Instant Genius - How science can help us tackle racism

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Most of us like to think we live in an equal society that offers the same opportunities to all. But unfortunately, hundreds of scientific studies say otherwise. Racial bias is essentially everywhere, often hiding in plain sight. For example, did you know that black people are as much as 50 per cent less likely to be called in for a job interview than a similarly qualified white person? Or that children of colour are more likely to be viewed as troublemakers at school? In this episode, we speak to Prof Keon West about his latest book The Science of Racism – Everything You Need to Know but Probably Don’t – Yet. He tells us how racism is so deeply baked into many of our societal systems, explains the issues surrounding the concept of ‘colour blindness’ and how we can all benefit from simply interacting with more people from different ethnicities and backgrounds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. And welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas and science and technology today.

I'm Jason Gozier, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Most of us like to think we live in an equal society that offers the same opportunities to all. But unfortunately, hundreds of scientific studies say otherwise. Rachel Bios is essentially everywhere. often hiding in plain sight. For example, did you know that black people are as much as 50% less likely to be called in for a job interview than a similarly qualified white person?

Or that children of colour are more likely to be viewed as troublemakers at school. In this episode, we speak to Professor Keon West about his latest book, The Science of Racism, Everything You Need to Know, but Probably Don't, Yet. He tells us how racism is so deeply baked into many of our societal systems, explains the issues surrounding the concept of colour blindness and tells us how we can all benefit from simply interacting with more people from different ethnicities and backgrounds. So welcome to the podcast.

Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So today we're talking about your latest book, The Science of Racism. Everything you need to know but probably don't know yet. Yes. So you open the book by saying something that's startling in a way that only half of the UK and US population think that racism still exists. That's a very tricky sentence in some ways,

because it depends on what you mean by that. So if you mean, do they think that anyone anywhere is racist, then no. Most people accept that some human being somewhere in the world is probably racist. But when you get into the nitty-gritty of a deeper question, so do people think that the way society is run, currently advantages certain people, certain races, over other races, that's a different question. And then you get this about half and half split. So as you say, the nitty gritty there, we're going to go into that in a moment. But before we do, I think it's perhaps best to start with,

what do we mean when we're talking about racism? What sort of fundamental definition are we working from? Yes. A lot of people have a lot of different definitions of racism. And I don't mind how people like to define things. I think words should have clear definitions for a reason, but I think that reason is primarily communication. So as long as you and I mean the same thing, then that's fine. I think there are two important things, though, to keep in mind, that a definition really has to be useful and that you can't define things out of existence. So you can define racism in such a way that it's essentially impossible to find or to detect, but that doesn't mean that the thing isn't still happening. It's still happening. And so we

have to be aware of that. Me personally, I choose two definitions of racism. One is any detectable difference in treatment between two otherwise identical people that can be attributed to race and race alone. Now that is super specific, but that I think allows for a certain kind of measurement. It operationalizes racism very clearly. So if two people are treated differently in a store or in a doctor's office, but it's because of something else, like whether or not they're immigrants or whether or not they've cut their hair, well, that's some other kind of discrimination, possibly,

but it's not racism. And when we know that the difference is because of race, then we call it racism. The second definition that I think is very important is to do with systemic power because a lot of people say, well, sometimes, you know, people who have less power, they don't like people who have more power.

So they say, oh, for example, you know, sometimes black people or Chinese people or whoever else say mean things about white people. That's racism too. And I can see why people would feel that way. But I think it's worth acknowledging the way that systems allow some people to just have better outcomes than other people and allow some kinds of hatred to be more consequential than other kinds. And that's part of it as well. So obviously the book's called the science of racism. Yes. Throughout the book, there are countless studies that you reference in the script. I think someone did count them. I can't remember how.

many, but if you count the meta-analyses, there's several hundreds of them. Which is great, you know, as a science brand, that's what we love. Let's have a look at some of these then, and some of them are better known than others, I would say, but the big one, I think, is the CV study. So for those who haven't heard of this, you know, what is it? Yeah, so I never know if people have heard of it. I assume everyone's heard of this a hundred times, but I always meet new people who haven't heard of it. But essentially, it's the answer to the question of, well, how do you know that race affects people. How do you know that race is a factor in hiring discrimination? And the design of the CV study is incredibly simple. It's not hard at all. You just take a CV, so it could be yours or mine or

anyone else's, and you make a few hundred or a few thousand copies of that CV, all of which are perfectly identical, except for the one thing that you're interested in. And in the case of the studies I cite there, you change the race of the person who is apparently applying for the post. And that's not that hard to do. Actually, you could do better than changing the race. Some people go as far as to change it to be a Caribbean name in particular, or an African name, or an Indian or a Pakistani name. You can get really quite fine-grained about it. But let's keep it simple. We can make it a white name or a black name, and then you send them out.

In theory, because all the CVs are identical, you should get exactly the same ratings in terms of competence and hireability and organizational fit or whatever else. You should get the same number of callbacks. You should get the same number of job offers. but that never happens. And we know that that doesn't happen because we've tested it so many hundreds of times. And what you get is a reliable pattern where white people get more callbacks,

more job offers, and higher ratings than ethnic minorities for exactly the same CV. Now, the CV study is really quite basic, but it's a template on which you can start to understand everything else. So you could call a doctor's office doing the same things, offering the same symptoms, except the person who's doing it as black or white. you could show people evidence of a crime that was committed, except the defendants is black or white.

You could show people in newspaper article, except the person described as black or white. You could do anything. And of course, you could do this with anyone else, with Indian people, Chinese people, Muslim people. And I know Muslim is not a race. I understand that. But it's often treated the same way because it has the same effects. But you can do whatever you want, and you reliably find the same patterns, that white people are generally treated better than everyone else in all of these conditions.

So that's talking about adults there. But a thing that you mentioned, which is quite interesting, which you're covering quite a lot of detail, is the education system follows a similar pattern. So what can you say about that? Well, what I'd like to say about it is that I have so many conversations with parents who have children who are seven, eight, nine years old. And they say, oh, I couldn't talk to them about racism. It's a bit early, you know, it hasn't come up yet. And there's a laugh that happens inside me, but not like a laughing at them laugh, kind of a bitter, tragic laugh. because I think, oh, you were way too late.

By the time the child is three, scientifically, we know that racism has already factored into their lives, both in terms of being victims of it and being perpetrators of it. So on the victim side, there are studies that show, for example, that when you give teachers the same kinds of work, exactly the same work, like a CV study, but you change it to make it look or sound like it's coming from a white child or a black child, the teachers will rate the white child's work as better than the black child's work,

and we know this. And there's other research showing that teachers, teachers tend to underestimate ethnic minority children more than they underestimate white children and different ethnic minorities in different ways in different subjects, but the pattern of underestimation is there. And we also know that when you tell teachers to look out for children who are misbehaving, and actually I do describe it in detail in the book, and it is a fascinating study because it has to do with eye tracking. So it tells the teachers to look out for the children who, I forget the exact wording, something about challenges, but I just encoded to my mind

as naughty children. Look out for the naughty children. And then you track their eyes. and their eyes will fixate on the black children, and in particular the black boys, even when no one is misbehaving. It's a very telling study. But then also children are racist, and as a psychologist, in many ways, children are easier to study than adults,

because adults are incredibly complicated. Adults have layers upon layers of beliefs that they don't want to own up to, and it's not just racism. Every person is lying to themselves about how they feel about their wife or husband, about how they feel about broccoli versus ice scream, about how they feel about cardiovascular exercise. We lie so much to ourselves. We think of

ourselves as so much better than we are. But children are really quite straightforward. If you ask them, what do you think about people of other races? It'll just tell you. They'll just tell you, these people are untrustworthy, those people are dangerous, these people are bad, those people are ugly. And that's what mummy and daddy said. You say, thank you very much. That was very easy. So when studies test children, they do find that children are liably shown the same patterns of racism that the adults of their countries show. In fact, there's a really neat symmetry between two studies, one on the percentage of people stopped by the police in the UK, that you have black people being stopped a lot more, for example, than mixed

people or Asian people who are then stopped a lot more than white people. And you can find that the children in the UK show the same pattern, that they show clear preference for white people, followed by Asian people, followed by black people. So we've mentioned that education, the workplace, you touched on the justice system, medical care. So the depressing conclusion from this is that racism is everywhere. Yes, almost everywhere. There are some places where it tends not to show up in the same way. So I didn't include those in the book.

So I don't want people getting really angry at me saying, oh, he left it out. He left out the places where it doesn't matter. I left out a lot of other places where it does matter. I left out some of my own studies, in fact, where it does matter. Because you can't fit everything in the book. It'd just be too much. Off the top of my head, there's a couple of places.

So if you look at the CV studies, you can do these in academic departments as well. And in general, if you were to, for example, send out a letter to a potential supervisor saying, oh, I'd really love it if you supervised my PhD work. If you were white and a man, you get massive benefits in most departments. You get them in the sciences, and you get them in the philosophy departments and in the humanities department. but there is apparently a slight edge if you're in the theatre or fine arts, certain kinds of theatre departments. Then if you're an ethnic minority or a woman, you get the advantage.

But in most departments, you get the advantage if you're a man or a white person. I know that there's a couple of instances, very, very specific instances. So there is one I did mention in the book about police officers and lay people and their likelihood of shooting you. And there is a specific case in the United States of America where they found that it's actually slightly better to be an East Asian person than a white person because you're slightly less likely to get shot. But most of the time, most of the time, 99% of the studies, it's just better to be a white person. Any same person, having read the research on it, who could then pick

a race, would pick white. It's a lot easier. So in the book, you mentioned quite an interesting distinction between individual racism and systemic racism. So what's the difference there? Yes. So again, I hate being a stickler for definitions because people have their own definitions. As long as we understand each other, I'm fine. And I know a lot of people use different definitions. I admit I don't like a lot of the other definitions. So a lot of other people say, oh, it's systemic racism because there's so much. But that seems like a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.

So I want to present a difference of kind. And for me, when you talk about individual racism, someone has to be racist in order for the racism to continue. Someone, somewhere, has to choose to treat people differently because of their race, or perhaps unthinkingly treats people differently because of their race. For systemic racism, you don't need that. You can have everyone be as perfectly egalitarian as possible, but the racism happens anyway because it's built into the system. So the example I focus on in the book is the example of the immigration system in the United Kingdom. And the way in which it was layered to only accept certain kinds of paperwork, but not other kinds of paperwork. And this

paperwork was chosen in such a way that white people were much more likely to have it, and ethnic minorities were much less likely to have it. Now, once you set that system up, it doesn't matter who's doing the choosing. It doesn't actually matter how racist the person is. That person could absolutely love ethnic minorities. They could be desperate to get as many ethnic minorities into the UK as possible. They won't be able to. The system is set up in such a way that they have to accept some paperwork and ignore other paperwork. And that paperwork trail forces them to pick more white people. That is a systemic racism. And once you understand that, you can look at other rules that make racism systemic. The other example I point out is voter suppression laws in the,

well, I don't think they call them voter suppression law. I'm sure that's not actually the word they like to use, but voter ID laws that use in the United States. These are laws that say you need a certain kind of ID to do it. And to get that ID, you need to go to a certain place. And to do that, you need to do this. And the voting booths are set up here. And ostensibly, there's no race involved. There's no race mention in any of these. But the IDs are less likely to be owned by people of color. And the specific booths are further away from anywhere where people of color live. And they're set up to vote on days when it's harder for people of color to take them off. And all of these rules then make it so that racist stuff happens, even if no individual within the

system is doing racist things. And system is systemic. racism is in many ways the more terrifying because you could just kill off all the racist people. If all the racist people who invented the system died, it would still roll forward to the racism. They don't need us to agree with their values to continue to perpetuate the racism. It happens because of the rules they set up. So let's change gears a little bit then and look at the individual. So a lot of people talk about unconscious bias in this context. So what's the idea of that?

And is it useful? Oh, wow. Is it useful? It's a very tricky one. So let's start with the easy one. What's the idea of it? Unconscious bias is an idea that comes out to the fact that most people don't think of themselves as racist.

And that's true. If you survey people, even if you survey them anonymously, and you ask them, are you racist? Most people say no. And in fact, most people get very offended and they wouldn't like you very much for asking the question. So there'd be the clear implication that this is bad. I'm not a racist person.

And yet, simultaneously, when you look at the studies, you find that most people do racist stuff, at least some of the time. So you do the CV studies or the healthcare studies or the policing studies or the shoot people in the simulator study or whatever other kind of study, people are racist. And so that presents an interesting disjunction. And the solution to that disjunction for many people is to invoke the idea of unconscious bias. And it's not just for racism. It's also for sexism or for anti-gay prejudice or whatever else it is.

But the idea is that people don't know that they're being racist, and they're doing it entirely unconsciously. And so the bias happens, even though they're unaware of it. It's bolstered by a lot of research, particularly research on implicit biases, showing that you can measure people's racism, even if they don't want to tell you about it. But this is where the first cracks start to show in the idea of unconscious bias,

because the implicit bias research never actually set out to measure unconscious bias. That was never the idea. It separated bias into two camps, explicit, that people know about and can report accurately to you. So someone who says, I'm super racist against Chinese people, for example. I think that they are like this, and I don't like them because of that. And implicit bias, where someone will say, no, no, no, I have no problem with Chinese people.

I'm great. I love them, but continue to do racist anti-Chinese stuff. But the reason why someone would say, no, no, no, I love Chinese people, that was They were fairly agnostic about that. They said it could be that someone is unaware of their levels of racism, but they didn't mean in an entirely unconscious way. They simply said that they weren't accurate about their levels of racism. They could overestimate or underestimate it.

And the other one, they used a very nice phrase, a very decent scientific phrase, which was, you know, they might be unwilling to report it to you, which I like that phrase, because it's such a nice way of saying that they're just lying, that they're racist and they're lying. And it's fine to be able to measure. it and get around the fact that they're lying. And I think the unconscious bias narrative has unfortunately

taken a lot of that complexity away and essentially created a world of cartoon characters who are either perfectly good, never racist, just not racist at all, or they're unconsciously racist in that they have no idea, they have no clue, they can't introspect at all,

they can't look at their own behaviors, they can't ask themselves why they have no friends or of this particular race, or they never dated anyone who is a, of this particular race, or they don't watch any films or read any books that star people of this particular, they don't do this. And I, that's not in keeping with the science. According to science, people can introspect, actually. People can notice their own behaviors. People can notice odd discrepancies in their lives, and people can notice that they like some groups of people more than other people. They just don't want to tell you about it, because that comes

with lots of social consequences. And because of that, some bias is unconscious, perhaps, although some scientists even debate that. Some people think that actually no bias is unconscious. We do clever things to ignore it, but it's not completely unconscious. But I'm willing to accept that some is unconscious. I'm totally willing to accept that. But what I think is an utterly ridiculous claim would be that all of it is, or even that most of it is.

I think we just don't have any data supporting that. And in that sense, the unconscious bias narrative is unhelpful in that it masks all the other kinds of bias that aren't unconscious at all, and that also aren't this weird cartoony bias, but that we still have to deal with. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

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With cooking oils, salad dressings and mayo all powered by the good food. fats from 100% pure avocado oil and simple delicious ingredients. Chosen foods. So in the book, you talk about what you call deception. So sort of, unfortunately, I bet many people listening will have heard somebody start a sentence with the phrase, I'm not racist, but... Yes. Do you know what?

People never say, I'm not racist, but, and then say something not racist, because it doesn't actually add up. If you say, I'm not racist, but I really prefer Burger King to McDonald. to take, well, I don't think that's, I mean, I think that's fine. I don't see any racism in that. I'm not racist, but I think rainbows are actually quite pretty. Again, it's totally incomprehensible. You have to say something racist after the butt in order for the sentence to make any sense. So you often hear this phrase as well, victim blaming. Yes. So what do we mean by that? And how does that fit into this picture? Victim blaming is a really, it's a big idea. It's any situation in which you treat any person or group of people

badly and then you blame them for the bad things that happened to them. I think probably nowadays, the easiest social resonance that people get would be in the case of victims of rape or sexual abuse that they say, well, they, what were you doing that night? You know, how promiscuous have you been before? What were you wearing? How drunk were you suggesting that by doing this, you deserve the bad treatment that you get? Of course, but it's applicable to lots of other people as well. So you can do this in a variety of different places. And one way that intersect with race but isn't the same as race is blaming people who are poorer for their circumstances when they're clearly systemic factors that keep them from having the same opportunities as wealthier people. So, of course, they don't have

enough to eat or they don't have enough money to pay for their heating because they're bad, factless, useless people who waste their lives and don't have good work ethic rather than because of the systems we've created. And it's used in the case of racism to, to, justify negative treatment towards black people and other ethnic minorities. I talk about it a lot in the book concerning black people and the perception of criminality, which is used to justify a lot of really negative behaviors towards black people. There's a passage I go through in the book about people who say, oh, look, black people, there's three times as likely to be in prison for crimes than white people. And, oh, you know, most black people, it was a big talking point

in the United States a while ago that most, I have to say it in the racist. this way because this is generally how people say it. But they say most blacks aren't killed by police. They're killed by other blacks. And so, you know, we don't need to worry about anti-black violence in the police. These arguments don't hold up. So I do talk about how the statistics themselves don't justify any of these patterns. That, you know, even when you look at the actual numbers of criminals,

most white people aren't criminals, most black people aren't criminals. Most people just don't fall into this category. And the number of people who are is really quite vanishingly small and very very difficult to justify a negative treatment of an entire group of people based on that. But there's also other statistics, like that most whites are killed by other whites, which is a thing that no one ever says. No one ever brings this up, even though it is true. Most whites are killed by other whites. But this is never used to justify the murder of a white person at the hands of the police, because that would be ridiculous and dehumanizing. It's such an obvious, ugly thing to do.

But then I also look at the research saying, well, what happens when black people and white people both present as criminals. So when they have criminal backgrounds, and you can imagine a continuation of the CV study in which you have a black person and a white person, or rather you have an identical CV that's presented as if it's coming from a black person or a white person, but also within that, you have people who have criminal records and people who don't. So you have a white person with a criminal record, a white person without a criminal record, black person with a criminal record, black person without a criminal record. And what the studies show is that people aren't just responding to the apparent criminality, which, by the way, it's a questionable thing in itself.

How much should we continue to judge people negatively for the rest of their lives because they have a criminal record? That is a whole other discussion, but I'm not getting into it. But assuming that people are doing this thing, where it's just the criminality that's turning them off, you should find that the black person without the criminal record does better than the white person with the criminal record. But this isn't what you find. What you find is a very clear effect of race. You do find an effect of criminality. that, yes, having a criminal record lowers your response rates. But it doesn't lower it to such an extent, or it doesn't lower it in a race-neutral way.

Black people suffer a lot more for the same history. And in fact, even black people without any criminal record at all, still are assessed as worse than white people with a criminal record. So we're not looking at criminality here. We're looking at race. And the finding that people would rather hire a white ex-convict than a black person with no criminal record says, this isn't what they're selecting for. They are selecting for race, and criminality is a secondary issue. So we've talked about, obviously, this is an absolutely enormous, prevalent problem.

So let's have a look at some solutions that have been proposed then. So one really interesting one is this idea of colour blindness. Yes, yes. Most people, most white people really like color blindness. And on some level, I do experience it as somewhat difficult to blame them for liking color blindness because every book and every movie that

I saw as a child, granted I was a child a while ago, promoted this as the best idea ever, that you know, oh, we're not even supposed to know who's what color and we don't think about it. And there was even that song, which I think was buying vogue.

I hope I'm not misquoting, and I might be both showing my age and taste in music, but it was a good song. Free your mind and the rest will follow. Do you know that song? Be colorblind. Don't be so shallow. Yeah, I know in vague. Okay, good.

We're on the same page. I'm 45. Okay. Look, it was a good song, right? But it was, scientifically speaking, terrible. It was a terrible idea. And maybe don't get your science tips from pop stars. Maybe that's not a good, maybe that's a good lesson by itself.

But colorblindness is terrible. And it is so unequivocally terrible that it is, it's a genuine mind blow how much people still rely on it, how much people still say to me. Even friends I have will say, you know, oh, I don't think of you as black and they will say it as if it's a good thing, as if they've done me a favor, as if they've accomplished something. When the science reliably shows that colorblindness is a way to be more racist, it's not even ineffective. It is reliably a way to be more racist. And if you adopt it, you're probably going to become more racist afterwards. So earlier on, we were talking about the CB study. So a lot of institutions now are sort of introducing quote-unquote diversity quotas. Yes. So what do we think about those? So I have complex feelings about those. I think it depends on how you do them. I think diversity

Quotas are better than nothing. And I respond to people who get really angry about them and say, well, it's unfair. You're hiring all these ethnic minorities who shouldn't be hired. I respond that it's already unfair. We're hiring white people who shouldn't be hired. The playing field is not level and literally nothing in the science says that it is level. So if we do nothing, what we will have is a continuation of the overhiring of relatively mediocre white people over more qualified people of color. We know that that is what's happening. We know it's what will continue to happen. We know it is what has continued to happen, even despite many years of DEI efforts and many kinds of affirmative action policies. It has never addressed the problem

completely. That has never happened. So I'd rather a quota than nothing, but I'd rather the quotas were done in specific ways. So I'm less comfortable with quotas that simply say, oh, we must have five people of color, for example. That makes me less comfortable. Most Mostly because of the way people respond to it. I could see people respond to that as deeply unfair, and that the people, even the ones who are selected, if I were selected, just because they said, well, look, literally, we had to accept five people of color. And you're one of the people who applied. So here's a job. I would feel like, I'm not sure if I belong here. I'm not sure if I'm qualified to be here, that would be uncomfortable. I do think there are other ways to enact the quotas that are quite useful. So sometimes people enact them in terms of minimal requirements being met. So if someone who is an underrepresented person or a minority in some way, meets the minimal requirements, you have to invite them to interview. You can't exclude them based on something else.

And that, I think, is much more scientific because we undervalue black CVs when they see them come in. We undervalue people of color when they submit their CVs. So if you think someone meets the minimum requirements, but isn't much better than that, they're probably better than that. You're just missing it. So invite them in and have them go to interview. There are other ways of people do it,

including rules that say, where two people appear to be identical. So if you have a white person and an ethnic minority and they appear to be identical, always hire the ethnic minority. That is incredibly in line with the science. That's amazing. Because if you have a white person and an ethnic minority, all other things being equal and you think they're equal, they are not. The ethnic minority is better. They're equal. They are not. The ethnic minority is better. Just hire them. Trust us on this. So that one is very scientific. So it depends on how you apply it. That's the way I think about it. So kind of related to this is the idea of visibility. In my industry, so media, we've got some sort of iconic black broadcasters over the years like Moira Stewart, Sir Trevor McDonald, and a lot of people of colour who've gone into the media industry, they always say, well, they gave me an example saying, if they've done it, they look like me, so can I. How valuable is

that? Yeah, so that is very valuable. And it's valuable in general, in decreasing. increasing racist ideas about people. So there is quite a whole other set of research, which, funny enough, is not the huge focus of this book. So in this book, there's like a tiny section on media, which I do talk a little bit about it. There's a whole other book that I wrote earlier called Skewed Decoding Media Bias, which I did with my friend, Karen Franklin, who is probably more famous, not for being my friend, but for being the host of, like, the close show on BBC One for a long time. But very lovely, white, I feel like I should point that we wrote it together, and we looked at bias in the media in many ways. But what you do find

is a consistent effect, whereas media can make you like people more, but also make you like people less. And it can also affect even the ways that people feel about themselves, so that if you can see, you can be a quote, which I didn't know, that is reflective of the science. People who don't see exemplars like themselves in media are less likely to believe that they can do certain things or that this is a place for them. But also, it can be incredibly sneaky. people always imagine that to convey a racist message, you need a book to say a racist thing. So there's no book anywhere. At least I've never seen it. There probably is actually such a book, but I wouldn't buy it and no one in my circles would own it. But there probably is a book somewhere

that says, black men are terrible fathers. Maybe. But I've never seen that book. What I have is children and a lot of children's books. And what I find is that most people can't name a single book in which there is a black man who is taking care of a child. And that omission is incredibly powerful. So you don't need anything as overt and crass as a book that says, Black men are terrible fathers. You don't need that. You just need a lot of books.

You need The Tiger Who Came to Tea and you need Elephant Tantrum and you need a long list of other books in which there are people who take care of children and literally none of them are black men ever. And then you learn the message anyway. And in that way, media can be much more subtle but much more powerful than many of us give it credit for. So sort of moving on to the person again, then, you talk about something called intergroup contact.

Yes. So what do you mean by that? Yes. So intergroup contact, it's a very fancy set of words, but it just means interacting with people who aren't like yourself. So we're doing intergroup contact right now. You're a white person, I assume, although I'm never 100% sure, actually. but I always guess that people are when they look white.

I'm guessing you are, yes? I am. There we go, and I'm a black person, and therefore we're doing some intergroup contact right now, so we're talking across racial lines. Same thing if you're talking to people of different genders, sexual orientations, nationalities, whatever else. And it sounds so basic and so simple and so ridiculous,

but it is actually one of the most powerful ways that science has shown to reduce integral bias. Not just explicit bias, but implicit, it, you know, quote-unquote unconscious, but we've had that discussion bias as well. It changes the way we respond to people. It changes how we treat them. It is something that is incredibly powerful and incredibly reliable. So we talked about the sort of problems with education. So off the back of what you just said, what can we do better in the classroom? Wow, well, there's a lot we could do better in the classroom. I was going to say, I'm not in education, but that's not true.

I was like a professor for a while. So I have worked in the education system. And I could say there are some things we can do better in the classroom, absolutely. In terms of reducing bias, I would say acknowledging that some of the discrepancy is because of the bias in the teachers is incredibly important. I've seen a lot of people discuss things like racial achievement gaps or whatever else and explain it in a hundred different ways to say, oh, it's because there's no role models or because the ethnic minority students don't feel as represented or because this or because that, and they never actually say, and also maybe, maybe the people doing the teaching are racist. I think we just have to acknowledge that as a possibility, and quite a lot of

research shows that that is the case. It's the case from a very, very early age. It's a case throughout their entire lives. The study I talked about, by the way, in which people wrote into potential PhD supervisors asking if they'd be interested in supervising them, except, of course, there were no real people. It was just the same letter being sent in ostensibly by white people or by people of color. That study found that when the professors were people of color as well, that conferred no benefit, that the ethnic minorities were not more likely to be chosen because they were writing to professors of color, which is a terrifying finding. So we don't get to escape this just by getting more teachers of color into the room. We have to accept that racism is big and pervasive and can affect

the way people teach, and we have to be aware of that. And there's some really very clever research that I did report on in the book showing that this racism is one of the things that causes that divergence in how well white and black children do, or white and black students do in classrooms. So we have to talk about that and we have to be able to fix it. But in a secondary way, coming back between the personal and the systemic, knowing that racism exists in the system, you have to take certain measures. So one of the things that we already do in the British University system is mark papers anonymously. And that's incredibly important, because if you have a name at the top of the work, people will respond to it differently. They'll read something about the name, they'll see the demographics, and they'll treat them differently.

So as far as possible, you should get rid of the bias, but also you should set up the system in such a way that assuming some people are biased, which, by the way, scientifically is an incredibly safe assumption. Even when you assume people are biased, that bias shouldn't be able to filter through to the outcomes for the students. So we've covered an awful lot there, so sort of by way of closing. I mean, are you optimistic that someday, you know, will be able to conquer these problems? I don't think in terms of optimism, actually, or pessimism. I think racism is enormous.

I think it's incredibly powerful, incredibly widespread. I think when you test it, you know, as you pointed out at the beginning, it's just hard to find areas of life in which it's not affecting us. So unless you have a very specific niche, unless you're a very specific kind of East Asian person living in a certain party of the United States of America who wants to join a theater department, you're probably going to face quite a lot of it. And even if you are that person,

you will face it when you do other things besides trying to specifically join the theater department. So I could see why people would feel pessimistic about it. What I mostly feel, I think, when I think about it, is a sense of needless suffering. because every year there is a lot of media hype about whether racism is happening and every year there's a lot of hype about

the new way of uncovering racism or the new way of dealing with racism. And I do also work in diversity and inclusion and consultancy and I can see the hype that some companies come up with and they're very excited about the newest thing we could do. and I don't find any of that interesting at all. We have known that racism exists for an incredibly long time, and we have known how to solve it for an incredibly long time.

And some societies, and some pockets within societies, are a lot less racist than others. So it's not impossible. We can do it, and we know how to do it, and we have known how to do it. We just don't. And that's the frustrating part, that nothing about this is insurmountable. nothing about this is impossible.

And on some level, I don't even think it's that difficult. I'm excited to hear what people think about the book, but I think once explained, it's actually incredibly simple, like wonderfully straightforward. And yes, there are nuances of it that are harder to explain, but the overarching thing is incredibly simple. And if we wanted to, we could stop it tomorrow. We just don't.

And that's the part I find disheartening. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Keon West. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book, The Science of Racism. Everything you need to know, but probably don't, yet. If you liked what you just heard,

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