflexive control that only a distraction-inhibiting strategy achieved the desired effect. Notice also how the successful use of a distraction-inhibiting strategy may require a type of “non-messy” social environment unachievable outside of a laboratory experiment.[16] Or, as Mendoza et al. (2010) rightly note: “The current findings suggest that the quick interventions typically used in psychological experiments may be more effective in modulating behavioral responses or the temporary accessibility of stereotypes than in undoing highly edified knowledge structures.”[17]

The hope, of course, is that distraction-inhibiting strategies can help dominant knowers reduce automatic stereotype activation and response-facilitated strategies can help dominant knowers internalize controlled processing such that negative bias and stereotyping can be (one day) reflexively controlled as well. But these are only hopes. The only thing that we can rightly conclude from these results is that if we ask a dominant knower to focus on an internal command, they will do so. The result is that the activation of negative bias fails to occur.

This does not mean that the knower has reduced their internalized negative biases and prejudices or that they can continue to act on the internal commands in the future (in fact, subsequent studies reveal the effects are short-lived[18]). As Mendoza et al. also note: “In psychometric terms, these strategies are designed to enhance accuracy without necessarily affecting bias. That is, a person may still have a tendency to associate Black people with violence and thus be more likely to shoot unarmed Blacks than to shoot unarmed Whites.”[19] Despite hope for these strategies, there is very little to support their real-world applicability.

Hunting for Intuitive Hypocrisies

I would extend a similar critique to Margot Monteith’s (1993) discrepancy model. Monteith’s (1993) often cited study uses two experiments to investigate prejudice related discrepancies in the behaviors of low-prejudice (LP) and high-prejudice (HP) individuals and the ability to engage in self-regulated prejudice reduction. In the first experiment, (LP) and (HP) heterosexual study participants were asked to evaluate two law school applications, one for an implied gay applicant and one for an implied heterosexual applicant. Study participants “were led to believe that they had evaluated a gay law school applicant negatively because of his sexual orientation;” they were tricked into a “discrepancy-activated condition” or a condition that was at odds with their believed prejudicial state.[20]

All of the study participants were then told that the applications were identical and that those who had rejected the gay applicant had done so because of the applicant’s sexual orientation. It is important to note that the applicants qualifications were not, in fact, identical. The gay applicant’s application materials were made to look worse than the heterosexual applicant’s materials. This was done to compel the rejection of the applicant.

Study participants were then provided a follow-up questionnaire and essay allegedly written by a professor who wanted to know (a) “why people often have difficulty avoiding negative responses toward gay men,” and (b) “how people can eliminate their negative responses toward gay men.”[21] Researchers asked study participants to record their reactions to the faculty essay and write down as much they could remember about what they read. They were then told about the deception in the experiment and told why such deception was incorporated into the study.

Monteith (1993) found that “low and high prejudiced subjects alike experienced discomfort after violating their personal standards for responding to a gay man, but only low prejudiced subjects experienced negative self-directed affect.”[22] Low prejudiced, (LP), “discrepancy-activated subjects,” also spent more time reading the faculty essay and “showed superior recall for the portion of the essay concerning why prejudice-related discrepancies arise.”[23]

The “discrepancy experience” generated negative self-directed affect, or guilt, for (LP) study participants with the hope that the guilt would (a) “motivate discrepancy reduction (e.g., Rokeach, 1973)” and (b) “serve to establish strong cues for punishment (cf. Gray, 1982).”[24] The idea here is that the experiment results point to the existence of a self-regulatory mechanism that can replace automatic stereotype activation with “belief-based responses;” however, “it is important to note that the initiation of self-regulatory mechanisms is dependent on recognizing and interpreting one’s responses as discrepant from one’s personal beliefs.”[25]

The discrepancy between what one is shown to believe and what one professes to believe (whether real or manufactured, as in the experiment) is aimed at getting knowers to engage in heightened self-focus due to negative self-directed affect. The goal of Monteith’s (1993) study is that self-directed affect would lead to a kind of corrective belief-making process that is both less prejudicial and future-directed.

But if it’s guilt that’s doing the psychological work in these cases, then it’s not clear that knowers wouldn’t find other means of assuaging such feelings. Why wouldn’t it be the case that generating negative self-directed affect would point a knower toward anything they deem necessary to restore a more positive sense of self? To this, Monteith made the following concession:

Steele (1988; Steele & Liu, 1983) contended that restoration of one’s self-image after a discrepancy experience may not entail discrepancy reduction if other opportunities for self-affirmation are available. For example, Steele (1988) suggested that a smoker who wants to quit might spend more time with his or her children to resolve the threat to the self-concept engendered by the psychological inconsistency created by smoking. Similarly, Tesser and Cornell (1991) found that different behaviors appeared to feed into a general “self-evaluation reservoir.” It follows that prejudice-related discrepancy experiences may not facilitate the self-regulation of prejudiced responses if other means to restoring one’s self-regard are available [emphasis mine].[26]

Additionally, she noted that even if individuals are committed to the reducing or “unlearning” automatic stereotyping, they “may become frustrated and disengage from the self-regulatory cycle, abandoning their goal to eliminate prejudice-like responses.”[27] Cognitive exhaustion, or cognitive depletion, can occur after intergroup exchanges as well. This may make it even less likely that a knower will continue to feel guilty, and to use that guilt to inhibit the activation of negative stereotypes when they find themselves struggling cognitively. Conversely, there is also the issue of a kind of lab-based, or experiment-based, cognitive priming. I pick up with this idea along with the final two models of implicit interventions in the next part.

Contact details: Kamili.Posey@kbcc.cuny.edu

References

Alcoff, Linda. (2010). “Epistemic Identities,” in Episteme 7 (2), p. 132.

Amodio, David M., Devine, Patricia G., and Harmon-Jones, Eddie. (2007). “A Dynamic Model of Guilt: Implications for Motivation and Self-Regulation in the Context of Prejudice,” in Psychological Science 18(6), pp. 524-30.

Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). “Imagining Stereotypes Away: The Moderation of Implicit Stereotypes Through Mental Imagery,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81:5, p. 837.

Correll, Joshua, Bernadette Park, Bernd Wittenbrink, and Charles M. Judd. (2002). “The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 6, 1314–1329.

Devine, P. G., & Monteith, M. J. (1993). “The Role of Discrepancy-Associated Affect in Prejudice Reduction,” in Affect, Cognition and Stereotyping: Interactive Processes in Group Perception, eds., D. M. Mackie & D. L. Hamilton. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 317–344.

Forscher, Patrick S., Lai, Calvin K., Axt, Jordan R., Ebersole, Charles R., Herman, Michelle, Devine, Patricia G., and Nosek, Brian A. (August 13, 2018). “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures.” [Preprint]. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dv8tu.

Glaser, Jack and Knowles, Eric D. (2007). “Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, p. 165.

Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., Moll, J., Hermsen, S., & Russin, A. (2000). “Just Say No (To Stereotyping): Effects Of Training in Negation of Stereotypic Associations on Stereotype Activation,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 871–888.

Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., and van Kamp, S. (2005). “Kicking the Habit: Effects of Nonstereotypic Association Training and Correction Processes on Hiring Decisions,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 41:1, pp. 68-69.

Greenwald, Anthony G., Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Nosek, Brian A. (2015). “Statistically Small Effects of the Implicit Association Test Can Have Societally Large Effects,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 108, No. 4, pp. 553-561.

Mendoza, Saaid, Gollwitzer, Peter, and Amodio, David. (2010). “Reducing the Expression of Implicit Stereotypes: Reflexive Control through Implementation Intentions,” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36:4, p. 513-514.

Monteith, Margo. (1993). “Self-Regulation of Prejudiced Responses: Implications for Progress in Prejudice-Reduction Efforts,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65:3, p. 472.

Moskowitz, Gordon and Li, Peizhong. (2011). “Egalitarian Goals Trigger Stereotype Inhibition,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, p. 106.

Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2013). “Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis of IAT Criterion Studies,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 105, pp. 171-192

Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2015). “Using the IAT to Predict Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: Small Effect Sizes of Unknown Societal Significance,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 108, No. 4, pp. 562-571.

Saul, Jennifer. (2017). “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Epistemic Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, eds. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. [Google Books Edition] New York: Routledge.

Webb, Thomas L., Sheeran, Paschal, and Pepper, John. (2012). “Gaining Control Over Responses to Implicit Attitude Tests: Implementation Intentions Engender Fast Responses on Attitude-Incongruent Trials,” in British Journal of Social Psychology 51, pp. 13-32.

[1] Alcoff, Linda. (2010). “Epistemic Identities,” in Episteme 7 (2), p. 132.

[2] Saul, Jennifer. (2017). “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Epistemic Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, eds. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. [Google Books Edition] New York: Routledge.

[3] Saul, Jennifer (2017), p. 466.

[4] See: Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2013). “Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis of IAT Criterion Studies,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 105, pp. 171-192.

[5] I owe this critical point in its entirety to the work of Lacey Davidson and her presentation, “When Testimony Isn’t Enough: Implicit Bias Research as Epistemic Injustice” at the Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies (FEMMSS) conference in Corvallis, Oregon in 2018. Davidson notes that the work of philosophers of race and critical race theorists often takes a backseat to the projects of philosophers of social science who engage with the science of racialized attitudes as opposed to the narratives and/or testimonies of those with lived experiences of racism. Davidson describes this as a type of epistemic injustice against philosophers of race and critical race theorists. She also notes that philosophers of race and critical race theorists are often people of color while the philosophers of social science are often white. This dimension of analysis is important but unexplored. Davidson’s work highlights how epistemic injustice operates within the academy to perpetuate systems of racism and oppression under the guise of “good science.” Her arguments was inspired by the work of Jeanine Weekes Schroer on the problematic nature of current research on stereotype threat and implicit bias in “Giving Them Something They Can Feel: On the Strategy of Scientizing the Phenomenology of Race and Racism,” Knowledge Cultures 3(1), 2015.

[6] Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., and van Kamp, S. (2005). “Kicking the Habit: Effects of Nonstereotypic Association Training and Correction Processes on Hiring Decisions,” in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 41:1, pp. 68-69. See also: Devine, P. G., & Monteith, M. J. (1993). “The Role of Discrepancy-Associated Affect in Prejudice Reduction,” in Affect, Cognition and Stereotyping: Interactive Processes in Group Perception, eds., D. M. Mackie & D. L. Hamilton. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 317–344.

[7] Kawakami et al. (2005), p. 69. See also: Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., Moll, J., Hermsen, S., & Russin, A. (2000). “Just Say No (To Stereotyping): Effects Of Training in Negation of Stereotypic Associations on Stereotype Activation,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 871–888.

[8] Kawakami et al. (2005), p. 69.

[9] Kawakami et al. (2005), p. 73.

[10] Kawakami et al. (2005), p. 73.

[11] Kawakami et al. (2005), p. 74.

[12] Kawakami et al. (2005), p. 74.

[13] The Shooter Task refers to a computer simulation experiment where images of black and white males appear on a screen holding a gun or a non-gun object. Study participants are given a short response time and tasked with pressing a button, or “shooting” armed images versus unarmed images. Psychological studies have revealed a “shooter bias” in the tendency to shoot black, unarmed males more often than unarmed white males. See: Correll, Joshua, Bernadette Park, Bernd Wittenbrink, and Charles M. Judd. (2002). “The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 6, 1314–1329.

[14] Mendoza, Saaid, Gollwitzer, Peter, and Amodio, David. (2010). “Reducing the Expression of Implicit Stereotypes: Reflexive Control through Implementation Intentions,” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36:4, p. 513-514..

[15] Mendoza, Saaid, Gollwitzer, Peter, and Amodio, David (2010), p. 520.

[16] A “messy environment” presents additional challenges to studies like the one discussed here. As Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg (2008) claim in “The Spreading of Disorder,” people are more likely to violate social rules when they see that others are violating the rules as well. I can only imagine that this is applicable to epistemic rules as well. I mention this here to suggest that the “cleanliness” of the social environment of social psychological studies such as the one by Mendoza, Saaid, Gollwitzer, Peter, and Amodio, David (2010) presents an additional obstacle in extrapolating the resulting behaviors of research participants to the public-at-large. Short of mass hypnosis, how could the strategies used in these experiments, strategies that are predicated on the noninterference of other destabilizing factors, be meaningfully applied to everyday life? There is a tendency in the philosophical literature on implicit bias and stereotype threat to outright ignore the limited applicability of much of this research in order to make critical claims about interventions into racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic behaviors. Philosophers would do well to recognize the complexity of these issues and to be more cautious about the enthusiastic endorsement of experimental results.

[17] Mendoza, Saaid, Gollwitzer, Peter, and Amodio, David (2010), p. 520.

[18] Webb, Thomas L., Sheeran, Paschal, and Pepper, John. (2012). “Gaining Control Over Responses to Implicit Attitude Tests: Implementation Intentions Engender Fast Responses on Attitude-Incongruent Trials,” in British Journal of Social Psychology 51, pp. 13-32.

[19] Mendoza, Saaid, Gollwitzer, Peter, and Amodio, David (2010), p. 520.

[20] Monteith, Margo. (1993). “Self-Regulation of Prejudiced Responses: Implications for Progress in Prejudice-Reduction Efforts,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65:3, p. 472.

[21] Monteith (1993), p. 474.

[22] Monteith (1993), p. 475.

[23] Monteith (1993), p. 477.

[24] Monteith (1993), p. 477.

[25] Monteith (1993), p. 477.

[26] Monteith (1993), p. 482.

[27] Monteith (1993), p. 483.

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Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Literary Fragments, Ayesha Hardison

SERRC —  February 20, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Ayesha Hardison, University of Kansas, hardison@ku.edu

Hardison, Ayesha. “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Literary Fragments.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 2 (2018): 56-63.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3UA

Please refer to:

Image by Trojan_Llama via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

To acknowledge Jane Crow, the term Pauli Murray contrived to unmask black women’s intersecting race and gender oppression, is not the same as understanding how black women’s subjection works—or why it persists. In “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability,” Kristie Dotson defines Jane Crow as a system of practices subjugating black women materially and epistemologically. That is, Jane Crow restricts black women’s inalienable rights to citizenship and limits their equitable access to resources.

Moreover, Jane Crow forecloses comprehension of the disenfranchisement it engenders. Dotson explains, “The complex bind of Jane Crow subordination is constituted by occupying simultaneous hyper-visibility, i.e. membership in social categories policed and suppressed for the maintenance of some form of supremacy, and invisibility, i.e. the limited nature of using those social categories to understand the specific nature of the subordination in question.”[1] Jane Crow, Dotson argues, singles out black women and girls for repression and control and summarily casts them as ciphers, nonentities “hidden in plain sight” despite statistics documenting their plight.[2] As a result of their concurrent hypervisibility and invisibility, black women are perceived as “unknowable” to the social, political, and cultural brokers upholding white supremacy and patriarchy. They are systematically targeted, branded as pathological, pared down to stereotype, regarded as disreputable, and ultimately deemed untenable.

I agree with Dotson: Jane Crow is a material and epistemological problematic manifest in black women’s longstanding repudiation in US hegemonic culture, a phenomenon theorized in black feminist thought since its beginnings. Black women have been relegated historically to the margins of black freedom struggles and women’s movements, and they continue to struggle for legibility in our post-civil rights moment particularly, as Dotson highlights, in the context of familiar narratives about the “endangered black male.”[3]

Yet, constitutive to black women’s epistemological quandary under Jane Crow, i.e. the way racism and sexism impacts their ability to produce knowledge, is the conceit that black women’s narratives about their multivalent oppression register similarly in hegemonic and counterhegemonic spaces. For example, a 2017 New York Times article uses the term Jane Crow to describe the practices of Children’s Services to punish poverty-stricken black and Hispanic women’s parenting by removing their children from their homes. The piece quotes a lawyer at length to indict the epistemic nature of the system’s biases:

There’s this judgment that these mothers don’t have the ability to make decisions about their kids, and in that, society both infantilizes them and holds them to superhuman standards. In another community, your kid’s found outside looking for you because you’re in the bathtub, it’s ‘Oh, my God’—a story to tell later. … In a poor community, it’s called endangering the welfare of your child.[4]

The state’s criminalizing narrative, based on discriminatory racial, gender, and economic geographies, exemplifies the distorted perspectives on black women’s structural disadvantages. Black women continue to be “unknowable” in dominant culture due to its investment in white supremacy and patriarchy. However, black women are not unknowable to themselves, especially if we consider their writing as epistemological endeavors instructive for their readers as well as their conceptualization of self.

An analysis of African American women writers’ engagement with Jane Crow is outside the scope of Dotson’s epistemological story in “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability,” but their texts illuminate the philosophical conundrum she identifies. From its conception, the African American women’s literary tradition has explored the realities of black women’s social condition under Jane Crow as well as considered, in its various fiction and nonfiction forms, the ways Jane Crow has shaped black women’s production of knowledge.

Pauli Murray’s own memoir Song in a Weary Throat (1987), which narrates the legal scholar’s civil rights activism throughout the twentieth century, makes concrete the material and epistemological injustices black women endure. Whereas Dotson theorizes Jane Crow by outlining the social factors facilitating black women’s “unknowability,” in literary studies, we might say black women’s “unknowability” is actually a matter of audience and, more importantly, a problem of reception. Structural realities (and inequities) demand black women’s invisibility, but black women’s philosophical and literary efforts make them visible—first and foremost—to themselves and each other.

“Theorizing Unknowability”

Dotson describes the conditions fostering black women’s invisibility as “a trifold structure of disappearing” that relies on “disregard, disbelief, and disavowal.”[5] First, black women occupy negative socio-epistemic space in hegemonic culture, which fixes them as unknowable. Public opinion largely classifies black women as irrelevant, and their social vulnerability permits rigid stereotypes that further their invisibility rather than inspire challenges to it. Dotson explains, “a catalyst for invisibility can be seen as, in part, epistemic failings with respect to what we use to make sense of our worlds that serves to obscure certain populations.”[6]

Second, black women experience reduced epistemic confidence, which means they are not afforded plausibility, seen as credible, or viewed as worthy subjects to be “believed in.”[7] In conjunction with the epistemic failings that encourage a disregard of black women, a common-held disbelief in black women delimits their capacity to contribute to the social production of knowledge.

Finally, black women are susceptible to heightened epistemic backgrounding, by which they are demoted to bit players in their own stories or employed as material for juxtaposition instead of subjects of inquiry. Such disavowal, Dotson expounds, displaces black women “as the backdrop of some other subject(s) of contemplation.”[8] Together these three negating environs underwrite black women’s invisibility, which effectively mystifies their Jane Crow oppression by the state and delegitimizes their discernment of their social status.

Dotson’s methodology invites a literary approach to her philosophical interrogation of Jane Crow’s epistemological assault. For example, she cites Toni Blackman’s poetry to exemplify black women’s negotiation of their presence so often mistaken for absence. However, when engaging Pauli Murray’s conceptualization of Jane Crow, Dotson focuses on Murray’s academic and public scholarship. She is careful to note that her work is not an intellectual history of Murray but a “theoretical archeology” of Jane Crow. “It is a story sketched between conceptual fragments in Black women’s social theory,” she writes.[9]

To compose an epistemological story, Dotson stitches together theoretical fragments from Murray’s 1947 article “Why Negro Girls Stay Single” and 1965 essay “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII.” She also mines a quote from Murray’s 1970 essay “The Liberation of Black Women,” in which Murray clarifies, “Jane Crow refers to the entire range of assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, customs, and arrangements that have robbed women of a positive self-concept and prevented them from participating fully in society as equals with men.”[10]

Dotson highlights this fragment’s epistemological relevance by concentrating on the causes of Jane Crow oppression. She contends black women’s “unfavorable placement with respect to prevailing” assumptions, stereotypes, and customs sanctions the material effects and epistemic circumscriptions of Jane Crow.[11] In effect, her grappling with and suture of Murray’s philosophical fragments challenges the hierarchal epistemologies that have characterized black women as unknowable and unknowing.

I appreciate Dotson’s attentive epistemological reading, and I am struck also by the fragment’s reference to Jane Crow’s influence on black women’s “positive self-concept.” This, too, is epistemologically relevant, and I would go further to suggest that it is within fragments of Murray’s creative and nonfiction writing that an inchoate discourse about black women’s positive self-concept, which is often overlooked and undervalued, emerges.

Image by AntonSLarsson via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

“Creatively Theorizing The Black Female Autobiographical Self”

Murray was an accomplished writer as well as a distinguished legal scholar. In addition to academic articles and law compendiums, she produced a collection of poetry, a biography of her grandparents, and her posthumously-published memoir Song in a Weary Throat. The latter takes its title from Murray’s published poem “Dark Testament” (1943), which sketches African American history from African society, captivity, and slavery to impending freedom over the poem’s twelve sections. Its speaker relays, “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”[12] Noticeably, “hope” is not included in the title of Murray’s autobiography, but its affect resonates in her extraordinary life story as a black activist, feminist, lawyer, priest, and poet.[13]

The speaker of “Dark Testament” goes on to entreat, “Give me a song of hope and love/And a brown girl’s heart to hear it” (italics original). This fragment, just a few lines later, suggests that a song of hope does not achieve its full transformative power without a brown girl’s heart and ear—or to put it another way, without an empathetic black female audience. In the introduction to Murray’s poetry collection, Morris Milgram reveals the activist/poet thought of “Dark Testament,” a prodigious narrative, as “only a fragment and forerunner of the epic of black America yet to be written.”[14]

Nonetheless, the fragment frames Murray’s memoir as a song of hope. It also signals the importance of a black female reader to whom and for whom her production of knowledge would be regarded, believed, and avowed despite the presumptions of “unknowability” black women’s Jane Crow oppression provokes.[15]

In her essay “Being the Subject and the Object,” Barbara Christian recalls her experience reading African American women’s fiction, namely Paule Marshall’s novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), for the first time. She writes that the “woman-voice” of the black female protagonist’s mother “constantly interrupted my mind-voice. Her anguish-rage warned me of trials I might have to face.”[16] Marshall’s coming of age tale resonated with Christian, as the latter internalized the lessons she gleaned from the protagonist’s racial and gender struggles.

The novel allowed Christian to confront the epistemic offense intrinsic to black women’s Jane Crow subjection. “In it,” she writes, “I as subject encountered myself as object.”[17] By reading black women’s writing, Christian distinguishes herself as a reader, a subject, from that which is read, an object. Her confrontation with herself as an object codified her abiding invisibility in American literature and culture even as it marked her obvious presence. Christian surmises Brown Girl, Brownstones “was crucial to a deeper understanding of my own life,” and she later learns from a conversation with Marshall that it was written “to unravel [the black female writer’s] own knots.” Central to the acts of reading and writing, then, is black women’s knowing.[18]

Christian’s reflection minds African American women’s fiction, but its premise is helpful for thinking about black women’s epistemic endeavors in nonfiction.[19] A cursory review of black women’s literary criticism in autobiographical studies reveals fragments theorizing their unknowability as well as their efforts to counteract it. In Black Women Writing Autobiography, Joanne Braxton expresses, “We have been knowers, but we have not been known.”[20] She elucidates that autobiography is a way for African American women to “meet,” or know, their mothers “on the conscious plane,” as exemplified by her study of the works of Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Nina Simone, and Maya Angelou among others. “Defying every attempt to enslave or diminish them or their self-expression in any way,” Braxton writes, “black women autobiographers liberate themselves from stereotyped views of black womanhood, and define their own experiences.”[21]

Similarly, Margo Perkins contends that the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown construct “an alternative history that challenges hegemonic ways of knowing.”[22] Finally in Words of Witness, Angela Ards asserts that personal narrative and political discourse intersect within an autobiography to create a “deliberative space where readers” can “imagine the new vocabularies and strategies that the moment demands.”[23] These fragments of knowing identify black women’s autobiography as a vehicle for positive self-concept and social epistemology.

In Song in a Weary Throat, Murray relays the moment she decided to write her memoir late in the narrative. While contemplating a faculty appointment at Brandeis in 1968, she explains, “Suddenly I realized that what I really wanted to do was to write an autobiographical book on Jim Crow and Jane Crow—racism and sexism as they had impinged upon my life.”[24] Murray elected to do both, to teach and write during the summer. Her purpose for penning the book, to write about sexism during the height of twentieth-century black freedom struggles, echoes her resolve to confront systemic oppression depicted throughout her memoir.

Earlier in the text Murray discloses her decision to attend Howard Law School “with the single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow.”[25] However, it is during her time there that she began to theorize Jane Crow, “the twin evil of discriminatory sex bias,” as she was the only female student in her class at the all-black institution which had no women faculty and only one female staff member.[26] “[T]he racial factor was removed in the intimate environment of a Negro law school dominated by men,” she writes, “and the factor of gender was fully exposed.”

Murray describes experiencing the material affects of Jane Crow as well as its epistemological repercussions in this period of her life. She is excluded from the legal fraternity and its extended networks due to her gender. Although she characterizes her male classmates as “friendly,” she qualifies that they “seemed to take it for granted that I had nothing to contribute. For much of that first year I was condemned to silence unless the male students exhausted their arguments or were completely stumped by a professor’s question.”[27] Murray is barred customarily from adding to the class’s production of knowledge. Consequently, she writes that her realization “women were often the objects of ridicule disguised as a joke” by her classmates and professors “aroused an incipient feminism in me long before I knew the meaning of the term ‘feminism.’”[28]

Song in a Weary Throat details Murray’s experiences with racial and gender subordination, but it also outlines the processes of knowledge production that motivated her to identify and signify her Jane Crow oppression.[29] She theorizes the practice in law school, and she applies the term in her 1947 essay “Why Negro Girls Stay Single.” Yet, it is in the fragments of her autobiography that Murray demythologizes black female epistemologies. Song in a Weary Throat is an enlightening testament to black women’s production of knowledge.

Coda

In the conclusion of her essay, Dotson asks, “How does one disrupt epistemic resources that hide their inadequacy behind the shape of its own sense making features? … Would one aim an intervention at the nature of imagination as a means of disrupting knowledge economies?”[30] In response to these questions, she states many black feminists, such as Pauli Murray and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and many black women writers, such as June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, “have tried.”  Yet such a feat could only be accomplished with the demise of Jane Crow—a complete end to its material and epistemological abuses.

Although I engage Pauli Murray as a writer here to offer a complementary approach to Dotson’s theorizing of Jane Crow, I do not claim that black women’s writing irons out Jane Crow’s material paradoxes. I do want to suggest black women’s self-articulation provides them a way to mitigate the intellectual confines of Jane Crow. Black women writers do not “resolve our dilemmas,” to return to Christian’s insights about the literary tradition, but they do “name them.”[31]  In a destructive culture of invisibility, for black women to call out Jane Crow and counter with their self-representation has substantive weight.

Contact details: hardison@ku.edu

References

Ards, Angela A. Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

Bobo, Jacqueline.  Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia, 1995.

Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

___. “Autobiography and African American Women’s Literature.” African American Women’s Literature. Eds. Angelyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 128-147.

Christian, Barbara. “Being the Subject and the Object: Reading African-American Women’s Novels.” New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000. Eds. Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fabi, and Arlene R. Keizer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 120-126.

Clifford, Stephanie and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow.’” New York Times July 21, 2017. Accessed January 31, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/nyregion/foster-care-nyc-jane-crow.html

Cooper, Brittney C. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Dotson, Kristie. “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability.” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 31:5 (2017) 417-430.

Graham, Maryemma. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 1-16

Hardison, Ayesha K. Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Petry, Ann. The Street. 1946. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Milgram, Morris. “Introduction.” Dark Testament and Other Poems. Norwalk, CT: Silvermine, 1970.

Murray, Pauli. “Dark Testament.” 1943. Dark Testament and Other Poems. Norwalk, CT: Silvermine, 1970. 12-27.

___. Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1987.

___. “The Liberation of Black Women.” 1970. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy Sheftall. New York: The New Press, 1995. 186-197.

[1] Kristie Dotson, “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability,” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 31:5 (2017): 417.

[2] Ibid., 420, 425.

[3] Ibid. The degree of black women’s visibility in the current #metoo campaign is also debatable, given the limited discussion of their experiences in Hollywood despite the hashtag’s origin in black female activist Tarana Burke’s grassroots organizing around sexual abuse.

[4] Maisha Joefield, the mother penalized under these circumstances, shares in the article that the temporary removal of her child still makes her nervous: “You’re afraid to parent the way you would normally parent.” The ritualized castigation of poor black mothers with scarce options for childcare speak to the circuitous material and epistemological aspects of their Jane Crow oppression. Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow,’” New York Times July 21, 2017, Accessed January 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/nyregion/foster-care-nyc-jane-crow.html.

[5] Dotson, “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability,” 426.

[6] Ibid., 423.

[7] Ibid., 424.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 418.

[10] Pauli Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women,” 1970, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 186.

[11] Dotson, “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability,” 421.

[12] Pauli Murray, “Dark Testament,” Dark Testament and Other Poems (Norwalk, CT: Silvermine, 1970), 22.

[13] Murray’s public identities are the subtitle to the eponymously titled 1989 edition of her autobiography.

[14] Morris Milgram, “Introduction,” Dark Testament and Other Poems (Norwalk, CT: Silvermine, 1970), n pag.

[15] Jacqueline Bobo differentiates the interpretive community black women create from audiences that passively consume representations perpetuating black women’s ideological domination. Within an interpretive community, “women utilize representations of black women that they deem valuable, in productive and politically useful ways” to challenge their cultural subordination. Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia, 1995), 22.

[16] Barbara Christian, “Being the Subject and the Object: Reading African-American Women’s Novels,” New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000, edited by Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fabi, and Arlene R. Keizer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 121.

[17] Ibid., 122.

[18] African American women’s fiction also theorizes black women’s Jane Crow oppression. For example, Ann Petry’s novel The Street, published in 1946 one year before Murray’s essay “Why Negro Girls Stay Single,” examines Lutie Johnson’s interlocking racial, gender, class, and sexual oppressions as a single mother and domestic worker in Harlem during WWII. Lutie is aware of her invisibility among her white employers, who assume she is promiscuous, and she questions the purpose of being taught how to write, as her voice is undermined throughout the novel. Of course, the existence of Petry’s novel attests to the importance of black women writing and sharing their stories.

[19] The social aims of black women’s fiction and life writing are not mutually exclusive. Maryemma Graham points out “the autobiographical impulse in the African American novel. The continuous need to explain and ‘inscribe the self’ in a world which has historically denied the existence of that self gives both focus and intensity to the act of writing a story about black life.” Maryemma Graham, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5.

[20] Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 1.

[21] Joanne M. Braxton, “Autobiography and African American Women’s Literature,” African American Women’s Literature, edited by Angelyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 128.

[22] Margo V. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), xii.

[23] Angela A. Ards, Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 16.

[24] Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1987), 388.

[25] Ibid., 182.

[26] Ibid., 183.

[27] Ibid., 183-184.

[28] Ibid., 183, 184.

[29] Murray’s autobiography foregrounds her battles with racism and sexism in her public life to the exclusion of her efforts to understand her queer and nonnormative sexual and gender identities in her private life. Brittney Cooper’s intellectual history of Murray highlights the ways Jane Crow and the politics of respectability inform black women’s praxis as “knowledge producers” (102). She reveals, “at exactly the same moment that [Murray] named Jane Crow as a form of sexist discrimination that she experienced as a woman, she was frequently being hospitalized for depression related to her struggle with her gender identity” (100). In my own work on Murray, I argue Song in a Weary Throat “resounds with silence” about her struggle with her gender identity due to Jane Crow’s “literary inscriptions” for black women’s self-representation (17, 15). Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Ayesha K. Hardison, Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

[30] Dotson, “Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability,” 426.

[31] Christian, “Being the Subject and the Object,” 122.

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