Could We Ever Unlearn Prejudice?

[Ricardo] We’re recording? Okay. Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the [mumbles] okay.

[Danyelle] Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the UT Dallas CometCast Network.

[Ricardo] Could We Ever shines a light on our experts and ask them to tackle questions you never knew you needed answered.

[Danyelle] From science to art and more.

[Reporter to audience] We brought together three groups of kids at this day camp and showed them pictures of two men — one Arab the other Asian.

[Reporter to kids] Who do you like better? This man…. or this man?

[Kid 1] The Chinese guy.

[Reporter to audience] Over and over they said they like the Asian man more than the Arab.

[Kid 1] He looks meaner and he looks nicer.

[Kid 2] Because he looks nicer.

[Kid 3] Yeah, he does look nicer and he, he has a smile on.

[Reporter to audience] But both men are smiling. And what do the kids think about the personalities of the men?

[Reporter to kids] Let me ask — you don’t know this person but what do you think he’s like?

[Kid 1] I think he’s weird.

[Reporter to kids] Why is he weird?

[Kid 1] He just doesn’t look like a very nice person.

[Ricardo] That was a clip from a 2006 story on ABC News’ 20/20 and today we’re discussing a very timely topic. We are asking, could we ever unlearn prejudice?

[Danyelle] Our guest today is Dr. Salena Brody, professor of instruction in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Dr. Brody is the assistant dean for equity, justice and inclusion for BBS and also serves as an assistant director for the Center for Teaching and Learning. Dr. Brody teaches a variety of courses including the psychology of prejudice, workplace psychology, intro to psychology and inter-group emotion and social change. Her research interests include inter-group contact, cross-group friendships and prejudice reduction. Before we get started we just wanted to quickly remind y’all that this was recorded remotely, so we apologize for any audio mishaps. And just a quick trigger warning — we discuss virtually all the isms in the book so be sure you’re in a good headspace before giving this ep a listen.

[Ricardo] Okay, now let’s get to the chat. All right, hello, Dr. Brody. How are you today? Thank you for joining the podcast.

[Dr. Brody] Hello. I’m great, thank you for having me.

[Ricardo] So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your expertise on the topic of psychology of prejudice?

[Dr. Brody] Yeah I’d be happy to. So I’m part of the teaching faculty within the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas. I’m trained as a social psychologist and I earned my doctorate from UC Santa Cruz and my undergraduate degree is from Boston College where I majored in psychology and I had a minor concentration in faith, peace and justice studies. So my graduate work specifically focused on inter-group contact and prejudice reduction and I’ve studied contact in lots of different areas — in mixed income housing, in service learning contexts and also in experimental lab settings, and so I have an interest in how cross-group relationships can lead to support for policies that support the out group. So basically how interpersonal relationships have the power to create the support needed for systemic or institutional change.

[Danyelle] And what compelled you to go this route in psychology?

[Dr. Brody] That’s a good question. I think, um, when I think about my personal experiences — I am the child of Indian immigrants and um I grew up here in the Dallas area and I was very much shaped by the environment, you know, of the 1980s and the kinds of questions that I was asked as a child. You know, I was often asked things like, what are you or where are you from. And I think that experience of being othered as a young child certainly shaped the way that I see the world and myself in it. And so that kind of shapes who you are, right? And the things that you’re interested in and the questions that you want to ask in, in life personally and that became then a professional curiosity for me as well.

[Danyelle] So before we get started with talking about prejudice, can you just quickly define the term for us and how you’re going to use it in the rest of this conversation?

[Dr. Brody] Sure. So prejudice means a prejudgment, and the way that social psychologists typically use the term involves negative affect or emotion. So when we talk about prejudice we’re really talking about the feeling component, and stereotypes are the cognitive component and discrimination is the behavioral component. So in everyday language we are really talking more about isms like racism, sexism, heterosexism, anti-semitism, classism and the list goes on.

[Ricardo] How do we see prejudice happen in society and who does it affect and how?

[Dr. Brody] That’s a great question. Um, there’s a little equation that I tell my students that I learned in my own training as a social psychologist and it’s this: prejudice plus power equals an ism. That means that it’s not just the negative feelings that one group holds about another group that matters. Because that has no power to subjugate another group of people. It is this combination of the negative effect, um, plus the, the power over another group that matters. And so we can use different lenses to answer your question about who does it affect and how does it affect people. So we can look at an interpersonal lens or we can look at an institutional lens to examine the effects of each ism. At the interpersonal level we can talk about the effects of prejudice for the target. So whether that’s trauma — that is suffering and stress mental and physical consequences. Or we can talk about at the institutional level which is access to resources um whether you move up in a you know a pipeline or whether that pipeline is closed off to you, whether there’s a pay gap, whether there are big differences in health and mortality. So there’s different levels of analysis when we’re examining the effects of any of these isms.

[Danyelle] I’ve heard a lot of things lately, especially in light of the social justice movements that have been taking place about reverse racism. But reverse racism doesn’t seem to have that key component of power. Can you speak to that?

[Dr. Brody] Right, so it matter who, it matters who’s holding the power, right? And so if you’ve got a disadvantaged, you know, marginalized, oppressed group who holds very little power, it’s not gonna make a big dent in the majority group that they might hold some negative attitudes towards them. But the other way around certainly has the potential to shape the everyday experiences, the health and the livelihood of the disadvantaged, marginalized, oppressed group and so there we see that it’s not an equal equation, right? That the directionality there matters quite a bit when we add power to the equation.

[Ricardo] And where does prejudice come from? Is it learned?

[Dr. Brody] So I think a lot of students in my classroom come on the first day of class signing up for the psychology of prejudice thinking, well, I didn’t learn prejudice at home. I was taught by my parents to treat everyone equally, to be kind and respectful. And the kind of consequence of that thinking is, therefore I’m not really part of the problem. And it takes a beat to move past this idea that the problem of prejudice is not one that is solely parents actively teaching hate at home. You know, it really takes a minute to work through the, the idea that, that prejudice isn’t just about individual kindness to individual people. It’s not particularly a useful frame to think of yourself as just a non-prejudiced person when you are trying to, to solve these bigger issues. And so we do spend some time in class really trying to work past that idea that treating people with kindness and respect is not the same thing as being, you know, anti-racist. Right? That it’s much, much more work than than just this kind of individual treatment of individual people.

[Danyelle] And so a lot of times when I hear people talk about prejudice and this idea that I didn’t learn it, I wasn’t taught it — some folks even talk about being considered colorblind and they say things like, well, I don’t see color, or my parents taught me, you know, that a person’s color doesn’t matter. But if you’re saying that prejudice isn’t always taught then does the concept of colorblindness fall apart at that point?

[Dr. Brody] Yeah. I love that. Uh, that’s a great way to put it. So to borrow a term from social psychologist Scott Plous, he says we are wired for trouble. So it’s from the very get-go the way that our brains are wired that we are set up to think in categories. In fact, Gordon Allport, who wrote the classic text ‘The Nature of Prejudice,’ uh, in 1954, he talked about how the human mind really must think with the aid of categories and how these categories are really the basis for pre-judgment. He wrote, we cannot possibly avoid the process — orderly living depends on it. I mean, those are some bold words, right? Orderly living depends on it.

[Ricardo, aside] Quick interruption. We’ll leave a link to ‘The Nature of Prejudice’ by Gordon Allport in the show notes. Alright, now back to the conversation.

[Dr. Brody] And so of course our brains are designed to simplify all this complexity around us. So we create these mental categories that help us make sense of the world. And just in the same way that we have a category to understand what a table is we also simplify our social worlds as well and that’s called social categorization. These categories, though, that we create, um, they are more fixed and rigid than reality actually suggests. So that creates some problems, right? So when something doesn’t fit into a category very neatly we tend to just assimilate that into a pre-existing category. What we know is that group boundaries are much fuzzier than our categories suggest.

[Danyelle] What do you mean by that?

[Dr. Brody] So I’ll give you an example. We can ask the question, who is Black, right? And in our class, uh, I assign my students to read from some scholars who examine this question. And so historically our nation has decided that a person with any drop of Black blood is a person who is Black and this was called the one-drop rule. And so you can see that that is a, a legal definition of identity. And that doesn’t always mesh with people’s real life experiences. And so sometimes we see categories change over time and new categories have emerged to differentiate people further. We can see that in conversations about gender now that we sometimes have new, new words that we are using to include people who typically haven’t been included in the way we’ve talked about gender. We have this when it comes to, to race in the language that we use to talk about people who are biracial, who don’t necessarily neatly fit into fixed categories. And there’s also a long history of this that we should be aware of. And so whiteness early on, you know, we can ask the question also, who is white? Whiteness was a category that was invented and it was invented to serve those in power. So when we had people who were mixed race we had to come up with new words to put them in a category that was not white. So we actually have lots of people who were the children of white people and mixed race people and so genetically speaking those children were actually more white than Black but they were excluded from all the privileges that whiteness afforded. So you see then that the definition and the category was designed specifically to exclude people from rights and privileges and freedoms. And so those categories are, they’re important to recognize the functions that they serve in our real everyday lives.

[Danyelle] So Dr. Brody, are there any, like, modern day examples of the one-drop rule? Are there, is there anything in popular media that people can relate this to?

[Dr. Brody] I think so. We are still in 2020 having conversations about who is Black. You just need to turn on the news, uh, or open a newspaper and look at the commentary about Senator Kamala Harris and her identity as both a Black woman and a South Asian woman. And so I know I’ve seen conservative pundits questioning the authenticity of her Black identity and making this claim that because she has a Jamaican father it makes her a different type of Black person, that she is not eligible to be called African-American. And I would argue that that kind of thinking, that kind of argument really largely misses the point about the experience of being Black in America. But we are still having this conversation about whether she is Black, whether she is Black enough, whether she’s a different kind of Black person, and so I would say that this conversation hasn’t quite been settled yet, has it?

[Danyelle] When we’ve talked before you’ve mentioned that your class is a lot of history, possibly as much history as psychology. Can you walk us through why learning history and historical context is so important for the psychology of prejudice?

[Dr. Brody] Yes. I wish I did not have to teach so much history in a class that is a psychology upper division elective, so my hope is that one day we will do a much better job in our k-12 education at teaching a fuller history so that I can just focus on what I know best. I teach so much history because we need to be on the same page as we are investigating these isms. So in class we might look at how individuals support and uphold and justify and benefit from these systems and we’re going to look at attitude change and different types of dependent variables — so things like, you know, how does an intervention create change at the individual level? Does that change generalize to support for change at an institutional level? Do the positive effects of an intervention generalize to other disadvantaged groups? And in order to really have a meaningful conversation there it’s important to see a historical throughline to the present and, um, I sometimes use this story of a red violin to illustrate what I’m talking about, um, and I’m happy to share that with you now if you want, if that would be helpful.

[Danyelle] Yes, tell us a story.

[Dr. Brody] Okay, so there is this this old movie actually — it’s not old it came out in 1998, which was the year that I graduated from college — and this movie is called ‘The Red Violin’ and it tells the story of this one violin across four centuries and five countries, through many different owners, and the screenwriters weave together this like super fantastical tale that you can only tell by zooming way out and seeing how all the dots are connected.

[Danyelle, aside] Hey friends, if you want to check out the movie ‘The Red Violin’ there’s a link to it in our show notes. Now back to Dr. Brody.

[Dr. Brody] And so when we zoom out we can appreciate the journey, the struggle and the interconnectedness among us. And in real life, though it’s really hard to zoom out. We don’t have the vantage point of a spectator who’s able to see across time and space. But what I’d like my students to do is to try, right? To try to see the connections that are invisible to us. So these invisible throughlines help us understand how where we are now is really a function of where we’ve been before. So we have a current events focus in the psychology of prejudice class. Like we start every class with a current events speed round and so, for example, if my students came to class and were talking about immigration policy in 2020 or the ways in which the president is talking about immigration, I would really want my students to look back in time and to understand that the conversation that we’re having now is from an old playbook and so for example in 1924 we have a really important immigration act and this act, um, you know, in the early 1900s we have the American eugenics movement, we have this creation of whiteness as a category in deciding who is white — and that really meant who is not white — and so there are some really important Supreme Court cases that definitely impacted people like me and people who are listening. So in the early 1900s we have a really important Supreme Court case — the Ozawa case — and this is in 1923 and Ozawa was a Japanese-American businessman. He was born in Japan. Had lived in the United States for 20 years. He files for U.S. citizenship, which he was not eligible for because citizenship was only for free white persons. And Ozawa says, hey my skin is as white if not whiter than the people you’re giving citizenship to, therefore I should get citizenship, too. And he lost and white was determined to be only for people who were Caucasian. So then comes in Thind. Thind was a Indian Sikh person and Indians like Thind were truly members of the Caucasian race. So the way this works out it was like the perfect counterpoint to the Ozawa case. So Thind says, okay, you’re only giving citizenship to Caucasians? Well sign me up. And no surprise, the Supreme Court says well, actually we didn’t really mean you, we meant a different kind of Caucasian person. And so this is the lead-up to the Immigration Act of 1924, which set the quotas of immigration back to 1890.

[Ricardo] So switching gears for a little bit, let’s talk about academia. We know you’re interested in amplifying the work of historically disadvantaged and marginalized scholars in your field. So what type of prejudice exists in academia?

[Dr. Brody] This is a great question and one I am very, very interested in teaching students about. And so there are quite a few unsung pioneers in the field of psychology and this is really troubling because we should, as professionals, be really honest and reckon with the racism and the sexism and the other isms in our own field before we go about teaching. I tried to work on this as an educator and to, to learn about the people who contributed to the field who weren’t necessarily in the textbook and this can be really challenging because it requires asking, what don’t I know. Who’s not included here? That’s a hard thing to Google, right? What don’t I know? Who isn’t here? And it takes time and effort and I would say that this process is still unfolding for me. But one thing that I’ve tried to do in my introduction to psychology course — so these are intro courses usually with mostly first and second year students — I’m spotlighting a scientist each unit who contributed to our field despite institutional discrimination. And so these are usually people who are not prominently featured in the textbook. But I’m using the terms racism and sexism to explain what their experiences were as scientists at the time they were doing their work. And to just be really explicit about that that’s part of the history of psychology. And there are lots of examples of these scholars and some of these scholars have really changed America and they’re still not prominently featured in our textbooks. And one example I’d like to highlight is the work of Mamie Phipps Clark.

Mamie Phipps Clarke was an expert on self-concept, particularly looking at self-concept with Black children, and she was just doing her thing in the 1940s, working hard, asking important questions and she ends up sharing her work with Kenneth Clark, who becomes her husband, right? So it’s Mamie’s original work, uh, that is on the self-concept of Black children. She does this doll study that becomes very famous — it’s the Clark and Clark study — and this study becomes part of the Brown v Board landmark desegregation Supreme Court case. It’s footnote 11. It’s an important piece of social psychological evidence for why separate but equal is harmful to Black children in particular. But what’s important to recognize is that Mamie Clark really didn’t get her due. Kenneth Clark was often given credit for the work and to his credit he often tried to give Mamie Clark credit along the way and he’s, uh, you can find lots of examples of him saying it was really Mamie’s work, it was her original work. But the way that the story has been told has really excluded Mamie Clark’s contributions. And so there was a recent study published in the summer of 2020 that does this amazing work of documenting representation in the way that we teach the history of psychology and I just, I love this study because it shows you just how bad we are doing at representing these unsung pioneers. And in this content analysis of the most frequently used textbooks for the history of psychology, women of color represent 0.2 percent in the bodies of the textbooks that are analyzed. And when we look at the extended tables of contents, zero mentions. Mamie Clark — we can specifically look at her. She is not nearly as represented as other women and certainly women are barely represented when it comes to the contributions of men in our field. But this is a person whose work changed the lives of so many people in this country for generations and we’re barely giving her her due. And so that’s one way that we can do better, is by taking this evidence and incorporating the unsung pioneers as pivotal people in, in our history. So putting that in writing in our textbooks. There are other ways that we can do this as well. When we are looking at how prejudice manifests in our field we can look at the topics that we choose to explore, that are worth doing research on, the samples that we choose, whether we have access to participation in labs and other opportunities to help people move up in the field, hiring practices and also the funding allocations from granting institutions. So there was another study that, that came out in 2019 that looks specifically at funding discrepancies and found that topic choice contributed to lower rates of NIH funding for Black scientists who are more likely to propose community-based research and so that’s one example where you can see how an institution has these kind of disproportionate impacts on, on groups.

[Danyelle, aside] Hey, y’all. Just a reminder to check out our show notes again. We’re including links to more information on the court cases Dr. Brody has talked about and other historical examples and research studies she’s mentioned.

[Ricardo, to Dr. Brody] So you’re doing some work on this topic with the author of your intro to psych textbook, is that right?

[Dr. Brody] I was invited to a dinner a few years ago with the author of the textbook and I found myself sitting across from him and he was lovely and, and just really engaging with all of these psychology professors and I don’t know if I had had a glass of wine and that made me a little bit brave but he asked me about my use of the textbook and I found myself saying, the way that you cover women and women of color is really disappointing. And I said a few more things along this line as my husband looked at me with his eyes bugged out wondering, what are you doing? I, I said what I had to say. I thought it might be my only opportunity to say it and he was so approachable and I thought, I’ve got nothing to lose here. So I said it and the evening moved on and we chit-chatted about other things and I thought well at least I said what I had to say and to my surprise the very next day I received an email from the author of the textbook who said he had been thinking about what I had told him and that he should do better, the textbook should do better and they will do better. And he asked me if I would help. And so that started a project where I worked with a textbook to research all of these people that the textbook was not including and there have been a number of changes in the textbook since. So now when you look at the textbook I use there used to be a timeline where all these people were not included at the beginning of the book and now you see these lovely pictures and the inclusion of the forgotten scholars and that makes me really proud to see and I know for sure it makes a difference to, to my students. So it can be done, it has been done and I think that there is, there is a drive to get this kind of work done, uh, within scholars of the field.

[Danyelle] So Dr. Brody, how can we ask individuals reduce prejudice?

[Dr. Brody] Well, thankfully we have intergroup relations scholars who have been trying to answer this question for well over half a century so I have some good answers for you here. So in the 1950s we have Gordon Allport proposing the inter-group contact hypothesis and he kind of sets out the stage for under what conditions can we reduce prejudice, which is the question that you’re asking. And Allport says, I think I know what’s going to reduce prejudice. It’s if there’s equal status within the contact situation, if there is support from authority and that there are norms for, for this kind of contact to happen, and that there’s cooperative interdependence towards a shared goal. So you’ve got Allport proposing this in the 1950s and then basically researchers are tackling this, this question. We’ve been doing it ever since. And so we do know some things about the conditions under which contact between groups can lead to prejudice reduction. And our best hope seems to be cross-group friendship. And friendship is the mechanism that does a lot of things. It helps us learn about the out group, it helps us counter negative stereotypes and to chip away at those stereotypes, it increases positive affect and I would say most importantly cross-group friendships increase support for the policies that really improve the lives of out group members. So here it’s not just about a nice thing that happens between two people — it becomes a mechanism to create social change and that’s why it’s important to consider. We also have evidence of extended contact effects and this is pretty cool. It means that I might not have a cross-group friend but I see you in your successful cross-group relationship and there are some positive effects of just seeing other people having these positive inter-group relationships. We also have some evidence about how positive contact effects generalize to the support of other disadvantaged out groups. And that’s really exciting, too, right? So you have contact with someone who’s different from you and that gives you access to their perspectives, their identities, uh, the way that they see the world, and because of that we have this inclusion of other in the self. So that person you become closer with and you include them in the, the way that you think about yourself. And by virtue of them being a member of a group that you’re not a part of, that group becomes self-relevant and so things that happen to your out group member because of their group membership now are relevant to you as well. But it’s also important to recognize that out group friendships are not all rainbows and puppies. The thing about cross-group relationships, research shows us that is precisely in the friendship when the issue of prejudice emerges that friends suffer a dip in closeness. So this is important, right, because you’re kind of bringing up the difficult material and you’ve got a fork in the road, right? You have a dip in closeness. You were really close before and now you’ve got relationship partners, say, talking about experiences of racism. The key is working through that difficult conversation. And so in the lab we can kind of force people to continue having contact with each other and when they do that closeness re-emerges. And we have all these positive effects. In real life we need people to kind of continue on in their relationship even though there’s a little blip, right? There’s a little bit of difficulty when we’re doing the hard work, when we’re having the hard conversations. But the dividends are pretty great when individuals actually do this.

[Danyelle] That’s great news, yes. And then what are some ways that we as a society can reduce prejudice?

[Dr. Brody] I think we’re seeing steps towards this right now. We have a lot of people talking about anti-racism work, looking at prejudice within the self and that’s, that’s great. I think structurally it means that we look at the impact, whether intentional or not, of policies that disproportionately and systematically hurt particular groups and then we do something about that. I think we have to start where we’re at and that might mean starting kind of micro local, looking at your own attitudes and behaviors and branching out to our spheres of influence, right? We have to really think about the bigger issues and particularly where racism was the prime architect. So, looking at things like how our neighborhoods were constructed, why the were constructed and where the were constructed. How they were planned. How the highways and the roadways we travel destroyed thriving communities and neighborhoods, how the textbooks that we use neglect a fuller history. That’s part of our sphere of influence, is looking at the ways in which we live, the loops that we travel, and seeing how we are preventing ourselves from having the types of inter-group contact that are necessary to achieve some of these goals.

[Ricardo] Dr. Brody, you’ve given us so much to consider on this topic. So what do you think? Could we ever unlearn prejudice?

[Dr. Brody] Those of us who do this work wouldn’t be doing it if we weren’t optimistic at heart in answering that question. So as a psychologist I’m going to emphasize the power of relationships. So being anti-racist can’t just be an abstract concept. It has to involve moving out of your bubble, broadening the loops that you are in. And you have to be in relationships with people who have different identities and perspectives and experiences. I also think that unlearning prejudice means doing a whole lot of learning — learning a full, fuller history of this country, learning how racism has been at the root of many of our institutions and learning that the only way forward is for us to collectively address systemic injustice.

[Danyelle] We want to thank Dr. Brody again for coming on Could We Ever. She wanted to plug the teach-ins the School of Arts and Humanities is hosting. We’ll include a link to their virtual events page in our show notes. She is also hosting a book club in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences for the book ‘Not Light But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom,’ by Matthew R. Kay. If you want to check out the book we’ll link to that, too.

[Ricardo] And we have one last quick CometCast plug. Say that 10 times. [laughter] If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our Comets Discuss: Prejudice episode with Dr. Brody on the psychology of prejudice. If you like what you hear please leave us a review.

[Danyelle] And a five star rating.

[Ricardo] You can find Could We Ever on all major podcasting platforms.

[Danyelle] Also check out our website utdallas.edu/cometcast.

[Ricardo] Until we talk next time, whoosh! The UT Dallas CometCast is a podcast network brought to you by the UTD Office of Communications.

[Danyelle] A special thanks to Senior Lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to follow the university on social media and check out Could We Ever and our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. So listen out for us next time.