Claims of blameless, unconscious racism are easily unmasked

Ihave never been a fan of the name given to the sociological phenomenon known as unconscious or implicit racial bias. The term was coined in 1995 by US academics Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, and has since been made popular by the free online implicit association tests developed by Harvard University, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington.

Through a series of rapid online image associations, the Harvard test enables anyone with an internet connection to gain a richer understanding of whether (and when) race — or gender, physical ability, religion or other factors — causes them to perceive individuals or groups of people negatively or treat them as inferior.

My scepticism is not about the rigour underpinning this framework — which has been developed over decades by the world’s leading sociologists, and whose bona fides have been confirmed by legions of academic studies demonstrating how children as young as five have racial biases against black people and in favour of white people.

What I distrust is the convenience of being able to say that your racism is unconscious and therefore out of your control.

The addition of the modifiers “unconscious” and “implicit” to straightforward racial bias risks giving those who are prejudiced in their actions the licence to avoid being implicated in discrimination

— or worse, having their discrimination seen as an innocent and unintended mistake, not of their own making.

The sociologist and author of White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, calls this the “myth of [white] racial innocence”.

I also wonder whether referring to structural racism as “implicit” or “unconscious” negates the experiences of the people who are at the receiving end of racial intolerance. It is surely a kind of secondary aggression to be actively discriminated against and then have the perpetrator’s discrimination referred to as “unconscious”.

I raise these issues because I, too, felt the aggression of the multiple instances in which eNCA news reporter Lindsay Dentlinger brusquely instructed the black MPs she was interviewing outside the National Assembly to put on their masks, in the video loop doing the rounds on social media this week. This was in contrast to the white MPs she had interviewed just before that, and appeared to have given free rein to speak without their masks on.

This was swiftly followed by the secondary aggression of being gaslighted by the management of the news station in its response to the public outcry generated by the viral video. The words “maliciously misleading” made an appearance, as did, curiously, “this incident represents an inaccurate and unfair image of her work” — which makes no sense, since we were all watching the same video loop. Is the broadcaster questioning our vision or our intelligence?

Since the start of the pandemic there has been a marked increase in the number of Asian-Americans in the US who have been victims of racist hate crimes, including violent assault and murder. At the latest count, there have been over 3,000 reports of hate crimes against the East Asian community in the US — from people having dead animals thrown in their front yards to acid attacks and vicious beatings.

Advocacy groups have identified former US president Donald Trump’s toxic rhetoric referring to Covid-19 as the “China virus” as one of the many root causes of this uptick in racist brutality.

In the UK, a mutation of the coronavirus that was first detected in southeast England and is known as B.1.1.7 or the Kent variant, has been found to be just as infectious as B.1.351, the socalled South African variant. Yet this would be difficult to discern, judging by news commentary and foreign policy in the UK, where politicians have been scaremongering so relentlessly about the dangers of travel to and from SA that health minister Zweli Mkhize felt compelled to issue a statement in December denouncing their baseless hysteria.

Persistent, racist narratives about people of colour being inherently dangerous, and their bodies being diseased and unclean, are nothing new in countries like the US and the UK. Certainly they should not be unheard of to a news organisation in post-apartheid SA — most especially not to one of its most seasoned reporters. By denying what was plainly visible to anyone who watched Dentlinger’s video clips, eNCA has made a grave miscalculation about the impact of these racist narratives on its audience.

The truth is that nobody in this country can claim the mantle of racial innocence, and to try to do so is both futile and an insult to the daily lived experiences of the people who must regularly face the sharp end of a polarised society. We are all engaged in the daily work of trying to undo generations of socioeconomic injustice perpetrated in the name of racism, nationalism, and greed; part of that work is acknowledging that systemic racist attitudes can and do find their way into mainstream journalism.

We need leaders in the news media who will inculcate a culture of introspection, genuine apology and learning when incidents of racial discrimination such as this one — be it “unconscious” or not — arise in their reporting.

Denial and obfuscation are not sustainable ways forward.