NOTE: This #8 installment in the “For Racial Healing” series will describe the findings of an important study by the University of Michigan that indicates white men are more prejudicial than white women against Blacks, based on a large pool of more than 440,000 persons. Relatedly, #8 demonstrates the ways that this greater prejudice by white men has often manifested itself through restrictive, institutional and personally brutal treatment of Blacks. Moving forward, also reflective of the results of the same University of Michigan study, we will examine in the #9 installment the exercise of racism by white women, which has generally shown more moderation toward Blacks in various respects, certainly in comparison to white men, together with, in some, highly visible instances, a willingness and capability, though on a limited scale, to assist Blacks in the achievement of their civil rights goals, while white men were taking a completely different tactic, attempting to encumber and obstruct Black initiatives toward equal justice and equal opportunity.
On a Sunday evening in 2022, Freda and I attend an event at a well-known church on the upper eastside of Manhattan in New York City. The presenter was a credentialed, Black speaker on racial healing, who would concentrate that night on the subject of white responsibility in Black-white relations. She had spoken and written on the subject with authority, so we anticipated the presentation with enthusiasm to hear what she had to say on a topic that has major consequences for Black and white Americans.
I should not have been surprised, but as I surveyed the twenty plus attendees at the gathering, except for the head cleric of the church and me, all of the audience consisted of women, mostly white women. Where were the white men? Was the lack of attendance by white men that night an indication of their weak interest in this matter of gravitas? Was this non-involvement another signal that white men do hold a higher degree of prejudice against Blacks than white women have demonstrated?
Recently, I discovered an article, published in 2018, written by the researcher, Shervin Assari, who, at the time his study had been released, was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. The principal purpose of the article had been to shed light on how anti-Black bias in white men hurts Black men’s health. As an aside (but quite an important aside), the study employed a device called the “Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures racism by calculating how our brain struggles to match black faces with good terms”.
The Michigan study applies an evolutionary cause to white men’s behavior toward Blacks, especially toward Black males, which we can also employ to derive some clarification of white women’s conduct:
“My recent study that used IAT (Implicit Association Test) of 444,422 individuals shows that white men have higher implicit bias against blacks than white women do. This finding makes sense evolutionarily. All social animals including humans needed to make a distinction between their in-group members (those individuals who are like them) and the out-group (rivals). So, to increase our survival chance, we have historically favored our in-groups to out-groups. This is particularly true for the in-group males who are very aggressive toward out-group males, due to the mating and sexual selection.”
If this overall proposition is true – that is, white men carry more bias against Blacks than do white women, which I have come to believe – does the thesis mean that, in this time of wide-spread acknowledgment of white racism and racial responsibility, white men’s attitudes toward Blacks will have to be addressed in a more specialized and separate fashion?
It is disturbing that there are more than just a few of us, but certainly less than desirable, who have noticed over time that the racial bias against Blacks among white men has been more pronounced than that shown by white women. Taking into account the fact that white men historically enjoyed greater economic privilege and position than white women, this comparatively higher degree of prejudice against Blacks among white men can also help to explain why institutions have failed so continually to fulfill the hopes and dreams of both Blacks and a multitude of whites who expected that institutions would have adopted and pursued policies and practices for breaking through racial barriers in a more positive and demonstrable way.
The implications of this finding are quite expansive and relevant. For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was meant to eradicate racism in all areas of American life, including the business world, by forbidding discrimination on the basis of race in hiring and promoting. Sixty years later, however, a 2024 study by Fortune Magazine determined that though Black Americans constitute over 14% of the country’s population, there were only eight Black CEOs among Fortune 500 companies, or 1.6%. The study also found that “eight out of 500 leaders is a near-record high. . .”. As a result of the greater prejudice against Blacks that resides with white males, it is more than reasonable to emphasize now that the acute problems faced by Blacks have not only been racially based, but apparently gender-based as well.
While I do not discount the evolutionary theory, espoused in the University of Michigan study, I know that this theory is not the final word for conclusive evidence that white men bear greater prejudice against Blacks. There is another proposition that I believe is also associated with that bias, which I will dub the “those we abuse, we loathe” response and which is also related to the evolutionary theory. The protector role, reflective of the “in-group” incentive for the white male against the “out-group” Blacks, would have presumably required physical enforcement to establish domination. In this respect, it explains a good deal when we understand that a meaningful part of the white man’s higher degree of bias against Blacks also derives from the reality that “those we abuse, we loathe”.
Additionally, Blacks remain degraded for that white man, who experiences and inculcates instinctively that “those we abuse, we loathe” consequence. Growing up in a racist family in a racist region, I learned that message from the time I was a child, though I may not have fully understood the cruel and brutal implications and nature of it all. I could not help but notice that when a white person verbally demeaned a Black person, it was often followed by a diatribe of negative comments about Blacks generally. Even though the phrase of “those we abuse, we loathe” would not be owned by most white men in America today, the truth of it is still applicable for so many. This attitude carried forward by white men year after year has a continuing effect of minimalizing the worth of Black lives. In fact, it is impossible to have a credible conversation about racial healing in the absence of a full admission that Black lives have been routinely treated as demonstrably less valuable than white lives.
Searching for a related cause of brutality that has existed by white men against Blacks, one can certainly surmise that it may partially occur as an outgrowth of the white racist men’s reliance on the “those we abuse, we loathe” effect that undergirds a foundational untruth: that is, the belief that Blacks are innately inferior to Caucasians, thereby increasing the latitude for many white men to take full control through physical action, sufficient and necessary, to subdue Blacks. Although these white men should have fundamentally known better, they instead have used this widespread falsehood and trope as an excuse for inflicting particular harm on and gaining particular power over Blacks. For whites who crossed the unsupportable bridge that Blacks are inferior, it is not too extreme then to swallow derivative fictions that try to bear witness to other big lies, such as elongated and thicker hip muscles among Black athletes allow for more efficient and higher jumping abilities, or thicker crania among Blacks cause their brain size to be smaller, or a lackadaisical nature of Blacks makes them useful mainly for less mentally challenging and less impressive occupations. One can even hear ardent white racists reiterate the myth about Black men being endowed with generally larger genitalia, and, at the same time, argue that this Black masculine feature affirms the bestiality of the race.
The harm, caused by so many American white men against Blacks, whether by implicit reactions (derived from white predecessors) or more direct, physical acts of abuse and degradation, has produced so much scar tissue over the years that it has become nearly impossible for perpetrators and related descendants to penetrate into their own hidden humanity through those layers of tragedy that numerous white men have developed. The absence of so many white men from the country’s anti-racism engagement and the prolonged racial subjugation by whites generally of Blacks go hand in hand. The knowledge that this subjugation had been wrong but had been continued regardless took much humanity from the white perpetrators, and the descendants from generations past carried that inhumanity with them, for they had also, like their forebears, made a critical choice between accepting the benefits that the immoral code of racism wrought and receiving humanity by publicly and personally repudiating the inherited racist code. At the same time, however, there were very many whites, especially American white men, who decided simply to ignore the fact that a choice had to be made at all, and by ignoring an overt choice, a choice had in fact already been made, whether they realized it or not.
We have met white men – inheritors of the bloody and evil past that could not, would not be substantially altered – who let filiopietism sit at the table with ancestors, particularly forefathers, who were the first to lose their humanity, and to justify the loss of that humanity, shared the loss with sons, nephews, grandsons, and all the rest of those protectors of the “in-group” filiopietism by pretending that there was nothing to accept or reject. The perpetrators and descendants concluded it was only the past, and they couldn’t change it (nor would they), for they learned many lessons from it that would be lost if they rejected it.
So many white men know that, even today, there is a decision, a choice, but one that they feel doesn’t have to be made. Of course, it can be ignored, and the more who ignore the choices, the better it seems for the whole of white men. Little do they entirely comprehend that by ignoring the choice, they have also lost their ability to capture their humanity, and by not capturing their humanity, they have re-invited the past and filiopietism without judgment, declaration, or consternation – with impunity, but with only apparent impunity. The hardest aspect to accept in this scenario consists of the realization that a seemingly ambivalent message will be confirmed for the next generation with the unresolved past being foisted on succeeding generations without the necessary personal clarity that each generation owes the next. There is no exit without choice, and the progeny then have to make or dismiss the choice, though they shouldn’t, for the choice should have been made for them long ago that humanity could be instilled as an act of love.
As we consider steps toward authentic passion and allyship, it is important to keep distinctions affecting white prejudice between white women and white men in mind. In particular, the prejudice of white men will need to be addressed in a somewhat different, more intense way, including an acknowledgment of white men’s discernibly greater prejudice toward Blacks.
Next Time: White Women at Crossroads