When we speak about race, you’ll find that most Americans agree that people of all races and ethnicities should be treated equally and with respect. However, personal experiences and news reports show us that race and ethnicity continues to be a problem and it affects how people are treated and how we all interact with each other on a daily basis. Most of us are aware that racial prejudice has a major impact on our lives and on our community. However, prejudice alone does not fully account for all racial dynamics, including occurrences where people of color may experience different treatment from white people. Therefore, we must realize the impact of racial anxiety (the discomfort people feel in anticipation of or during interracial interactions).
Most of us are concerned about how we may be perceived when we are communicating with others who come from different racial groups or ethnicities, and this can make us feel unsure about how to act. In the subject of race, this concern may be particularly severe, as people of color worry that they will fall victim to racial bias and white people worry that their words or actions will be misconstrued or assumed to be racist. This anxiety very often comes from lack of experience in interacting or being around other racial groups, this leads us to develop cultural stereotypes or distorted perceptions about what other groups are like.
Racial anxiety can be interpreted into behaviors that may seem to be bias, for example, the following are all examples of symptoms of racial anxiety:
- maintaining less eye contact
- keeping a physical distance
- smiling less
- using an aggressive or less friendly verbal tone, or even
- avoiding all interactions with people from other races altogether
All these behaviors can have major repercussions for perpetuating racial injustices, for example, a white teacher to appear to be engaging less with students color due to awkward body language, or by actually engaging less with students of color. Also, white employers conducting shorter interviews with non-white applicants, or patients of a certain race being less trusting of doctors from a different race. In addition, avoidance and distancing behaviors can also be due to racial prejudice, and people of different race may interpret these behaviors to be coming from racial prejudice, instead of interpreting them as a result of anxiety about interacting with other racial groups.
However, fortunately, racial anxiety is something that can be changed. This would require us to reach beyond our segregated friendship circles or communities, and develop meaningful relationships with people of other races, this has been proven by psychological research (Tropp, 2011). The more we do, the more we can:
- develop positive attitudes/empathy with people of other races
- gain confidence about navigating cross race interactions in the future, and
- alleviate our anxieties about cross race interactions
Positive experiences with people from other races can also help to lower the impact of negative cross racial encounters and help to make people more resilient when they engage in stressful interactions in the future. Most importantly, the advantage of cross race contact may not occur right away, one brief meeting between strangers or acquaintances can induce anxiety, especially for those with a brief history of interracial experiences. People usually become more comfortable with one another through repeated interactions across racial lines that grow closer over time. Even among people that show high levels of racial bias, physiological signs of stress can decrease through repeated interracial interactions, which can in turn cause future interracial experiences to be more positive in nature.
The circumstances in which people from different races come into contact matter. Reduced prejudice and racial anxiety happens most often when people from different races work together as equals towards a common goal, institutional support that endorses this kind of equal status also helps a great deal. Some examples of how these conditions can facilitate familiarity, positive changes and mutual respect in interracial attitudes are integrated sports teams and cooperative learning strategies. However, such favorable conditions can’t always be guaranteed across different situations. We may use these additional strategies to help create a common sense of identity and increase the potential for members from different groups to become friends, we can do this by establishing norms that promote interaction and empathy between groups and encourage respect for group differences.
However, given the fact that most of our communities and social circles remain segregated, it can be difficult to achieve interracial contact. Racial anxiety is usually a byproduct of racially similar environments, which render cross race interaction less likely and increase the changes that it will be less positive if it does occur. In such cases like these, indirect forms of contact, such as observing positive interracial interactions, or knowing that members of your racial group have friends and/or acquaintances in other racial groups, can help to reduce anxiety, promote more positive expectation for future interracial interactions, and create positive shifts in attitude.
The most important thing is to continue to reduce the impact of racial bias and prejudice, and address the structural and institutional conditions that perpetuate our country’s history of racial discrimination. While engaging in these efforts, we must also realize that addressing our racial anxiety is critical if we hope to achieve long-term goals in removing racialized barriers to belonging, opportunity, and inclusion.
We can use intergroup contact techniques to reduce racial anxiety and promote positive interracial relationships as an important complement to other anti-discrimination efforts. We can all benefit from moving past the confines of our group boundaries and into a broader more open circle of friendships, relationships, and colleagues.
References:
Pettigrew, Thomas & Tropp, L.R.. (2012). When groups meet: The dynamics of intergroup contact. When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact. Retrieved July 27, 2020, from 1-310. 10.4324/9780203826461.
Tropp, L. R., & Mallett, R. K. (Eds.). (2011). Moving beyond prejudice reduction: Pathways to positive intergroup relations. American Psychological Association. Retrieved July 27, 2020, from https://doi.org/10.1037/12319-000
Tags: Applied social psychology, Diversity, equality, intergroup relations, Interracial Contact, prejudice, Racial Anxiety
When considering the ideas of race, ethnicity, equality, and prejudice, we normally think of openly racial things that have been said or blatant acts of prejudice. While I agree that such prejudice is a problem and that more interracial contact would likely help some people to become more accustomed to such interactions. I also agree that on the surface it might help to alleviate the nervousness that many people experience. However, what about the biases and actions that are not so open, not so easily identifiable, and much more insidious? For instance, racial bias can take the form of body language and remain completely nonverbal, this is more subtle, and, in its subtlety, it slips past our guard more than other more obvious forms of prejudicial or biased behavior. According to Weisbuck, Pauker, and Ambady, this is because “biased facial expressions and body language may resist conscious identification and thus produce a hidden social influence.” (2009, 1711). The hidden social influence that happens immediately before us and those that happen at a distance. These influences deeply ingrained and therefore less likely to be eradicated.
Perhaps if we were not surrounded by the biases of society everywhere, every day we might find a way to purge those biases from our interactions. For example, you would think that such biases and behaviors would be abolished in arenas like television where the writers must consider the feelings and beliefs of their potential audience members. However, the truth seems to be the opposite, especially in cases of nonverbal instances of bias, according to Weisbuck, Paucker, and Ambady, the evidence shows “that race biases can be subtly transmitted via televised nonverbal behavior. Characters on 11 popular television shows exhibited more negative nonverbal behavior toward black than toward status-matched white characters” (2009, 1711). No face to face interaction, no openly biased actions, and yet it is there and our minds are affected by it. Can this kind of bias be influenced by merely having more interactions? I am unconvinced.
Whether we see the bias for what it is, or it touches us more subtly the effects are measurable through our body language. Meadors and Murray found and reported in their 2014 study, Measuring Nonverbal Bias Through Body Language Responses to Stereotypes, that “the results indicate that biases in attitudes and beliefs might be reliably detected and measured through body language.” (p. 209). For example, when people are discussing the reactions to white criminal stereotypes and black criminal stereotypes, the Meador and Murray study revealed that when testing the concept, did the individuals display racial bias through their nonverbal cues and body language? “The hypotheses were partially supported by the data; the effect was predicted for females but only partially predicted for males.” (2014, 221). Meaning that well over half the time the actions of racial bias were predictable.
The Meador and Murray study further revealed that the most telling display of racial bias was in the body posturing, participants in the study tended to close their posture as they described white suspects and opened their posture when describing black suspects. “Considering the concept of immediacy (i.e., involvement in the interaction) as well as the correlations between closed posture and ratings of uncertainty, this closed nature of the body implies that the encoder’s communication may not be as readily perceived as trustworthy or certain if it is not presented in an open, cooperative manner.” (Meador and Murray, 2014, 224). Therefore, a bias was revealed because the participants felt they were more certain of their suspicions when it came to the black suspect and less ready to report their suspicions about the white suspect.
Another surprising result of racial bias studies is found in the study the Ironic Effects of Racial Bias During Interracial Interactions, by Shelton, Richeson, Salvatore, and Trawalter, from 2005, where the researchers found that “Previous research has suggested that Blacks like White interaction partners who make an effort to appear unbiased more than those who do not.” (p. 397). The study revealed that indeed” there are situations in which whites with higher levels of automatic racial bias may appear less threatening than whites with lower levels of automatic racial bias” to people of color. (Richeson, Salvatore, and Trawalter, 2005, p. 401). This is largely because those that are the most bias are also under a lot of pressure to appear unbiased so it changes their behavior.
We are nearly brainwashed by society, our biases are so ingrained, that even those that the bias is against are inclined to favor interactions with those that are most biased. In addition, these biases are not limited to a simple white and black dichotomy. We can see it play out not just between racial and ethnic groups but across a spectrum of social groups, white vs. black, Puerto Ricans vs. Mexicans, boomers vs. millennials, men vs. women, protestant vs catholic you name it and we’ll divide it, it’s human nature to categorize and separate things and that is the root of the problem. After all, how do we expect to escape those biases when they surround us every day in our television, the things we see on the internet and hear on the radio, in our schools, our churches, and our families? They are in our daily interactions. The problem is rooted in more than just our nervousness about the unknown people or groups, it is not about familiarity, it is a learned set of actions that stems from our own flawed humanity.
References
Meadors, J. D., & Murray, C. B. (2014). Measuring nonverbal bias through body language responses to stereotypes. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 38(2), 209-229.
Shelton, J. N., Richeson, J. A., Salvatore, J., & Trawalter, S. (2005). Ironic effects of racial bias during interracial interactions. Psychological Science, 16(5), 397-402.
Weisbuch, M., Pauker, K., & Ambady, N. (2009). The subtle transmission of race bias via televised nonverbal behavior. Science, 326(5960), 1711-1714.