{"title":"White Privilege: Unconscious Racism, Freud, and Neuroscience of Implicit Bias","authors":"K. Golden","doi":"10.5325/critphilrace.9.2.0295","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through an appraisal of neuroscience viewpoints on nonconscious mind with respect to white racial bias, this article shows how Freud's philosophical approach to unconscious mentality assists insights into white privilege and complements the model neuroscience provides. The article addresses four areas: Freud's concept of displaced affect, a link between American white people's self-reported egalitarianism and suppressed prejudice, how studies linking automatic race bias with the amygdala correlate nonconscious race-bias with fear response, and how race bias develops from two brain bases involving conscious and nonconscious processes. This article concludes that white individuals will be better positioned to embrace a principle of social fairness if widespread racism, racial bias and their psychic denial by whites, are made clearer to people. Combining a Freud-informed and experimentally empirical approach can help.","PeriodicalId":43337,"journal":{"name":"Critical Philosophy of Race","volume":"9 1","pages":"295 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical Philosophy of Race","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.9.2.0295","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ETHNIC STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Abstract:Through an appraisal of neuroscience viewpoints on nonconscious mind with respect to white racial bias, this article shows how Freud's philosophical approach to unconscious mentality assists insights into white privilege and complements the model neuroscience provides. The article addresses four areas: Freud's concept of displaced affect, a link between American white people's self-reported egalitarianism and suppressed prejudice, how studies linking automatic race bias with the amygdala correlate nonconscious race-bias with fear response, and how race bias develops from two brain bases involving conscious and nonconscious processes. This article concludes that white individuals will be better positioned to embrace a principle of social fairness if widespread racism, racial bias and their psychic denial by whites, are made clearer to people. Combining a Freud-informed and experimentally empirical approach can help.
期刊介绍:
The critical philosophy of race consists in the philosophical examination of issues raised by the concept of race, the practices and mechanisms of racialization, and the persistence of various forms of racism across the world. Critical philosophy of race is a critical enterprise in three respects: it opposes racism in all its forms; it rejects the pseudosciences of old-fashioned biological racialism; and it denies that anti-racism and anti-racialism summarily eliminate race as a meaningful category of analysis. Critical philosophy of race is a philosophical enterprise because of its engagement with traditional philosophical questions and in its readiness to engage critically some of the traditional answers.