Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.
In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers.
Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. “This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done,” she said. “This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work—intuitions—you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] was—how we were able to pick it up every time.”
The paper, “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences,” is the result of a series of six previously unpublished studies conducted by Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State University psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff (the lead author and a former student of Eberhardt’s) and Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively. The paper is scheduled to appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.
The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt’s supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. 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 researchers consistently discovered a black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. 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. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.
“Despite widespread opposition to racism, bias remains with us,” Eberhardt said. “African Americans are still dehumanized; we’re still associated with apes in this country. That association can lead people to endorse the beating of black suspects by police officers, and I think it has lots of other consequences that we have yet to uncover.”
Scientific racism in the United States was graphically promoted in a mid-19th-century book by Josiah C. Nott and George Robins Gliddon titled Types of Mankind, which used misleading illustrations to suggest that “Negroes” ranked between “Greeks” and chimpanzees. “When we have a history like that in this country, I don’t know how much of that goes away completely, especially to the extent that we are still dealing with severe racial inequality, which fuels and maintains those associations in ways that people are unaware,” Eberhardt said.
Although such grotesque characterizations of African Americans have largely disappeared from mainstream U.S. society, Eberhardt noted that science education could be partly responsible for reinforcing the view that blacks are less evolved than whites. An iconic 1970 illustration, “March of Progress,” published in the Time-Life book Early Man, depicts evolution beginning with a chimpanzee and ending with a white man. “It’s a legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white man,” Eberhardt said. “I don’t think it’s intentional, but when people learn about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that people of African descent are closer to apes than people of European descent. When people think of a civilized person, a white man comes to mind.”
Consequences of socially endorsed violence
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. “Taken together, this suggests that implicit knowledge of a Black-ape association led to marked differences in participants’ judgments of Black criminal suspects,” the researchers write.
According to the paper’s authors, this link has devastating consequences for African Americans because it “alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against black suspects.” For example, the 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.
The way forward
Despite the paper’s findings, Eberhardt said she is optimistic about the future. “This work isn’t arguing that there hasn’t been any progress made or that we are living in the same society that existed in the 19th century,” she said. “We have made a lot of progress on race issues, but we should recognize that racial bias isn’t dead. We still need to be aware of that and aware of all the different ways [racism] can affect us, despite our intentions and motivations to be egalitarian. We still have work to do.”
For Eberhardt, two stories of race exist in America. “One is about the disappearance of bias—that it’s no longer with us,” she said. “But the other is about the transformation of bias. It’s not the egregious bias anymore, but it’s modern bias, subtle bias.” With both of these stories, she said, there is an understanding that society has moved beyond the historic battles centered around race. “We want to argue, with this work, that there is one old race battle that we’re still fighting,” she said. “That is the battle for blacks to be recognized as fully human.”
This research was supported by a Stanford University Dean’s Award to Jennifer Eberhardt.
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Whites look like Neanderthal Apes. White gorilla men or Proboscis Monkeys. What looks more ape like than the Neanderthal. Stop putting down other races to make yourself feel better. Your white women love black men and always have. Maybe thats where all the anger is coming from. Blacks come in all different shapes, sizes and facial features. Stop trying to lump them all in one of your silly racist theories. Whites resemble apes and gorillas, Thin lips, white skin, flat butts and hairy all over. I’ve seen plenty of whites with ape like noses. Before you start name calling look up your monkey, Proboscis Monkey and your gorilla, Neanderthal.
Whites look just like the proboscis Monkeys. Look it up for yourself
Whites look like the Proboscis Monkey, so whats the point
In the article they keep reffering to how whites thought the beatings were justified simply because the victim was black. And they also say they want to aim to get less crime against blacks.
What they dont realize is that the reason they believed the beatings were justified is because in the usa black on white crimes are 50 times higher than vise-versa. And ofcourse as it is stated in this webstie link below me, a white on black crime gets front page, but despite being 50 times more frequent, black people get more symapthy and are treated like ” dont worry once upon a time you guys were oppressed so we are going to let you rape and murder every single white woman you see and you wont get in too much trouble”
http://www.newnation.org/NNN-Black-on-White.html
they are apes tho
ummmm maybe whites could distinguish you guys as apes easier than whites because
blacks have bigger lips
blacks haver darker skin
blacks have an elongated profile
blacks have darker eyes
blacks have dark hair
blacks have flatter noses
blacks have bigger mouths
whites have light skin
whites have neanderthal dna
whites have multiple hair colors
whites have thinner lips
smaller mouths
long noses
their profile is more acute than a black man’s
its really simple BLACKS LOOK MORE SIMILAR TO APES THAN WHITES DO DUMBASS
what college did this retard go to
lemme guess they teach guys who wear makeup and red noses
I GUARANTEE if they gave an asian man, a jewish man, a middle eastern man, a Indian man, and a Native american man the SAME FUCKING TEST
the results would be THE SAME
god why are people so fucking stupid these days? WHY?
yet again more liberal pc bullshit trying to brainwash the beautiful white youth into believing we are all racist evil demons whose only point in existence is to destroy blacks
despite all the time money effort and projects designed to help them
whats new here NOTHING
white guilt is so pathetic its more guilty than OJ simpson right about now
How is this shocking? Niggers act like chimpanzees everywhere you go. They are loud, obnoxious, inapprppriate, illiterate, demand the word “Ebonics” be used as a cover up for their inability to master speech. The average iq of a nigger is about 15 points behind that of other races.
The truth is, the feral nigger is responsible for most of the crime in the U.S. And when they are not committing crime..They are talking about committing crime by “rapping.” Further, this “rap” music that glorifys nigger’s bad decisions to not get an education, is now idolized.
Whoever wrote this stupid article needs to wake up and smell the coffee. Niggers are violent, crimal beings who have never created or invented a fucking a thing. They are a tragic blight on America and should be either 1.) Contained to a specific area of the country or 2.) Shipped back to the “wonderful” continent of Africa which they so love to glorify.
Professor Eberhardt, stop bullshitting yourself and your students.
Ritt Ricketts for president.