1
The Chase
It didn’t make sense.
Patricia Devine sat hunched over the desk in her cramped office, staring at a piece of paper. Her elbows were splayed, her chin propped up on the heel of each hand. She was twenty-five years old. On the paper were two graphs. She squinted. Nope, still nothing. “This is driving me crazy,” she said to her officemate. She’d been sitting in the same position for weeks, trying to make sense of the graphs. She’d blink, stare, trek to the nearby Wendy’s for food, and trek back to stare some more. Her life had shrunk to a blur of graphs and chicken sandwiches, with an occasional visit to Buck-i-robics, the official Ohio State University aerobics class. She was starting to feel desperate.
“How could the data be so wrong?” she asked herself. “How could I be so wrong?” It was March 1985. She was supposed to defend her dissertation by August, then immediately start her first academic job. But this experiment—one that she’d meticulously designed and carried out, and on which she’d staked her entire dissertation—was falling apart. Worse, it was her first independent project. Her advisor had even tried to steer her away from it. It was too risky, he’d said; the approach required new tools. Besides, the subject was too far outside his area of expertise. But she had persuaded him that it was a good idea. “Maybe he was right,” she now thought miserably. “Maybe I’m not cut out for research.”1 In fact, Devine’s experiment was about to provide a new window into the way we understand prejudice. It would, shortly, alter the social science landscape.
Devine had set out to test the sincerity of White people who said they opposed racism. At this moment, in the mid-1980s, psychologists were flummoxed by a phenomenon we might call the “prejudice paradox.” On the one hand, White Americans overwhelmingly opposed racial prejudice: when asked, they denied holding racist beliefs. On the other, many still acted in racially discriminatory ways, both in lab settings and in the real world. Prominent psychologists of the era, faced with this contradiction, concluded that these people were hiding their true beliefs in order to protect their image. White people who said they weren’t racist were lying.2
Devine wasn’t so sure. This verdict didn’t ring true to her—it didn’t match her experience of people and her knowledge of the world. What about White people who actively fought against racism? Were they faking it, too? She was White. She knew she sincerely opposed racism. The notion that all these White people were engaging in a mass game of make-believe was hard to accept. There must be something else happening inside their minds.
* * *
OUR DATA ABOUT RACIAL ATTITUDES don’t go back very far, because the study of racial prejudice is not very old. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American and European scientists accepted the notion of White superiority prima facie. Researchers in anthropology and medicine—mainly White, Anglo-Saxon men—were in the business of trying to prove racial hierarchies, sometimes resorting to baroque methods like filling human skulls with mercury and pepper seeds to assess relative brain volume. By the turn of the century, psychologists had joined the quest, publishing and promoting manufactured “evidence” of White greatness. A paper in the Psychology Review in 1895, for instance, reported that a handful of Black and Native American subjects had faster reflexes than White subjects and took this as “proof” of the former’s “primitive constitution.”3 The same paper argued that men had faster reflexes than women because of their greater “brain development.” Reconciling these two conclusions was left, apparently, as an exercise for the reader.
Black scholars long denounced this project (Frederick Douglass had, in 1854, neatly summed up the arguments as “partial, superficial, utterly subversive of the happiness of man, and insulting to the wisdom of God”), and Black and White social scientists like W. E. B. DuBois, Franz Boas, and W. I. Thomas forcefully rejected what came to be known as scientific racism. But the financial resources, authority, and imprimatur of science at the time were largely lassoed to the cause of White supremacy: proving that groups of people White scientists deemed “inferior” possessed immutable, inherited differences that placed them lower in a natural hierarchy. In the meantime, the meaning of the invented category “White”—and who exactly this “superior” group included—was constantly changing, expanding and contracting over centuries. (One study concluded that Nordic Europeans were more advanced than Mediterranean Europeans, declaring “the mental superiority of the white race.”4) Nonetheless, well into the twentieth century, social scientists largely considered what we now think of as prejudice as simply the truth.
Then, in the 1920s and ’30s, the psychology community began an about-face. What had been taken as “evidence” was crumbling under scrutiny. Analyses of “intelligence tests” of World War I army conscripts, for instance, showed that Black conscripts from northern states in fact outscored White conscripts from southern states.* In 1930, Carl Brigham, a psychologist who had analyzed the army tests and concluded Whites were superior, publicly retracted his verdict as “without foundation” (though not before it was used to promote immigration restriction and eugenics). Black civil rights efforts in the United States and anti-colonial movements around the world further propelled psychologists to begin viewing beliefs about White supremacy as prejudiced and worthy of study. This evolution may also have been hastened by the arrival of ethnic minority immigrants into the profession, including Jewish and Asian newcomers; alarming news from Europe about Hitler’s uses of “race science” provided additional fuel. Eventually, even the psychologist who had crowned Nordic Europeans mental monarchs proposed that psychologists were “practically ready” for “a hypothesis of racial equality.” The task now shifted to understanding the origins of this irrational, unethical way of thinking.5
It was as if astronomers suddenly decided to investigate why so many people believed the moon was made of cheese after spending decades trying to separate its curds and whey. Throughout this radical transformation, as psychologist and historian Franz Samelson wryly notes, the researchers did not question their own “superior rationality.”6
It wasn’t until World War II, however, that the government began collecting information about people’s racial attitudes—not out of ethical concern, but because racism threatened the war effort. In Detroit in 1942, the KKK and other White protesters rioted to protest housing built for Black defense workers who had moved north to the factories turning out bullets, ball bearings, and B-24s. The next year, twenty-five thousand White assembly line workers walked off the job to protest laboring next to their Black peers. Detroit’s production, as historian Herbert Shapiro notes, was seen as essential to winning the war: now racism was interfering with victory.7
Racism caused another problem for the government: it undermined the legitimacy of the fight. Black Americans were being asked to crush the Nazi ideology of racial supremacy on behalf of a country whose racism enforced their own second-class citizenship. As an editorial in the NAACP’s Crisis proclaimed, “The Crisis is sorry for brutality, blood and death among the peoples of Europe.… But the hysterical cries of the preachers of democracy for Europe leave us cold. We want democracy in Alabama and Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan.…” Langston Hughes pointed out the symmetry in his poem “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943”:
Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Nordell
“Beaumont to Detroit: 1943” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, associate editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.