What black people value when white people confront prejudice

ABSTRACT

Previous research in psychology has focused on how confronting racial prejudice affects White people – White perpetrators and bystanders – and reduces their prejudice. We shift the focus to Black people – Black people targeted by prejudice and Black observers – and examine how Black people perceive White people’s confrontations. Two hundred forty-two Black participants evaluated White participants’ responses to anti-Black comments (i.e., confrontations), which were text-analyzed and content-coded to identify the characteristics that Black participants valued the most. Analyses revealed that Black participants valued confrontations that were coded as direct, targeting the action, labeling the prejudiced action as such, and connecting individual acts of prejudice to systemic racism. Notably, this style of confrontation is not what research suggests is best for White people, for reducing Whites’ prejudice. Accordingly, the present work contributes to our understanding of confronting prejudice and the value of centering Black experiences and perspectives rather than White comfort and prejudice.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• racial prejudice
• confronting prejudice
• intergroup relations
• allyship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2023.2178875.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2023.2178875.

Notes

1. We aimed to recruit mono-racial Black/African-American participants. In one sample, however, we unintentionally recruited mono- and multi-racial Black/African-American participants, resulting in the seven multi-racial participants reported here. We include them in our analyses to be inclusive of the participants. The results do not change if we exclude these seven individuals.

2. Upon analyzing the results from White participants, we excluded one scenario (Scenario 8) due to the lack of willingness to confront, thereby leaving 10 scenarios total. Scenario 8 described a situation in which participants overheard the speaker’s (a stranger) private conversations at a restaurant. Even though the comment was perceived to be most problematic out of all comments, few people said they would confront.

3. We planned to recruit 50 MTurk participants and 50 university participants per set, but recruiting Black participants from a university participant pool was more difficult than we anticipated. When we had an opportunity to expand university sites, we chose to focus on Set A, so that at least one set could be seen by all three populations.

4. Adapted from Czopp and Monteith (2006)

5. Adapted from Plous (2000)

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Hyeonjin Bak

Hyeonjin Bak is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Psychology at Yale University.

Ines Jurcevic

Ines Jurcevic is an Assistant Professor in the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington.

Sophie Trawalter

Sophie Trawalter is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.