"[M]any Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes."
I often have fun translating social science research into something lawyers can read, but the press release for "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," in the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, doesn't need translation. What it needs is courage, a steady calm while you try to absorb what this is telling you.
The researchers -- Stanford's Jennifer Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State's Phillip Atiba Goff, and grad students Matthew Jackson and Melissa Williams, did six separate studies, which this paper compiles. I don't have the paper itself, so this is from the press release:
--"In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to 'prime' the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces."
--"The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other non-white groups, such as Asians."
--"In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white male undergraduates with words associated with either apes (such as 'monkey,' 'chimp,' 'gorilla') or big cats (such as 'lion,' 'tiger,' 'panther'). The latter was used as a control because both images are associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt said. The subjects then watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. A mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a description conveying that, although described by his family as 'a loving husband and father,' the suspect had a serious criminal record and may have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest. . . . The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was. Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either ape or big cat words, Eberhardt said. But those who thought the suspect was black were more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat words."
--"[T]he paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, African Americans convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant language, such as 'barbaric,' 'beast,' 'brute,' 'savage' and 'wild.' 'Those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not,' the researchers write."
Voir dire won't help you on this. We're talking about something jurors wouldn't unearth in years of therapy, much less in a few hours with a judge and a roomful of strangers. What you need to do instead is to recognize unflinchingly that this level of bias is out there. There are weapons against it, and many variables affect which weapons you choose. If you deny the opponent exists, though, there's nothing you can do to fight it.
(Image of 1866 poster from the Library of Congress via PingNews at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/421405578/; license details there.)
