Anti-blackness is psychic. Latest neuroscience disproves their indicts.

That complicated forms of the nonconscious mind play a significant role in race-based bias is supported by studies of specific group preferences for their racialized group. In the psychological literature generally speaking, “the nonconscious” means mental processes not mediated by consciousness. The nonconscious does most of the mind’s work encompassing automatic, rational, intuitive, dream, and repression processes.46 Here “repression processes” refers to a post-Freudian idea generally excluding Freud’s topologies, their variations on the idea of the unconscious, and dramatic ideas such as the Oedipus complex and the life and death drives.47

One body of studies I looked at highlights a disjunction between peoples’ conscious racial attitudes and their perceived nonconscious race-biased beliefs. Elizabeth Phelps et al.48 and Phelps and Mahzarin Banaji49 confirm, and build upon early stages in this body of research. In their work, the white subjects tested tended to consciously affirm belief in racial equality but nonconsciously affirm the superiority of their in-group, which is to say, of whites. The black persons tested in a companion study, by contrast, explicitly affirmed, unlike the whites, a preference for their racial group.50 But nonconsciously they registered a lower in-group preference than the white people did. The studies suggest that both groups’ conscious avowals are masking complicating competing feelings and ideas perhaps unavailable to direct awareness.

Foundational Studies Linking Bias to Amygdala

A related assessment made by Phelps and Banaji connects to the amygdala the force of nonconscious thoughts influencing racially biased behavior.51 The pivotal experiments by Phelps et al. (2000) and work by Phelps and Banaji (2006) reinterpreting the experiments in light of animal models of conditioned fear give an idea of how this body of studies tends to work.52 The 2006 reformulation included four components. It assessed fMRI imaging of the amygdala while white participants looked at photos of unfamiliar black male or unfamiliar white male faces (Phelps et al. 2000). And it compared the results to two implicit behavioral tests and one explicit behavioral test (ibid.). In this field, “implicit” means nonconscious and “explicit” means conscious. One of the implicit association tests (IAT) was a startle eyeblink assessment that measures nonconscious social evaluation through physiological reaction. The explicit test implemented the Modern Racism Scale.53 The other IAT asked participants to describe items as “Black + good” or “White + bad” for half the time and then use conversely arranged key pads: “White + good” and “Black + bad.” Items were four in kind: photos of black male faces with neutral expressions, photos of white male faces with neutral expressions, words with positive connotations (love, joy, friend), words with negative connotations (agony, vomit, devil). The difference in time using one keypad value system (Black + good; White + bad) as opposed to the other (White + good; Black + bad) measures implicit racial bias.

The IAT data on white Americans showed greater amygdala activation with the unfamiliar black faces than with the unfamiliar white faces. Though there was enough variability that the results were insignificant, results of subsequent studies 54 would show significance. The more important idea for Phelps and Banaji, however, is the relationship among the amygdala activation and the three tests for implicit-explicit race bias: “Amygdala activation correlated significantly with implicit race bias as measured by the IAT[s] . . . and startle eyeblink with more negative assessments of black relative to white on the measure of behavior predicting greater amygdala activation.”55 In other words, when considered together, white people’s tests of implicit association, explicit association and amygdalic movement were significant. In the startle eyeblink test participants were exposed to a loud noise at the same time as they looked at pictures of unfamiliar black male or white male faces, and “the difference in strength of the startle eyeblink response while viewing black versus white faces was the measure of [implicit] race bias.”56 Subjects measuring higher in anti-black bias on the Modern Racism Scale measured higher in amygdala response.

When viewed alongside a study of black Americans57 who show greater amygdala activation in response to unfamiliar white male faces than to unfamiliar black male faces, the group data about race-bias suggests nonconscious bias against “outgroup faces in general.”58

Combining the startle eyeblink IAT with the additional implicit-explicit tests and comparing them with the functional imaging measuring strength of activity of individuals’ amygdala, Phelps and Banaji’s study seems to link nonconscious race bias elicited by association testing to activation of the amygdala.59 The amygdalic activity Phelps and Banaji measured “reflects an immediate (implied) threat response to racial outgroup members.”60 Perhaps more important, Phelps et al.’s and Phelps and Banaji’s work suggests that models of classic fear conditioning can interpret the human neural processes underlying implicit racial bias—how it is learned, how it is enacted, how it might possibly be extinguished. Together the four studies correlated in Phelps and Banaji’s analysis are significant in showing race-specific in-group preferencing. They provide data that social evaluation of out-group races occurs nonconsciously and predictably along race-group lines, with whites showing negativity toward blacks and blacks61 showing negativity to whites. Phelps et al. acknowledge that their data and procedures are novel, but that they “cannot speak to causality.”62 They interpret the group-specific tendencies of race-bias dissociation to be “reflections of social learning within a specific culture.”63 Virtually universal to human existence is being part of a social group. And if one is a member of a social group, “it is impossible to avoid acquiring evaluations of social groups”—that is to say, it is impossible to avoid being influenced by the spoken and unspoken messages of a social group—but being influenced by an evaluation “does not require its conscious endorsement.”64

Investigating the amygdalic activity connecting to nonconscious racial bias for whites against blacks helps because it can show trends among larger numbers of individuals across groups. It is satisfying to some researchers because its tie to a particular bodily organ makes it appear less ambiguous. But unlike the experiments, the Freud concepts of the leading idea and displacement, when understood to be in the preconscious, and illuminated by the Bonilla-Silva story analyses, can suggest nuanced reasons why the neuroscience results become what they are.

Specifying Neural Roles: From the Amygdala to the Striatum

The psychological literature on prejudice shows there is one social context that often subdues individual race-bias: working toward a common goal. Amygdala investigations fall in line with previous tendencies on this model. Sharing a common aim conditionally dissolves individual race-bias. While some goals involve life threat, many do not. Studies show the amygdala cues to a perceiver’s goal, including to positive survival goals (athletic team success) as well as negative ones (e.g., averting aggression). The amygdala activity varies with the perceiver’s aims. The participants’ goal in one study requires sorting black and white faces by coalition. Does he or she, regardless of race, belong to the sports team? Positive amygdalic activity registered higher for team in-groups than for racial in-groups.65 Studies designed to direct participants’ attention to a goal independent of race suggest race to be of no consequence. The amygdala responds the same regardless of racial group differences.66 Studies in which there is not a goal taking one’s attention away from race indicate nonconscious race bias persists. How? Unfamiliar out-group faces for whites or for blacks increase amygdalic and other central nervous system negative affect.67

The amygdala is one of many brain regions where nonconscious prejudicial affect registers. I have focused on the foundational work of Phelps et al. and Phelps and Banaji. Studies since show other brain areas and their apparent roles in implicit race-biased behavior. They link the processing of racially biased cues like racially biased empathy to the orbital frontal cortex, disgust, to the insula;68 and thought that imputes value to a possible activity (e.g., pros and cons of inviting Jim on a second date) to the striatum.69 Importantly, the view emerging about a brain base for implicit race bias suggests a network of connecting neural areas working simultaneously while also affectively specializing. Does the neural-network complexity undermine the likelihood that whites or their communities can significantly reduce anti-black bias? Does it indicate a diminishment of the extent to which individuals can be held responsible for automatic expressions of race bias, while simultaneously impugning whites for racism many whites overlook in themselves?

Distinguishing Stereotype from Prejudice

To understand better the idea of the brain as networking organs whose partnerships and specializations produce, transform, and elaborate the many variations and individual forms of race bias, we need a window into stereotypes. In the psychological literature helping to explain the formation of racial bias are stereotype studies. Stereotypes are a kind of categorizing. As any student of linguistics or philosophy knows, categorizing is integral to human experience.70 A vast literature of empirical studies examines processes infants and toddlers use to develop abilities to classify objects into groups. The study of classification is a preoccupation for Plato and Aristotle, and for just about any philosopher thereafter. For the empirical sciences, the idea of people’s fundamental need to categorize in order to perceive, decide, act and plan is not new. Walter Lippmann first used the term “stereotype” in his 1922 work Public Opinion:

For the most part we do not first see, and then define; we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing, confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.71 Your ability and mine to quickly sort an object by its group makes readily available, attributes likely to belong to members of the group’s kind. It facilitates speedy extrapolation of properties the object is likely to possess.72 Information processing favors stereotype-affirming options. The ways in which we search for information is shaped by the fact that we tend to ignore stereotype-inconsistent options but seek, remember, and assimilate stereotype-congruent information.73

How does the seeming inevitability of encoding racial stereotypes relate to the lineage of neural studies linking prejudiced affect to fear response and to specific brain areas (i.e., amygdala, orbital frontal cortex, insula, and striatum)? Studies about stereotypes show activity sourced in a different neural network. The core base for stereotype processing seems to be the temporal lobes, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the interior frontal gyrus.74 These cortical regions facilitate memory and retrieval of concepts, objects, and their significance. They appear to form the processing center for racial stereotyping, just as the amygdala, orbital frontal cortex, insula, and striatum do for prejudiced affect.

A word about terminology is due. In the literature of social psychology, the term “prejudice” is reserved for racially biased affect, whereas “in contrast to prejudice, which reflects an evaluative or emotional component of social bias, stereotypes represent the cognitive component— the conceptual attributes linked to a particular group as defined by a culture or society.”75 Thus, on this account, stereotypes and prejudices can be kinds of racial bias, but stereotypes are not prejudices. This specialized use of “prejudice” differs from its customary significance in the humanities where it includes any bias based solely on race whether cognitive, affective or both. The concept of prejudice in the social sciences is reserved for “deeper” expressions (e.g., feeling, emotion, evaluation/ preference). As specializing areas, the neural structures for racial stereotypes versus prejudiced affect may operate separately, but they overlap significantly. In his review of neurostudies on race bias, David Amodio writes, “The framework . . . suggests separate networks for prejudice and stereotyping, but in most cases these two processes operate in concert. Thus although [prejudice and stereotyping] are largely rooted in distinct neural systems, their effects converge in higher-level cognition and behavioral expression.”76

What Does It All Mean?

How Do Thinking Freudingly and Neuroscience Illuminate White Privilege?

Burrowing itself into the nonconscious area of the central nervous system and organizing many aspects of American society, white privilege characterizes a decisive order in contemporary white Americans’ psychic and civic racializing 77 structures. Phelps and Banaji’s behavioral and neural approach and Freud’s concepts of the leading idea, affect displacement, and repression, when applied to contemporary white privilege and bias, specify several complex viewpoints.

The neuroscience shows how widespread the bias is. The Freud applied to white privilegists at the preconscious level helps with reasons why it is widespread. Racism permeates our society so deeply and intricately that perhaps no one can escape complicated relations to it in this lifetime.78 At the level of repression, Freud’s concepts of the leading idea and displacement applied to white-racial group membership after the civil rights movement map unevenly to ways whites can be unaware of their complicity in supremacism. But if we understand them to be operating preconsciously, they help clarify white privilege. At this point the discourse becomes inspired by, but no longer representative of, Freud.