White College Students’ Verbal Responses to Subtle and Blatant Racism

• In Event: 3-213 - White Young Adults’ Ideologies, Attitudes, and Responses to Racism

Integrative Statement

College students are receiving increased training in recognizing bias and intervening in instances of prejudice (Denson, 2009; Engberg, 2004). While these trainings often provide their own definitions of what constitutes biased or prejudicial behavior, students may struggle to integrate these definitions into their own conceptualizations of racism. Sommers and Norton (2006) asked college students to list behaviors that exemplified racism and found that White students tended to list fewer subtle behaviors (e.g. “Feels anxious around Blacks”) than did students of color. The decreased accessibility of subtle behaviors when defining racism suggests that White students may struggle more with identifying subtle racism as racism.

When White students fail to consider subtle forms of bias to be racism, they may be more likely to perpetuate subtle racism and less likely to intervene appropriately when encountering subtle prejudice. Students reporting lower acknowledgement of race and racism have exhibited more racially insensitive behavior, resolved instances of prejudice less successfully, and been perceived by Black peers as less friendly (Neville, 2013).

While the way students talk about racism has been associated with racial attitudes, not much is known about the content of these conversations beyond lay theories of racism (Sommers & Norton, 2006; Walton, Priest, & Paradies, 2013). The current study investigates White college students’ verbal responses to blatant and subtle racism by analyzing language indicating cognitive processing (i.e. “thinking through”), confidence/expertise, and centering of the self.

Seventy White college students were shown brief animated videos depicting interracial interactions among school-age children. Eight videos were shown in random order: three subtle, three blatant, and two control videos (one positive, one negative). Participants were asked to answer questions (e.g. “Was [the character] prejudiced?”) out loud for two minutes after each video. Students’ verbal reactions were transcribed and analyzed, and multilevel modeling was used to analyze the data.

Students expressed greater cognitive processing, lower confidence/expertise, and more first-person language when discussing subtle versus blatant racism. To test whether students believed the characters in the video were showing prejudice, we also examined agreement language. As hypothesized, students used fewer agreement words when discussing subtle versus blatant racism.

The current study suggests that White college students engage in more mental processing, exhibit less confidence/expertise, and voice less agreement when discussing subtle racism compared to blatant racism. First-person language may indicate that students identify more with characters exhibiting subtle racism, which might hinder willingness to label such situations as bias (Sommers & Norton, 2006; Walton, Priest, & Paradies, 2013). Additionally, first-person language has been tied to lower power/status, thus White students may feel less powerful or less authoritative when speaking about subtle racism (Pennebaker, 2011). Results provide insights into how White college students speak about racism in conversation, which may relate to their treatment of racial prejudice within their social networks. Efforts may be needed to help White college students integrate subtle racism into existing schemas for racial prejudice to bolster this population’s ability to prevent and respond to racism in their communities.

Authors

• Emily J Blevins, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Sylvia Perry, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allison Skinner, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author