Keon West could reel off anecdotes about the everyday racism he experiences – but he won’t. Personal accounts rarely convince anyone, he says, and, all too often, they are dismissed or put down to some other, less offensive, cause. Instead of the feelings that racist behaviour and accusations of racism provoke, he prefers to focus on facts.
A social psychologist at the University of London, West has consolidated hundreds of rigorous empirical studies on racism conducted over decades in his new book, . By exploring how experiments can detect racism and measure its impact across societies, he builds a scientifically accurate picture of what contemporary racism is and the complexities that surround it.
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While it is clear that society’s attempts to combat racism remain inadequate, there is plenty that can be done about it. The same studies that prove the existence of racism can also help us unpack the psychological gymnastics that nearly everyone performs to conceal their racist behaviours from themself. The idea is that, by becoming aware of these personal biases, many racist behaviours can gradually be dissolved.
In this interview, West sheds light on ideas like systemic racism and lays out the science-backed methods of spotting racism in its various guises. Doing so, he hopes, will steer public discourse away from debating whether racism exists to confronting it head on.
Amarachi Orie: What is racism?
: There are two definitions that I think are useful. There’s one that’s useful for running the scientific experiments: racism is any detectable difference in treatment between two otherwise identical people that can be attributed to race uniquely.
But there’s another definition that I think is important: racism is prejudice plus power – because what we’re ignoring is a huge system of advantages that are built in, that are systemic, that happen even if no one is treating anyone any differently.
How do scientists accurately test for racism?
Pick something where you think people could be racist.
Hiring.
All we have to do is create 100 copies of a CV or résumé with, say, Tanisha Brown’s name on it and then another 100 with Emily Cooper’s name on it, but they’re the same CV. Then we send them out to people and see how people respond to these CVs.
That test has been done hundreds of times. It’s been done in the UK, the US, France and Australia. It’s been done so many times that researchers can then smush all of these together and create meta-analyses of these studies, and the one thing we know for a fact is that when Emily Cooper and Tanisha Brown are equally qualified, they do not get hired at the same rates. At every stage, Emily Cooper is promoted and Tanisha Brown is disadvantaged. Every single time. We know the only explanation is the race.
How are people able to be racist, and hide that from others, in a way that can show up in a scientific study?
There’s a great study where researchers in the US. They send in a Black person, a white person and a Latino person who are equally qualified, have the same experience, have been trained to behave uniformly, are dressed similarly and have been matched on physical attractiveness, verbal skills and interaction styles. In that study, they found that those hiring will give different reasons for not giving someone the job – effectively telling lies depending on who they are talking to. They’ll say to the Black person: “I’m sending you away because we happen to be closed today” or “Oh, I’ll have to call your references. We do that with everyone.” But then they don’t do that when a white person comes in. The employers don’t call to check the white person’s references, but just offer him the job anyway. You can see that happen in a study.
Of course, in real life, you only have your own experiences, you’re only dealing with one candidate at a time (yourself). You don’t have these Black, white and Latino copies, so it’s hard to know when certain behaviours occur because of race.
What are the different types of racism according to psychology?
There are so many different kinds of racism. I like to remind people that there’s still quite a lot of open, explicit racism everywhere in the world. I think we’ve got really quite attached to unconscious bias. This is bias that you are unwilling or unable to accurately acknowledge. For example, you may believe that someone is being hostile and you think you’re perceiving the threat from their behaviour or their hand gestures, but it’s actually just the skin. That’s what’s triggering your threat response.
But unconscious bias isn’t the most prevalent kind or the most important kind of racism. There is the insidious racism of paternalistically lowered expectations, the kind of racism where people will explain basic words to you. There is aversive racism in which people are very careful not to be racist until they have an excuse. They don’t have to say: “I just don’t like Black people.” They’ll justify it, saying: “Well, I heard this rumour, so that’s why I don’t like this person.”
How can someone be racist without realising that they are being racist?
Aside from unconscious biases, the other way is that people do things like explicitly say “I’d rather date white people”, but they don’t call it racist. What they do is for why they’re behaving in a racially discriminatory way, but then categorise their behaviour as not being racist.
There’s a whole bunch of , and some research on stuff I did myself called , which is how we draw the line around what we call actually racist and what we call acceptable. What it does is it allows us to be flexible with our definitions. “I’m not going to hire someone like that for this post. But I have a good reason. Five years ago, I hired a Black person and they didn’t do very well, so I’m not going to do that again. I’m not racist. I’m just learning from my mistakes.” “I don’t pick up Black people in my taxi. Everyone knows they don’t tip. I’m not racist. If they would just tip, I’d do that quite differently.” People do this all the time. By bending these rules and giving themselves excuses, they don’t see that they’re being racist. They get to continue doing racist stuff, but never acknowledge it as racist.
I have seen people stunned by the outcomes of implicit bias tests
If someone is using psychological tricks to hide their racism from themself, how can they become aware of this?
You become aware of things through external feedback. I would encourage everyone to do an . This is where you have to quickly combine certain categories – such as “good” and “bad” with “Black people” and “white people” – to indicate your level of implicit bias, which is bias that you are unable or unwilling to report. I have seen people stunned by their outcomes, and sometimes quite hurt by them. But they’re insightful.
What are the effective ways of tackling racism?
If you want to change your own personal racism, if you’re like, “I hate Muslims and I want to do something about that”, I would say you need to spend time in the local mosque. You need to go and see Muslims and talk to Muslims. You need to buy books written by Muslims. You need to watch television programmes made by Muslims. You need to immerse yourself in their lives and their emotions and what they care about.
But many of the changes required are in the structure of society. There are many things that stop people of colour from having power. I don’t like “stop and search” – which gives police in the UK the power to search someone based on suspicions alone – but it could be made better if you shift the power so the police officers who stop and search you and find nothing now face serious repercussions. You put more power in the hands of the people who are victimised and less in the people doing the victimising – that will change the dynamic.
What does the definition that racism is prejudice plus power tell us about the notion of “reverse racism”. For example, do you believe Black people can be racist to white people?
Black people can dislike white people very strongly, but I don’t call it racism and I’m not alone in that. Psychologist explained it very well to me. If all the Black people in the UK collectively decided that we hated white people, that our collective goal was the extermination of white life in the UK, this would not bother [white people]. They wouldn’t like it. They’d be uncomfortable. But the prime minister is still white, most police officers are still white, most people who work in banks are still white, most CEOs are still white, most judges are still white. Regardless of our levels of anti-white hatred, there’s little we could do.
But we have seen what happens when white people get up en masse and decide that their goal is the extermination of another race of people. They are horrifyingly successful at that, whether we’re talking about the Native Americans in the US or Jewish people in Germany. If they get up en masse tomorrow and decide their goal is the extermination of all Black people in the UK, we are probably going to die – and that disparity is important.
Does improving individual racism improve systemic racism?
Systemic racism is anything wherein there is a system that continues to function to produce racist outcomes, even if no one in the system is trying to be racist or no one is being racist. On some level, systemic racism doesn’t need racists to function, but it’s worth noting that racists keep it going. Individuals are part of systems.
You’re not going to get a change in a law, abolish slavery or end apartheid without changing individual people’s minds. But the unfortunate truth is that people can like you a lot, but not be any nicer to you.
There’s a lot of out there that shows that if you make people like each other more, this change in how much they like each other will be genuine, but they may not behave differently. They won’t hire you more. They won’t assign more resources your way. They won’t be better to you in ways that count.
Changing individual racism is important, but if you stop there, that’s insufficient. The truth is that often a fight for power is part of it. If you really want change, think about power as well.
Article amended on 28 January 2025
This article was amended to correct West’s university affiliation.
