Aversive racism is a social scientific theory proposed by Samuel L. Gaertner & John F. Dovidio (1986), according to which negative evaluations of racial/ethnic minorities are realized by a persistent avoidance of interaction with other racial and ethnic groups.
Explicit racism includes any speech or behaviors that demonstrate a conscious acknowledgement of racist attitudes and beliefs.
By contrast, implicit racism includes unconscious biases, expectations, or tendencies that exist within an individual, regardless of ill-will or any self-aware prejudices.
The passage of civil rights legislation and socially enforced taboos against explicit racism have served to inhibit direct outward expressions of prejudice against minorities over the last several decades.
One of the most prevalent ways of assessing implicit racism is through response latency procedures, such as the implicit-association test (IAT).
People from a list of conservative and liberal political parties in Brooklyn, New York was called by a "wrong number" caller, a confederate to the researcher, attempting to get hold of a mechanic to come to help them with their broken-down car.
[15] Because aversively racist people endorse egalitarian values, their biases do not manifest in situations where there are clear social norms of right and wrong.
[16] A wide variety of empirical research supports the effects of nonconscious prejudice on the behavior of people aversively racist tendencies.
According to the aversive racism framework, discrimination should occur in situations in which decision can be ostensibly be based on factors other than race.
Even in the face of similar credentials, participants ostensibly justified their discrimination on the grounds of other, non-racial factors.
Participants were separated into two groups depending on whether they scored high or low on a self-report measure of racial prejudice.
As expected, there was no bias in admission decisions when the student had strong grades combined with high SAT scores.
Even more convincingly, prejudiced participants inconsistently reported to place more value on the particular score that the black students performed poorly in.
[19] Because aversive racism is neither conscious nor blatantly apparent to others, it is able to survive largely unchallenged by societal pressure for egalitarianism.
Johnson and colleagues[21] examined the effects of introducing damaging inadmissible evidence on the judgments of white jurors.
When exposed to only admissible evidence, jurors were not affected by the race of the defendant and perceived both whites and blacks as equally guilty.
The experimenters in the study believed that in these cases, black participants focus more on race due to strong relations within their in-group.
[24] Dovidio et al.[24] found that negative implicit attitudes were correlated with nonverbal cues of discomfort such as increased rates of blinking and decreased eye contact in interactions with blacks.
[25] Consistent with this reasoning, Dovidio, Kawakami, and Gaertner (2002) found that racial majority and racial minority members often based their perceptions of interracial interactions on two different sources of information, with white people relying more on verbal behavior and black people more on nonverbal behaviors.
[citation needed] Aversive racism has been hypothesized in the 2008 presidential elections with the emergence of the first biracial candidate, Barack Obama.
[28] A survey conducted by Stanford University claimed support for Obama would have been "six percentage points higher if he were white".
[29] The New York Times journalist, Nicholas Kristof stated that "most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses will belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objections to electing a black person as president – yet who discriminate unconsciously".
According to the common ingroup identity model inducing individuals to recategorize themselves and others as part of a larger, superordinate group can lead to more positive attitudes towards members of a former out-group.
While minorities often prefer to have their racial identity recognized, people who employ the "colorblind" approach can generate greater feelings of distrust and impressions of prejudice in interracial interactions.
[33] Furthermore, when practiced consistently, these monitored behaviors become less and less disparate from the personal standards of the individual, and can eventually even suppress negative responses that were once automatic.
This is encouraging, as it suggests that the good intentions of aversively racist people can be used to help eliminate their implicit prejudices.
Those in the hypocrisy condition were made to write about some time they had been unfair or prejudiced towards an Asian person, while those in the control group were not.
[34] In another study measuring the correction of implicit bias among aversively racist people, Green et al. examined physicians' treatment recommendations for blacks and whites.
A growing body of research has demonstrated that practice pairing minority racial out-groups with counter-stereotypic examples can reduce implicit forms of bias.
[38] One very interesting finding may have implied that aversive racism can be combated simply by eliminating the desire to employ the time- and energy-saving tactic of stereotyping.