The Science of Racism by social psychologist Keon West raises urgent questions about our contemporary understanding of racism and provides concrete answers based on scientific facts. The book begins with a crucial observation about the lack of agreement about the relevance of racism: 50 per cent of people in the UK and the US don’t believe racism exists today. The book goes straight for the jugular to dispel any doubt – racism exists, and science has proven it.
A welcome antidote in a media landscape that profits from distressing imagery and trauma-dumping about racism, The Science of Racism is confident about its method: “The plural of anecdote is not data”. The book is packed full of scientific data on how racism affects all aspects of black people’s lives, from birth to death. “By the time a child is three to four years old, they likely already have significant, detectable biases against ethnic minorities,” according to a cited 2005 study in the UK.
Various US studies indicate that racism negatively affects employment: “Black job applicants are up to 50 per cent less likely to be called to interview than identically qualified white people”; business: “baseball cards sold for approximately 20 per cent less if they were being sold by Black people instead of White people on eBay”; healthcare: “doctors with higher levels of implicit anti-Black bias were also less likely to offer Black patients life-saving treatment”; and the justice system: “Black victims of police shootings are twice as likely to be unarmed as White victims”.
On the question of how we can better tackle racism and improve the real-life outcomes for ethnic minorities, The Science of Racism offers tangible solutions: better education about racism, spending more time with people of minority ethnicities and diversifying our media diet. Yet, West warns that relying solely on changing white people’s attitudes is ineffective. We must shift our focus from fixing the “white man’s problem”, ie his attitude, towards fixing the “ethnic minority problem”, which is power.
“If I had to choose between living in a world in which every white person wanted to lynch me but none of them could, or a world where all of them could but none of them wanted to, I would definitely pick the former. Because power makes a difference.”
Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is a Lagos-born, Galway-raised and Dublin-based writer, editor, spoken-word performer and arts facilitator
