Join us this Sunday as Kristen Brown Golden leads us in an exploration of whiteness: “Privilege, Psychoanalysis, and Implicit Racial Bias.” A Q&A session will follow the message.

“If for many whites, complacency with racial advantage can seem highly unintentional, the question in this inquiry is: unintentional in what way? Are we talking about denied racially-biased beliefs that, though disavowed and ignored, remain accessible to consciousness? Or a deeper kind of denial repressed in Freud’s sense? Do some white people become unable to face inner racist feelings or beliefs once a post-civil rights world tells them they are morally bad?

The message explores how concepts in neuroscience surrounding anti-Black implicit bias by whites are distinct from Sigmund Freud’s concepts of the unconscious and repression. It examines whether and how unintentional white racism relates to the neuroscience and psychoanalysis concepts, respectively. I base it in foundational studies in implicit race bias of the early 2000s. In studies by Elizabeth Phelps and Mahzarin Banaji, white subjects consciously affirm belief in racial equality, but non-consciously prefer their ingroup. In a companion study, Black subjects—unlike the whites–consciously affirm their ingroup, but nevertheless show a lower ingroup preference than the whites.

The studies suggest both groups’ conscious avowals are masking complicated competing feelings. They anticipate subsequent results of two decades of white anti-Black bias in implicit association testing. I conclude that white anti-Black racial bias is not a repression in Freud’s sense, and that the more primary goal than fairness in psyches is fairness in societal structures.”

If you can’t make it in person, watch on Zoom…

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https://zoom.us/j/91584017613
Meeting ID: 915 8401 7613

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Topics: Action, Beloved Community, BIPOC, Equity, Social Justice