Getting Under Your Skin: The Science of Implicit Bias on Screen

• In Event: Science and Activism: Medical Approaches

Abstract

Implicit bias has emerged as a keyword in public debates about racial and gender justice in recent years, part of a larger movement legal scholar Jonathan Kahn calls “recreational antiracism”: a push to frame antiracism in terms of diversity, and to place responsibility for equity on individuals rather than institutions, such as universities and corporations which offer anti-bias workshops for employees while failing to address structural barriers to access. “Bias” offers a palatable alternative to confronting terms like “racism” for activists and other rhetors, naturalising past acts of discrimination while offering hope for a post-bias future: what science can name, science can cure. In this paper, I examine the scientistic visual rhetoric of the anti-bias public service advertisement campaign Love Has No Labels, and its use of emotional and scientific appeals to alert viewers to their own biases. In this campaign, x-ray figures are shown dancing on a screen in a public square, before people step out from behind the screen to reveal interracial, inter-ability, or same-sex pairings. In other words, (virtual) medical visualization is said to reveal the essential falseness of bodily difference by demonstrating that we are all the same under the skin, analogizing across categories of bodily difference and privileging—quite literally—the most superficial notions of diversity. My paper examines the rhetorical implications and social stakes of such appeals to scientific authority in public culture and debate, and offers a framework for assessing the efficacy of those appeals in promoting social justice through popular texts.

Author

• Beck Wise, University of New England, Australia