Racial stereotypes Americans face today – including the notion of the dangerous Black male — grew directly out of slavery and its aftermath, a study reports.
“These corrosive stereotypes fueled unequal treatment, and continue to do so even today,” said the December 2014 report. The U.S. is not a “post-racial” colorblind society, “where any racial disparities are due simply to characteristics or behaviors of the affected group themselves.”
The report is called You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Look At: Acknowledging Race in Addressing Racial Discipline Disparities. Its authors are Drs. Prudence Carter, Russell Skiba, Mariella Arredondo and Mica Pollock, Center For Evaluation & Education Policy, Indiana University.
They note early European settlers judged people of color as inferiority to Whites. Famous authors and scientists of that time circulated propaganda claiming to demonstrate the inferiority of non-Europeans to reinforce the stereotypes.
Slavery was justified in the eyes of Whites by the belief that Blacks were inferior. In order for slavery to work, Blacks had to be disciplined and “controlled.”
One way of maintaining a higher order over Blacks were codes enacted beginning in the 17th century. Normal human activity was considered a crime for Blacks of that era. They “made it illegal for slaves to congregate, marry, travel without their masters’ permission or even learn to read.”
False rumors portraying Black men as aggressive and rapists were spread by slaveholders in fear of revolts. Although incidents of Black men raping White women were “rare or unheard of,” a law passed in 1700 in Pennsylvania by William Penn mandated death or castration for such an attempt.
The fear of Black men led to more than 2,500 of them being hanged between 1889 and 1918, mainly for minor offenses “like disputing with a White man, attempting to register to vote, asking a White woman’s hand in marriage or peeping in a window.”
Meanwhile, White men were raping Black women, forcing them to procreate or breed with other slaves and selling their children into slavery. Somehow, this was translated into Black women being “depicted as hypersexual, promiscuous and less virtuous than White women.”
Jim Crow laws continued segregation and a race hierarchy, with Blacks and other people of color on the bottom, long after slavery’s end.
To escape the oppressive laws, bombings and lynchings, Blacks fled the South for the North, where they still faced “attitudes and polices that reinforced segregation and stereotypes, and limited economic opportunity,” said the report.
“For nearly a century after the Civil War, laws and practices enforcing inferior schools for Blacks, Native-Americans, Asians and Mexican-Americans and significantly better educational access, housing and jobs for Whites led to economic and social cumulative advantage for Whites and growing disadvantage for people of color.”
After World War II, the U.S. Supreme court passed Brown vs. Board of Education, rejecting the separate but equal doctrine, requiring steps to overcome the hardships created by legalized segregation. Social scientists theorized increasing contact among different races and classes would break the grip of stereotypes, bias and discrimination. However, social segregation rigidity set stereotypical beliefs in many minds.
Physical and psychological separation across schools, housing areas and social boundaries by race and class fostered segregation and lessened opportunities for interracial interaction that could challenge the stereotypes, the authors said.
In the 1970s, the courts began to roll back or limit post-Brown civil rights reform. The courts refused to act unless it was shown that explicit laws were put into place supporting segregation.
“Segregationist mindsets spawned separatist government and private sector policies that continue to define many of our communities today,” according to the report.
“Controlling images and narratives about different groups of individuals can affect us all across racial lines,” said the report.
Middle class Blacks are no less likely to evaluate students subjectively than White middle class people, the report said. They often act with deep-seated implicit biases outside their conscious awareness.
These actions are often difficult to spot.
Microaggressions can look like a waiter serving a White patron before someone Black, acts conveying underlying (even if unconscious) messages that people of color are less intelligent, otherwise inferior or more dangerous, or sudden overreactions to young people of color as threatening.
Recent studies on implicit bias show negative Black stereotypes are still widespread in U.S. culture. TV shows and other media reinforce negative Black stereotypes by portraying Blacks in the role of criminals. Study participants implicitly or, even unconsciously, associate Blacks with apes and words like “poison” or “cancer.”
A survey showed “58.9 percent of Black and White subjects endorsed at least one stereotypical view of difference in inborn ability.”
The controlling images of the deviant Black person sometimes have deadly consequences and create disruptions in the life chances of many people of color.
Not all is lost. “Police trainings are tackling implicit bias,” said the report. For example, Professor Patricia Devine developed a “multi-faceted prejudice habit-breaking” intervention that trained participants in de-biasing strategies.
“Significant reductions in implicit bias among those trained provide tangible evidence that a controlled intervention can produce persistent reductions in implicit bias.”
