Racial Bias

Rap music has had a contentious relationship with the legal system, including censorship, regulation, and artists being arrested for lewd and profane performances. More recently, rap lyrics have been introduced by prosecutors to establish guilt in criminal trials. Some fear this form of artistic expression will be inappropriately interpreted as literal and threatening, perhaps because of stereotypes. Only a handful of studies have examined whether rap lyrics are evaluated using stereotypes, yet these studies were conducted in the 1990s—a period of heightened scrutiny for rap—and used nonoptimal methods. This study presents 3 experiments that examine the impact of genre-specific stereotypes on the evaluation of violent song lyrics by manipulating the musical genre (rap vs. country) while holding constant the actual lyrics. Study 1, a direct replication of previous research, found that participants deemed identical lyrics more literal, offensive, and in greater need of regulation when they were characterized as rap compared with country. Study 2 was a conceptual replication (i.e., same design but different stimuli), and again detected this effect. Study 3 used the same approach but experimentally manipulated the race of the author of the lyrics. A main effect was detected for the genre, with rap evaluated more negatively than country or a control condition with no label. However, no effects were found for the race of the lyrics' author nor were interactions were detected. Collectively, these findings highlight the possibility that rap lyrics could inappropriately impact jurors when admitted as evidence to prove guilt.

This research tackles the interaction between police and racial inequality. More specifically, it dwells on how democratic policing manifests itself in racially unequal societies. After assessing the existence of racial inequalities regarding the access to rights to life and safety, one wonders how this racial bias is produced and reproduced. To this effect, a review of the national literature on police violence and excessive use of force by
police is performed. We observe the development and consolidation of researches associating race to police brutality outcomes. We investigate the coinage of the term racial profiling, drawing on similarities and specificities of its use in Brazil and in the United States. In Brazil, we verify that researches on racial profiling focus either on accessible statistical data (regarding arrests by flagrante delicto and police use of lethal
force) or social representations that guide police practices and their process of suspicion. The second class of researches indicates an abstract institutional discourse in which racialization scarcely appears (generally in order to deny race) and emphasizes the importance of police agents' subjective constructions in materializing a race-biased conduct. Thus, our field research was guided by the question: in what ways the training provided by the Superior School of Military Police Soldiers of São Paulo state, in the city of São Paulo, influences race relations between police officers and citizens? The results confirm the literature directions that the institution curtails itself before themes such as racial inequality and racial discrimination by the police. It communicates abstracts
categories to be filled with representations – previous and post-training – of the suspect and the criminal. The self-conferred role of the Military Police dismiss its educational attribute in favor of an assimilationist perspective of knowledge, in which there is no space for reflexive analysis, only for body conditioning to automatic and intuitive responses.

A tese analisa a articulação entre práticas policiais cotidianas e a conformação do policiamento ostensivo militarizado protagonizado pela Polícia Militar. O presente trabalho partiu de entrevistas e análise de dados oficiais da segurança pública paulista para compreender como os policiais, durante o policiamento ostensivo, selecionam as pessoas que sofrerão as investidas da polícia e, por conseguinte, do sistema de justiça criminal. A partir daí foi possível entender, de forma específica, quais são os públicos e os crimes mais vigiados pelos policiais militares e, de forma abrangente, as características do modelo de policiamento ostensivo paulista. Constatou-se que o objetivo do policiamento ostensivo é flagrar suspeitos criminais, o que incute à PM a responsabilidade de selecionar e “retirar” das ruas aqueles que os policiais identificam como “bandidos”. Para tal estão disponíveis à PM, sobretudo, três recursos: a) o aprisionamento ou b) a eliminação daqueles identificados como bandidos e c) o tirocínio policial enquanto ferramenta para diferenciar “bandidos” e “cidadãos de bem”. Uma das conclusões da pesquisa é a constatação da ampla utilização do tirocínio pelos policiais que atuam no policiamento ostensivo e de seu aspecto racializado; isto significa que, para a fundamentação da suspeita policial, são utilizados marcadores raciais. Desta forma, o tirocínio, ao lado da letalidade policial e do aprisionamento se tornaram responsáveis pelo acúmulo de desvantagens para a população jovem e negra, no que tange ao direito à vida segura e a um maior risco de serem presos por crimes patrimoniais em relação ao restante da população. No mais, constatou-se que nos últimos vinte anos há uma insistência por parte da segurança pública paulista num policiamento ostensivo com tais características, mesmo diante do insucesso na diminuição no número de crimes patrimoniais no estado de São Paulo.

Palavras-chave: Policiamento ostensivo, Polícia Militar, Racialização, Tirocínio, Letalidade Policial, Prisões em Flagrante.

Discussions of issues confronting law enforcement can be enhanced by using a social psychological perspective that emphasizes the importance of contexts’ influence on internal capacities and characteristics to the understanding of human behavior.  This chapter shows the utility of such an approach within the context of racial disparities in policing.  We focus on judgments of fairness, especially as it pertains to how officers treat people and make decisions, and outline how racial disparities drive the perception that law enforcement is procedurally unfair and serve to erode public trust and support for the law.  Attention is then turned to how normal mental functioning that is essential to social behavior can promote such disparities in even the most egalitarian individuals.  In particular, we describe (1) the role of implicit racial bias and how automatic associations between racial groups and criminality can motivate differential behavior and (2) the importance of social identity and how threats to that identity can evoke responses that facilitate racial disparities.

Although studies on school suspensions focus on the disproportionate number of Black students receiving them, policy changes reducing suspensions offer new insights into the racial gap. Using annual school-level data from the Chicago Public Schools (2012–2016), I evaluate how a suspension reduction policy affected the number of students receiving suspensions, and the suspension gaps between majority Black schools and other schools. I find that the policy reduced overall suspensions but still preserved racial suspension gaps. I argue how structural limitations and functional alternatives played important roles in these consequences, and how this suggests the importance of contextual factors in assisting structural changes.

Recent research has highlighted that state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems exhibit a bias against African American speakers. In this research, we investigate the underlying causes of this racially based disparity in performance , focusing on a unique morpho-syntactic feature of African American English (AAE), namely habitual "be", an invariant form of "be" that encodes the habitual aspect. By looking at over 100 hours of spoken AAE, we evaluated two ASR systems-DeepSpeech and Google Cloud Speech-to examine how well habitual "be" and its surrounding contexts are inferred. While controlling for local language and acoustic factors such as the amount of context, noise, and speech rate, we found that habitual "be" and its surrounding words were more error prone than non-habitual "be" and its surrounding words. These findings hold both when the utterance containing "be" is processed in isolation and in conjunction with surrounding utterances within speaker turn. Our research highlights the need for equitable ASR systems to take into account dialectal differences beyond acoustic modeling.

Os registros de homicídios, no Brasil, fornecem poucos dados sobre as v[itimas, além de sexo, idade e estado civil. Só a partir de 1996, por exemplo, a identifica;áo da cor da pele passou a ser obrigatória nas declarações de óbito. Embora os dados nacionais ainda apresentem imprecisões, já são suficientes para comprovar que a grande maioria dos indivíduos que têm sua vida interrompida por assassinatos são homens, adolescentes e jovens adultos (em especial entre os 14 e os 30 anos) e, entre eles, principalmente os negros - grupos que, segundo critérios censitários, inclui "pardos" e "pretos".

This article addresses how racial subordination is embedded in the United States’ evidentiary system. Using a Critical Race Theory framework, it shows how the Rules of Evidence, under the guise of neutrality, promote racial injustice by privileging whiteness, penalizing nonwhiteness, allowing racialized evidence, and disallowing proof of racial bias during trials. The article proffers a framework for legal reforms based on the creation of race-conscious evidentiary rules.

There is a belief that the prevalence of racial prejudice across all cultures is an evolutionary strategy to detect enemies and form alliances, and will always be a part of the human experience. While it is demonstrable people categorise race and form beliefs at an early age, it is equally evidenced, through a selection of diverse methodological studies on intergroup bias attenuation, that these can and are being reduced.

Some, but not all, of the mistakes a person makes when acting in apparently necessary self-defense are reasonable: we take them not to violate the rights of the apparent aggressor. I argue that this is explained by duties grounded in agents' entitlements to a fair distribution of the risk of suffering unjust harm.  I suggest that the content of these duties is filled in by a social signaling norm, and offer some moral constraints on the form such a norm can take.​

The problem of inconsistent legal and administrative decision making is widespread
and well documented. We argue that predictive models of collective decisions can be
used to guide and regulate the decisions of individual adjudicators. This \synthetic
crowdsourcing" approach simulates a world in which all judges cast multiple indepen-
dent votes in every case. Synthetic crowdsourcing can extend the core benets of en
banc decision making to all cases while avoiding the dangers of group think. Similar to
decision matrices such as the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, synthetic crowdsourcing
uses statistical patterns in historical decisions to guide future decisions. But unlike
traditional approaches, it leverages machine learning to optimally tailor that guidance,
allowing for substantial improvements in the consistency and overall quality of deci-
sions. We illustrate synthetic crowdsourcing with an original dataset built using text
processing of transcripts from California parole suitability hearings.

We propose that social attitudes, and in particular implicit prejudice, bias people's perceptions of the facial emotion displayed by others. To test this hypothesis, we employed a facial emotion change-detection task in which European American participants detected the offset (Study 1) or onset (Study 2) of facial anger in both Black and White targets. Higher implicit (but not explicit) prejudice was associated with a greater readiness to perceive anger in Black faces, but neither explicit nor implicit prejudice predicted anger perceptions regarding similar White faces. This pattern indicates that European Americans high in implicit racial prejudice are biased to perceive threatening affect in Black but not White faces, suggesting that the deleterious effects of stereotypes may take hold extremely early in social interaction.

Predictive processing is transforming our understanding of the brain in the 21 st century. Whereas in the 20th century we understood the brain as a passive organ taking in information from the world, today we are beginning to reconceptualize it as an organ that actively creates and tests hypotheses about its world. The promised revolution of predictive processing extends beyond cognitive neuroscience, however, and is beginning to make waves in the philosophy of perception. Andy Clark has written that predictive processing creates a "bootstrap heaven," enabling the brain to develop complex models of the world from limited data. I argue that the same principles also create a "bootstrap hell," wherein prejudice biases inherent in our inegalitarian societies result in permanent perceptual modifications. These modifications are unamenable to conventional implicit bias training. The deep embeddedness of prejudice biases in perceptual experience makes any proposal to eliminate prejudice biases by mere "understanding" insufficient.

This article focuses on the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987). It is my goal to demonstrate how Freyre applied Nietzschean ideas to his interpretation of Brazilian society in an attempt to concretize the prophecy of the “new man” in the shape of the multiracial “mestiço.” By Nietzschean ideas I mean ideas indebted to Nietzsche directly or indirectly and reflected in the rhetorical, stylistic and argumentative strategies used by Freyre. It is not my intention to discuss whether Freyre interpreted Nietzsche’s ideas correctly; rather, I wish to highlight parallels to Nietzschean concepts and to indicate how the eclectic, even opportunistic, use of Nietzsche’s work allowed Freyre to move the discussion on Brazilian identity in a new direction.

Casa-grande & Senzala (1933), a obra secular de Gilberto Freyre, foi traditionalmente interpretado de um ponto de vista sociólogo e histórico. Esta interpretação deixou duas questões essenciais em aberto: 1) Como se pode explicar que Freyre interpretou a noção de miscegenação de uma forma (muito) mais positiva do que sociólogos anteriores e 2) Como se pode explicar as tendências elitistas e aristocráticas na sua obra? Este artigo explore estas duas perguntas analisando a influência em Freyre da filosofia de Friedrich Nietzsche através da interpretação de Henry L. Mencken. Argumenta que a influência de Mencken foi maior do que tradicionalmente tem sido admitido e que na obra de Mencken sobre Nietzsche se pode encontrar a mesma interpretação de miscigenação que Freyre mais tarde explorou em Casa-grande & Senzala. Argumenta também que Mencken profundamente influenciou Freyre com as suas ideias aristocráticas e elitistas."

This commentary responds to Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal’s (2020) call for further
investigations of the whiteness of AI. My response focuses on three overlapping
projects needed to more fully understand racial bias in the construction of AI and its
representations in pop culture: (1) unpacking the intersections of gender and other
variables with whiteness in AI’s construction, marketing, and intended functions;
(2) observing the many different ways in which whiteness is scripted, and (3) noting
how white racial framing exceeds white casting and thus cannot be undone by
more diverse and inclusive hiring (or engineering). Our techno-utopian fantasies, I
conclude, are morally suspect in ways that go beneath and beyond the white plastic
covering on robotic bodies.

Having diverse faculty in academic health centers will help diversify the healthcare workforce and reduce health disparities. Implicit race bias is one factor that contributes to the underrepresentation of black faculty. We designed the videogame ‘‘Fair Play’’ in which players assume the role of a black graduate student named Jamal Davis. As Jamal, players experience subtle race bias while completing ‘‘quests’’ to obtain a science degree. We hypothesized that participants randomly assigned to play the game would have greater empathy for Jamal and lower implicit race bias than participants randomized to read narrative text describing Jamal’s experience.

The algorithm development industry typically views itself as “acultural”, independent of culture, or often “post-cultural”, transcending cultural differences in developing the future.  This chapter argues that algorithm development and particularly algorithm development is deeply rooted in narrow cultural practices. Moreover, current cultural practices of algorithm development exclude genuine input from a broader variety of stakeholders, while simultaneously the negative impacts of algorithm development, such as algorithmic bias, are experienced primarily by communities and individuals who are not meaningfully involved in the development of the algorithms that affect them. A deliberate and significant effort towards increasing cultural diversity in the design and development of algorithms is required to enable genuine input from a broader group of stakeholders. Input from a broader group of stakeholders will in turn enable the development of solutions that address issues for a broader group of communities, and greater variety of innovative solutions that cannot be developed from a narrow cultural base.  In this chapter the term “algorithm development” refers to the design and development of algorithms in the context of software applications.

Chroma screens is a collective name for the blue and green screens that are commonly used in the process of compositing images in cinema, video and graphics. Taking into account the expanded functions of screens in the postmedia condition, screens are not merely 'container' of images, rather they emphasize, interconnect and constantly rearticulate relationships in a media assemblage. This paper explores the 'intra-active gesturality' of chroma screens, that is, screens as an enactment of material-discursive practices and analyses ways in which they sustain the relations between various parts of the media assemblage. In considering the specific instance of Sondra Perry's artwork, the paper argues that chroma screens are a performance of colour where the practices of imagemaking and racial discrimination converge. Chroma screens. Intra-action. Gesturality.

AbstractPrevious research indicates that American adults, both Black and White, assume a priori that Black people feel less pain than do White people (Trawalter, Hoffman, & Waytz, 2012, PLoS One, 7[11], 1–8). The present work investigates when in development this bias emerges. Five-, 7-, and 10-year-olds first rated the amount of pain they themselves would feel in 10 situations such as biting their tongue or hitting their head. They then rated the amount of pain they believed two other children – a Black child and a White child, matched to the child's gender – would feel in response to the same events. We found that by age 7, children show a weak racial bias and that by age 10, they show a strong and reliable racial bias. Consistent with research on adults, this bias was not moderated by race-related attitudes or interracial contact. This finding is important because knowing the age of emergence can inform the timing of interventions to prevent this bias.

This paper reports the results of a study investigating how jurors interpret and digest
scientific evidence when it is presented to them in a trial setting and how differences
in juror attitudes and education influence interpretation of scientific evidence. The
study involved a sample of mock jurors recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk
(n=91). Study subjects each viewed a transcript of a mock legal case involving DNA
evidence. Results suggest that when presented with conflicting expert testimony,
jurors will interpret evidence in a way that is consistent with pre-existing attitudes or
beliefs (such as political predispositions). Importantly, results suggest that a juror’s
ability to do this and therefore the polarization between jurors of different political
pre-dispositions increases as level of education increases. For jurors classified as
Conservative, as education levels increased, the prosecution expert was rated as more
credible and the defendant was found guilty more often. For jurors classified as
Liberal, as education levels increased, the prosecution expert was rated as less credible and the defendant was found guilty less often. Theoretical and practical
implications of these findings are discussed.

Having diverse faculty in academic health centers will help diversify the healthcare workforce and reduce health disparities. Implicit race bias is one factor that contributes to the underrepresentation of Black faculty. We designed the videogame "Fair Play" in which players assume the role of a Black graduate student named Jamal Davis. As Jamal, players experience subtle race bias while completing "quests" to obtain a science degree. We hypothesized that participants randomly assigned to play the game would have greater empathy for Jamal and lower implicit race bias than participants randomized to read narrative text describing Jamal's experience. University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students were recruited via e-mail and randomly assigned to play "Fair Play" or read narrative text through an online link. Upon completion, participants took an Implicit Association Test to measure implicit bias and answered survey questions assessing empathy toward Jamal and awareness of bias. As hypothesized, gameplayers showed the least implicit bias but only when they also showed high empathy for Jamal (P=0.013). Gameplayers did not show greater empathy than text readers, and women in the text condition reported the greatest empathy for Jamal (P=0.008). However, high empathy only predicted lower levels of implicit bias among those who actively took Jamal's perspective through gameplay (P=0.014). A videogame in which players experience subtle race bias as a Black graduate student has the potential to reduce implicit bias, possibly because of a game's ability to foster empathy through active perspective taking.

Peer reviewers at many funding agencies and scientific journals are asked to score submissions both on individual criteria and overall. The overall scores should be some kind of aggregate of the criteria scores. Carole Lee identifies this as a potential locus for bias to enter the peer review process, which she calls commensuration bias. Here I view the aggregation of scores through the lens of social choice theory. I argue that in many situations, especially when reviewing grant proposals, it is impossible to avoid commensuration bias.

Should editors of scientific journals practice triple-anonymous reviewing? I consider two arguments in favor. The first says that insofar as editors' decisions are affected by information they would not have had under triple-anonymous review, an injustice is committed against certain authors. I show that even well-meaning editors would commit this wrong and I endorse this argument. The second argument says that insofar as editors' decisions are affected by information they would not have had under triple-anonymous review, it will negatively affect the quality of published papers. I distinguish between two kinds of biases that an editor might have. I show that one of them has a positive effect on quality and the other a negative one, and that the combined effect could be either positive or negative. Thus I do not endorse the second argument in general. However, I do endorse this argument for certain fields, for which I argue that the positive effect does not apply.

A tese analisa a articulação entre práticas policiais cotidianas e a conformação do policiamento ostensivo militarizado protagonizado pela Polícia Militar. O presente trabalho partiu de entrevistas e análise de dados oficiais da segurança pública paulista para compreender como os policiais, durante o policiamento ostensivo, selecionam as pessoas que sofrerão as investidas da polícia e, por conseguinte, do sistema de justiça criminal. A partir daí foi possível entender, de forma específica, quais são os públicos e os crimes mais vigiados pelos policiais militares e, de forma abrangente, as características do modelo de policiamento ostensivo paulista. Constatou-se que o objetivo do policiamento ostensivo é flagrar suspeitos criminais, o que incute à PM a responsabilidade de selecionar e “retirar” das ruas aqueles que os policiais identificam como “bandidos”. Para tal estão disponíveis à PM, sobretudo, três recursos: a) o aprisionamento ou b) a eliminação daqueles identificados como bandidos e c) o tirocínio policial enquanto ferramenta para diferenciar “bandidos” e “cidadãos de bem”. Uma das conclusões da pesquisa é a constatação da ampla utilização do tirocínio pelos policiais que atuam no policiamento ostensivo e de seu aspecto racializado; isto significa que, para a fundamentação da suspeita policial, são utilizados marcadores raciais. Desta forma, o tirocínio, ao lado da letalidade policial e do aprisionamento se tornaram responsáveis pelo acúmulo de desvantagens para a população jovem e negra, no que tange ao direito à vida segura e a um maior risco de serem presos por crimes patrimoniais em relação ao restante da população. No mais, constatou-se que nos últimos vinte anos há uma insistência por parte da segurança pública paulista num policiamento ostensivo com tais características, mesmo diante do insucesso na diminuição no número de crimes patrimoniais no estado de São Paulo. Palavras-chave: Policiamento ostensivo, Polícia Militar, Racialização, Tirocínio, Letalidade Policial, Prisões em Flagrante.

This chapter will focus on the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and scrutinize whether AI is used to reinforce the social construct of racism or if it promises to provide opportunity and justice in areas where previously they lacked. Throughout this chapter, common examples of the everyday use of AI will be discussed to provide an understanding of how this technology has permeated through multiple sectors of life with the intention to continuously expand. This chapter will also explore the notion of AI inheriting the bias of its creator. This brings into question who is building this technology, how this technology should be used, and who is the intended beneficiary of its use. For the experts and novices in the field, this chapter calls for critical consideration for what is being developed. For the individuals unfamiliar with AI, this chapter is intended to bring awareness of the technology being used around them and how it has already impacted their life.

Prior research (Stepanova, Bartholow, Saults, & Friedman, 2012) indicates that exposure to alcohol-related cues increases expressions of racial biases. This study investigated whether such effects can be replicated with other tasks assessing racial bias and whether they stem from stereotyping or prejudice. In two experiments participants (N1 = 118; N2 = 152) were exposed to either alcohol-related or neutral advertisements, and then completed a race-priming lexical decision task (LDT, Wittenbrink, Judd, and Park, 1997). Experiment 1 provided weak evidence that exposure to alcohol cues decreases positive attitudes toward Blacks, which was not confirmed in a high-powered replication (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest a short-lived nature (if any) of alcohol priming effects on racial bias when measured by the primed LDT.

A model of face representation, inspired by the biology of the visual system, is compared to experimental data on the perception of facial similarity. The face representation model uses aggregate primary visual cortex (V1) cell responses topographically linked to a grid covering the face, allowing comparison of shape and texture at corresponding points in two facial images. When a set of relatively similar faces was used as stimuli, this "linked aggregate code" (LAC) predicted human performance in similarity judgment experiments. When faces of perceivable categories were used, dimensions such as apparent 'sex' and 'race' emerged from the LAC model without training. The dimensional structure of the LAC similarity measure for the mixed category task displayed some psychologically plausible features but also highlighted differences between the model and the human similarity judgements. The human judgements exhibited a racial perceptual bias that was not shared by the LAC model. The results suggest that the LAC based similarity measure may offer a fertile starting point for further modelling studies of face representation in higher visual areas, including studies of the development of biases in face perception.

The current study examined blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal underlying racial differences in threat detection. During fMRI, participants determined whether pictures of Black or White individuals held weapons. They were instructed to make shoot responses when the picture showed armed individuals but don't shoot responses to unarmed individuals, with the cost of not shooting armed individuals being greater than that of shooting unarmed individuals. Participants were faster to shoot armed Blacks than Whites, but faster in making don't shoot responses to unarmed Whites than Blacks. Brain activity differed to armed versus unarmed targets depending on target race, suggesting different mechanisms underlying threat versus safety decisions. Anterior cingulate cortex was preferentially engaged for unarmed Whites than Blacks.. Parietal and visual cortical regions exhibited greater activity for armed Blacks than Whites.. Seed-based functional connectivity of the amygdala revealed greater coherence with parietal and visual cortices for armed Blacks than Whites. Furthermore, greater implicit Black-danger associations were associated with increased amygdala activation to armed Blacks, compared to armed Whites. Our results suggest that different neural mechanisms may underlie racial differences in responses to armed versus unarmed targets.

Recently I have witnessed the difficulties with understanding the nature of Black Lives Matter movement among my Ukrainian counterparts. Some comments on mass protests in the U.S. manifest not only refusal to show empathy to oppressed and discriminated people, but prejudices and bias against American Blacks.
In this piece, I am trying to address the question "What’s behind the anger?" In particular, using the intersectionality framework, the essay provides some insights on numerous black-white gaps in the U.S.: job opportunity gap, the wage gap, social benefits gap, wealth gap, car-owning gap, education gap. Special attention is dedicated to the everyday life of Black women in terms of economic disadvantages and social exclusion.