Convergence

On the topic of "inequity is caused by favoritism toward ingroup members, not just discrimination against outgroup members" that Tam and I started discussing in the comments of my previous post on white privilege -- Robert just emailed me this link to a Slate blog post about this very idea, pointing to a recently published literature review in American Psychologist that is summarized at the University of Washington website for those of us who do not (any longer) have access to the academic literature.  (It's too bad, I'd like to read this one.)

(Note: It feels a bit funny to realize that in a slightly different version of my life, one in which I'd decided to go to a different one of the PhD programs that accepted me, I could be right now slaving away for one of the authors of that article...and possibly have all the interest in this topic sucked out of me thereby.  I'm much happier blogging about this stuff in my spare time than trying to produce publishable experimental work on the subject.  Or any subject.)

I agree with Tam that this is a particularly invisible form of white privilege, and I agree with the authors of this paper that favoritism is a very powerful force.  And it's a tricky thing -- it seems easier to stop being an asshole [to that group of people] than to stop being nice [to this group of people].  I mean, we're all taught the value of niceness, helpfulness, generosity, etc. -- unfortunately it's easier to apply those values toward people in our ingroup.  We are also (seemingly) pretty much wired to have ingroup preferences from extremely young ages (I particularly like the research on babies' preferences towards people with accents that match their ingroup; the accent preference in infants is apparently stronger and more robust than even racial preference) and we are explicitly taught to privilege and support (at least some of) our ingroups.

In my more cynical moments, I suspect that many college professors who do not treat their students with inequity have closed that gap through shitting off all of them who do not contribute immediately and directly to their own current work (restricting the ingroup to include basically no undergrads).  Can the rest of us work toward being equally nice to all groups of people?  To going out of our way to do something nice for somebody who isn't like us?  Is it possible to work against our unconscious biases in at least some cases by knowingly going against our gut? 

As you probably know by now, I take a pretty pessimistic view of the idea that people can compensate well for biases by knowing about their biases, and the literature is pretty consistent with this.  (For example, I especially like work on blind spot bias.)  But perhaps these outcomes are dependent on some particulars of the process -- for example, perhaps most people assume that knowledge is going to somehow automatically lead to corresponding action and thus reduce their vigilance much of the time, going on auto-pilot expecting that they will automatically correct for their biases, ultimately leading to no improvement (or even detriments) in outcomes. 

I think that this might be part of the value of actively working against the fantasies/pretense that we live in a color-blind, post-racial society and insisting that we deal head-on, explicitly, regularly with concepts of race, sex, etc. -- that perhaps by pushing ourselves (those of us in the majority/in privileged positions) to engage in controlled, conscious processing, questioning our reactions to people and situations with "Am I favoring this person because they are white / male / share my religion / support the same baseball team I do?", we have a better chance of treating people fairly.

I'd also just like to be clear that I think this line of psychological research is a fascinating and important supplement to, but not substitute for, the sociological research and theorizing around institutional racism and white privilege I blogged about earlier.  I think it's easy (and tempting) for a person in a privileged group to read the psychology stuff and think, "See, everybody inherently favors their own ingroups, so black people / women / etc. do the same thing for their groups.  So I'm no worse than anybody else!" and thus absolve themselves of any guilt that the idea of unfair treatment might bring up and decide that there's no need to pay any more attention to this issue.  I personally find this take on things to be both intellectually and morally lazy and think that even if it's hard and uncomfortable, we (those in privileged groups) can all do better than that.

Hah, now how's that for a bit of optimism bias about my ingroup from an unlikely source!  :)