The Science Behind The Stereotype: Why We Have The Biases We Do And How To Confront Them
(first published on Blavity.com)
Love watermelon and fried Chicken? Have natural rhythm? Always accused of having a bad attitude?
Chances are you’re familiar with some of these stereotypes that often pigeonhole black women and men. You may have even made some of these same assumptions about someone before getting to know him or her.
In a society where racial bias is the foundation of the current divide–which if not attended to, can lead to hostility, fear, and violence–we have to ask ourselves: why do we have certain stereotypes in our head and where do they come from?
Thanks to the media and limited on-screen representation, we are inundated with characteristics that we learn to attach to specific groups of people.
We are typically taught to associate white with positive attributes and black with bad. In result, we subconsciously form mental labels as a pattern or type of bias.
In order to look closely at how we develop these associations, let’s delve into a bit of neuroscience and how the brain works.
Learning is a process that can be carried out by a single neuron exposed to repeated stimuli. The neuron identifies a pattern and responds automatically in anticipation of the pattern continuing.
Simple nervous systems work similarly. Snails, for example, have a system of neurons around their body. If you touch a snail’s feeler multiple times, the snail will learn to ignore your touch within minutes. The snail realizes that the poking is not a threat, so it no longer needs to respond.
Some neural pathways work in the opposite way, where the more you poke, or provoke agitation, the more violently the animal will avoid it. This helps the animal respond better to its environment.
Neurologically, this process of responding to consequences–or lack thereof–is how our brain makes decisions on our behalf. Our brain creates patterns out of the stimuli we receive in order to help us make decisions on the spot.
In the case of race, however, the danger lies in the repeated exposure of these misrepresentations, as well as the failure to question the biased information.
For example, stereotypes will influence our thinking negatively toward certain groups, while favorably towards others, creating exclusion and dangerous power dynamics.
We see this when we look at a black person on-screen who is typecast as a character that is violent, uneducated, or poor. Our brain takes the repeated exposure to these negative portrayals and associates them with violence, lack of education, and poverty.
We may not be conscious of these biases as they are being formed; all we have are the results of our embedded prejudice. In turn, we end up perilously characterizing and endangering people in real life. We see it when adult cops say “threatened” by someone like Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old playing in the park.
Understanding that our brain likes to form patterns in order to create mental shortcuts is one thing, but the question is how do we start challenging the biases we’ve formed?
By having an open ear to the experiences of others and being willing to entertain new ideas, we can alter our original way of thinking and create an environment where we truly get to learn from one another.
This may require more energy on our part, but until we are able to challenge the labels we’ve learned to associate with others, we’ll never be able to make room for more inclusion or open up to understanding the people around us.
When we identify these biases, we will be in a better position to ask questions in order to confront our beliefs and values.
Are you curious to see if you have any unconscious racial biases? You can take the Harvard Race IAT test here.
Special thanks to Mary Krendel and Dr. Steve L. Robbins for providing the neurological research for this essay.
Superiority Complex
White fear is fragile, yet horrifyingly powerful.
It demands the disrobing of all other cultures while simultaneously hiding behind robes to perpetrate violence.
As a way to reassert dominance, simply utter the word “fear.” By employing this emotion, murder becomes self-defense, terrorism becomes preservation. All else is ancillary. All other lives are secondary.
White police officers can use fear as a motive for shooting and/or killing a black civilian, executing them on the spot without allowing the victim a fair trial. They can escape any punitive action unscathed.
White fear and the need for superiority can be used as a reason to abolish the majority of a civilization–à propos Native Americans–, while cautiously and underhandedly trying to kill the remnants of those who have survived.
White fear can execute those who are peacefully worshiping, like those who are Black and at a church or those who are Muslim and at a mosque, killing many by citing trepidation of race or culture as motivation.
WHITE FEAR ALWAYS SEEMS TO HAVE THE EFFECT OF SOMEONE ELSE DYING AND IN MASS NUMBERS.
Violence can happen over and over again, yet white fear will never equate to terrorism in the way that Islam equates to terrorism, although white fear is violent and rash.
It is instead hailed as a means of justice for those who employ it.
White fear has more privilege than any other life. It is the weapon that should be acknowledged and never trivialized. It is used often and unreasonably, creating disorder as an illusion to reinstate control.
If we eradicate this group of people then we will all be safe, says white fear.
So when they tell you All Lives Matter, do not believe them. All lives matter only when white fear is not in play, which is almost always never.
Be cautious of white fear, it may get you killed one day.
Everything But the Girl Next Door: A Black Woman in America
“I am tossed, a grenade harpooned into the streets of Barbie faces. I have a detonation of hair and mutilated features: wide nose, thick lips, and boogie man eyes, deep when they hit the soul. I am enough to be a monster by society’s standards.” –The Willow Tree by Elan Carson
I remember sitting on the floor of my kindergarten classroom, eyeing the creamy light-colored palms on my hands and feet thinking, “I’m part White.” I quickly dismissed my brown-hued flesh, asserting I would later look and be “normal”; I was simply going through a phase.
I’m not sure how at this early of an age I was already aware of race and that if you were White, you possessed a certain authority. Maybe it was the Disney movies I watched on repeat, donning a long terry cloth towel as my pseudo wig to hide my furiously tangled, short hair. Or it could have been the Brady Bunch, and my infatuation with hoping I would turn out like Marcia. Even the television set was turned on in the morning revealing bubbly Suzanne Somers, flashes of blonde hair nurturing my toddler admiration for all things bright and subsequently, “pretty.”
Later, I would grow up to develop social anxiety, depression and an unhealthy complex with my racial identity.
Fast forward from kindergarten to a few years later. I became cognizant that at my predominantly, African-African elementary school, girls of color with longer hair and fairer skin were immensely more favored by peers. These girls would casually shuck out comments on having “mixed Native-American heritage,” while others, including myself, played up their exoticism, while downplaying our own self-identity.
Later, during my high school years, I would hold bitter conversations with my African-American male friends who frequently commented that compared to other ethnicities, women of color simply weren’t desirable to men. We were labeled as loud, ghetto, brazen, uneducated and as a whole, unattractive. Even my father would state that if I had my mother’s complexion, eye color, or hair length—my mother being a woman of mixed heritage–that I would be that much more prettier. I started to let everyone’s words configure and sculpt a visual of myself that was entirely untrue.
I fought to overturn those negative thoughts, finding ways to prove that I was in fact smart, creative, easy-going, well-spoken, and even pretty, all while being Black. I didn’t get far though, as I looked to mainstream White role models Lizzie McGuire, Angela Chase, and even Daria, to distance myself from the stereotypes budding around my African-American heritage.
I tried to reconnect with my roots by reading literature like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as well as the soulful, piercingly honest poetry Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes delivered through anthologies. It didn’t hit me until college, though, that maybe I was fighting a losing battle.
After making the long haul from racially segregated Detroit, Michigan to Southern California, I thought I would find solace in what I perceived to be the culturally diverse folds of my new home. Enrolling in a private university, I was apt to join scores of students from different cultural backgrounds. What I found was nearly the complete opposite.
No one could mentally prepare me for the racial jokes, underhanded discrimination, or even unfiltered comments from predominately White students who would occasionally preface their curiosities with “I’ve never seen a Black person before…” I had relocated from one non-racially diverse space to another and this started to take a toll on my psyche.
Before I even graduated, I suffered a complete meltdown. I wasn’t sure how to come to terms with who I was, because I didn’t know where in American society I belonged. I managed to become everything the media had wanted me to be: smart, funny, creative, down-to-earth, all tossed in with a touch of sarcasm. But it would never matter, I realized, after spending one evening with a drunken colleague, who blurted something to the effect of, “You’re such a cool girl. Too bad you aren’t White. If you were you could rule the world.” There it was, spoken aloud.
From that day on, I decided that this battle with my skin color was no longer a “me” problem, as I had diagnosed in the past. It is an everyday dilemma that pulls at each of us. I can still feel it when I experience my guy friends swoon over the girl-next-door charm of Emma Watson, and I realize that twenty years later there still isn’t a mainstream example of her wholesomeness, easy-going, good-natured characteristics packaged into an African-American role available for mainstream consumption. These realizations hurt even more, when I read stories of how women of color from various cultures purchase skin lightening creams in hopes of reaching the pinnacle of America’s standard of beauty.
The truth is, I will never exist as that girl-next-door figure or any other archetype belonging to White women. I am not the “blonde bombshell,” “mysterious brunette,” or even quirky Zooey Deschanel. And I’m OK with that. I’ve decided that being boxed in with a certain stereotype doesn’t allow me the capability to grow and nurture who I am, but to feed an out-of-date machine running on repressed ideals.
Instead of trying to mold my identity into society-appropriated “norms,” I, as a woman of color, have a unique cultural perspective that I get to share with others because of my race, a luxury I’m not sure I would have if I were simply labeled the girl next door. This alone now motivates me to appreciate who am I every day.