In an excerpt published in Next City from her book BIASED: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Stanford social psychologist (and MacArthur Fellow) Jennifer Eberhardt delves into the impact of implicit bias in perpetuating segregation and racial discrimination. More than half of whites, Eberhardt explains, say they would not move to an area that is more than 30 percent black, because they “believe that the housing stock would not be well maintained and crime would be high.”
More broadly, Eberhardt writes, studies by sociologists Lincoln Quillian and the late Devah Pager show that “the more Blacks there are in a community, the higher people imagine the crime rate to be—regardless of whether statistics bear that out.” Eberhardt also cites the work of Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush, who have found that the more Blacks there are in a neighborhood, the more disorder people see, even when measurable signs like graffiti, boarded-up houses, or garbage in the street don’t differ. Eberhardt adds that, “Black people are just as likely as whites to expect signs of disorder in heavily Black neighborhoods.”
As NPQ has noted, technology often embeds these biases in algorithms. For example, many advocates of eliminating cash bail in California, including the California chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, dropped their support of legislation to ban cash bail once the bill was amended so that the decision on whether to detain or release a person would be based on “an assessment algorithm to create an individual ‘risk score’ that supposedly reveals the likelihood of re-arrest or failure to appear in court if released.” As Sam Levin of the Guardian explains, “Because the data comes from a criminal justice system that has documented discrimination at every step—including racial biases in police stops, searches and arrests,” the algorithms would likely reinforce existing racial inequities in the state’s criminal justice system.
[For more on this story by STEVE DUBB, go to https://nonprofitquarterly.org...ather-than-embed-it/]
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