ntto examples of people who suffered from racism, or who overcame racism.

But today's guest reminds us all that quote, "The plural of anecdote is that data," and that science actually has a lot to say about the reality of racism today.

He's Professor Keon West this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also a Salves Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is scholar and author Keon West, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

His new book is "The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know, But Probably Don't-Yet."

He's joining us today from London, England.

Keon, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate that.

- I mentioned, you know, the book is incredibly thoughtful, timely, an important read.

We're gonna get into it in some depth, but do you wanna give us a quick overview?

- Sure.

So people often ask me why I wrote the book.

And the reason why I wrote the book is because, when we talk about racism, we kind of assume we're talking about it from one of two places.

So we're either talking about it from an emotional place.

So someone like me, I'm Black, in case people can't tell, or people are just listening in, so I'm a Black person and people write books from the perspective of, oh, this happened to me, and I'm very sad about it and I want to tell you about my feelings about it.

Or we write about it from a political place.

Either this is what I want to do from this side of the political aisle, or that side of the political aisle.

And what we don't do, strangely, is talk about it from a scientific, factual place.

Not what I think, not what I believe, not what my politics are, but what does the science say about the facts about racism?

And I thought that was strange, because there are so many facts, and I thought it was time someone wrote them down, and so I did.

- Well, and it is brilliant, you begin with a discussion of the scientific method.

And for those of us who maybe don't remember what the scientific method is from our grade school days, do you wanna remind folks at home what we're talking about with that?

- Sure, I would describe the scientific method as the best way of figuring out what's really going on in the real world.

And in the early parts of the book, I talk about the ways in which we try to discuss racism and we fail.

So for example, some people think that they're proving racism exists when they say things like, oh, well, Black people in the US, or the UK, both are true, are about twice as likely to be unemployed as white people.

And they think that this is a discussion about the scientific evidence for racism, but these statistics don't do what people think they're doing, they're just differences, they're not showing where the differences come from.

The scientific method is really useful for explaining where differences come from.

And so I walk through how to design an experiment, I walk through what a control condition is, I walk through why you need people not to be aware of which part of the experiment, which condition of the experiment they're in, and I walk through how you'd conduct it to make sure you'd know that race, and only race was a thing causing the differences that you see.

And I think the great thing about the book, I know it's the science of racism, so racism is half of it, but it's also science.

And once you get it, once you get how to do it with racism, you could do it with anything, you could do it with sexism, or you could do it with, you know, vitamins, you could do it with the testing whether vitamins cure your cold.

This is science at its most basic.

And when you understand how that works, I think it's a powerful tool for understanding everything.

- So why is science so important to the study of racism?

What does it tell us that other disciplines don't?

- So I'm not sure if it tells us things that other disciplines don't.

I think you could definitely read anecdotes about racism and get a sense of the kinds of racist things that could happen.

But for me, what it is, fundamentally is more convincing than all those other things.

So if I were to tell someone, I went to a store, and I was followed around the store, and I feel like that was racism, that's just a feeling.

And if I told you this and you didn't believe me, some people might gasp and say, oh, they didn't believe him, how cruel, how racist!

But not really, actually, it's just a story.

It's a bit strange that I would expect you to believe me based on just a story.

But to conduct a scientific experiment to say, we got 100 people, 50 of them white and 50 of them Black, and we dressed them the same, and made them behave the same way, and sent them to a store, and had them walk around, and the Black ones were followed around, and the white ones weren't followed around, which these are experiments people have done.

When you do that, that is much more convincing.

That says, oh, I see the problem, the problem isn't your clothes, or your hair, or what you did, the problem is racism, and we can see that now.

- So what does the science tell us about racism in education?

- Oh, so the science tells us about racism generally, that there's a lot of it.

That racism is big, it's ubiquitous, it's spread around almost everywhere, it affects almost everything, so that includes education.

But it tells us a lot of things.

It tells us, for example, that if you take, let's say a hundred or a thousand essays that are written exactly the same way, and you put white names at the top of some of them, and Black names on the top of the other half of them, and you send them to teachers, the teachers will rate, will mark the white essays as if they're better than the Black ones, they'll give them higher grades.

But if you go to teachers who are teaching children as young as three to five, like really, really young children, and you tell them to look out for the children who are badly behaved, or who are doing challenging things, even if all the children are behaving exactly the same way, if you put little eye tracking glasses on the teachers, which you can do, if you're a psychologist, and you have the budget, you'll notice that they stare at the Black children, and in particular the Black boys, even when no one is misbehaving.

It tells us that when you send out an email to a professor saying, I'd like to study under you, if the email is exactly the same, but half of them are sent by white people, or by people with white sounding names, and half of them are sent by people with Black sounding names, the people with Black sounding names are much more likely to be ignored.

And so this is a huge list of things that starts from when you're very, very young, all the way up to PhD level.

And it's experiments like these that say, in education, racism is big, it's terrible, it has huge effects, and measurable effects, we know what these effects are.

- One of the experiments that you describe in the book is the CV or the resume experiment.

There are many variations to it, but in broad general terms, what is the experiment, and what does it show us?

- So the CV experiment is really simple.

I could take, let's say my CV, or your CV, or anyone else's CV, and make a couple hundred or a couple thousand versions of that CV, that are exactly the same.

So everything's the same.

Your education, your experiences, your accomplishments, all the awards, everything a hundred percent the same.

And the only thing you change in the CV is the name at the top.

And you change the name to make it sound like it's a white person's name, or to make it sound like it's a Black person's name, or you could do a Latino's name, and we do that as well, or an East Asian person's name, or a South Asian person's name, you can do whatever name you want, but you keep everything else the same, except for the race of the person at the top of the CV.

Now if you send out these CVs, because they're identically qualified, in theory, these people should get identical job offers, they should get identical invitations to interview, they should get identical offers of pay, but they don't, and we know they don't, because we've done versions of this, like you said, hundreds of times, thousands of times possibly, actually can't keep track.

But there's loads and loads of times, and there's meta-analyses as well that we do.

And when you do that, you get a really reliable effect.

You get white people getting the most callbacks, the best job offers, the highest level of pay.

And then below them you get ethnic minorities, in also really specific orders.

So I guess that comes back to another question you asked Wayne, what does this tell us that stories can't?

It actually tells us the numbers, and the order that you get.

So you get kind of the white names first, and then the East Asian names, the South Asian names, the Latino names, and the Black names, in that order, in America, that's what you get, in other countries you get a different order, but you can see not only, if people are being discriminated against, but you get the exact numbers of how much they're being discriminated against, how much this costs them in real money, in real jobs.

And that's really important and insightful.

- So you talked about real money in real jobs, what are the experiments in the workplace?

What did you find with those?

- Yes, so once you get into the workplace, there's a particular set of experiments that I find really chilling.

So, we've been through the CV experiments, and we know you're less likely to be hired with the same qualifications if you have an ethnic minority name.

And when I was younger, I kind of thought, the solution to this is fairly obvious, just become really, really good, just outperform everybody, and then you solve the problem.

And not so much, apparently, there's other research within the workplace that says, if you add experience to people's CVs, so you take that same CV experiment and you repeat it.

But before you do that, you add a couple of years of experience to everyone's CV, you find that the added experience really boosts the callback rates and the promotion rates, and so on for white people, but has a much smaller effect on everyone else.

So the higher up you go, the more experience you get, the better you get, the bigger that racist gap becomes.

So you're actually exacerbating the problem.

You never level out the playing field by overperforming, you unfortunately just remain stuck with the same problem.

It's not a problem you can fix just by being really great at everything.

- Yeah, so I guess I'm curious how universal is this phenomena?

So you're in the UK, we're in the States, - Yeah.

- Do different cultures have different types and different degrees of racist behavior within them?

- Yes, so absolutely.

And how would you know that?

You'd know that by let's say, doing a whole bunch of CV experiments.

So you could do the CV experiments again, you could do exactly the ones that I described before, you could do them in the US for example, and you could do them in the UK.

And if you do that, you get slightly different numbers.

Actually, the UK's gap, according to a meta analysis is bigger than the US' gap, so well done US- (hosts laughing) - That's like huge.

- Fairly well.

But it depends on who you're talking about.

So the UK for example, is not very fond of Black Caribbeans, not really high, we don't get very high response rates when you put our names on CVs.

But for example, we have, we just have certain races we don't really believe in, and that we treat them as white essentially.

So Latinos are not, they're not real races in the UK, they are generally just absorbed into other racial categories.

And of course no race is really, there's no such thing as white people, there's no such thing as Black people, we kind of make them all up as we go along, but you really see the effects of that as you move from country to country.

That in some countries people kind of shrug and say, well, these people are white, and then in other countries they say, no, they're something that's not white, and we will treat them worse as a result, which is quite different.

And it gets really exciting when you travel to other countries.

So in France you get an interesting effect, in particular, for North African names, they're not a huge fan of North Africans.

But they're actually quite relatively nice to Afro Caribbeans, not as nice as they are to white French people, but nicer than they would be to North Africans.

So depending on where you are, the numbers go up and down depending on different countries.

- So racism obviously is ancient, centuries millennial old.

Why has science not been applied to the study until now?

I mean, I think I'm very curious to know the answer, everyone has their definition of racism, has heard about, has their thoughts, their opinions, why has science not been applied until now?

- Well, I don't wanna take too much credit, and I don't want to give the impression that it hasn't been applied until now.

The earliest studies that I think I cite in the book, go back to the 1940s, I think, about racism.

And I have to run some quick calculations in my head, that is a long time ago, you know, it's 60-70 years ago, it's a while ago that people have been doing this.

And we have known for all of this time, for a lifetime, I'm going to say older than anyone in this room, there's been proof that, and people do exactly the same things, that they don't get the same outcomes because of their races.

That they can have the same CV but they won't get the same jobs, they could do the same behaviors, they won't be found guilty of the same crimes.

They could treat their partners exactly the same way, they will not be interpreted as equally good spouses, or whatever else.

And we have known that for 70 years.

And so I don't want to take credit, I didn't discover this.

In fact, what I kind of want to remind people of is that, this isn't higher level stuff, like the book is not the cutting edge of science on racism.

It's really basic.

This is, diseases are caused by germs, not by spirits, that's the level at which we're speaking, it's really, really quite basic, and we've known about it for an incredibly long time.

So I think the question's actually slightly different.

If the scientists have known this for a lifetime, why haven't they told anyone?

And I do think that's an interesting question.

I don't know the answer to that question, 'cause I did it, I told people, and it worked.

But I can get a glimpse into the answer, because I remember trying to publish the book, and a number of publishers saying, oh, a bunch of experiment, oh, no boring, like nobody wants a bunch of one study after another study, that's dull, why don't you tell them about the time that someone called you the N word?

And I said, no, I don't want to do that, who could possibly benefit from that?

So I think there's a fear of science, I think there's a fear of reading about experiments, reading about data.

And what I hope I can show with the book, is that these are interesting, these are fun, these are exciting.

You know, you don't need a story about the time someone shouted at me, you want to hear the data.

- You know, Keon, I'm not blowing smoke here, whoever that publisher was, they were just wrong, because this is a really compelling read, and a faster read than I expected when I initially thumbed through it.

The chapters are well paced, you don't dwell on stuff, this is really well written book.

US Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts, when he wrote the opinion in a case that invalidated parts of the Voting Rights Act, said that, look, there's no such thing as racism in the United States anymore, because we've elected our first Black president.

What does science say about that kind of argument?

You know, that the plural of anecdote is not data, which is something I'm gonna be quoting forever.

But what does science say about the argument that Justice Roberts made in that case?

- Well, I would say, to say there's no racism in America anymore is not an opinion-based claim.

It is a fact-based claim.

And the great thing about facts, is that facts can be right or wrong.

Like opinions are just opinions, like, I like the look of this car or this table, that's my opinion, that's yours, but you know, this table weighs 50 kilograms or weighs 100 kilograms, these are facts, and they can be right or wrong.

And I'm glad that this was placed as a factual claim, because then it enables me to say categorically, unequivocally, it's total nonsense, it's obviously not true.

Nobody who's ever conducted any experiment on such a thing would ever agree with that statement.

There is obviously still racism in Jamaica, not in Jamaica, in America.

It is clearly the case that if you take any population in America and you show them newspaper articles written with about exactly the same activity, but you change the name to make it sound like a white person, or a Black person, or a Muslim person, or whatever else it is, they'll get vastly different reactions.

If you send people into the same spaces to do the same things, they will not be treated the same way.

If you get them calling doctor's offices with the same symptoms, they won't be offered the same treatment.

It's just, it's a ridiculous claim.

And it's really kind of on the level of, I don't think smoking is dangerous because, I've been smoking for 20 years and I'm fine.

And we wouldn't accept that from someone.

I think we'd all know that even if, even if you would say, I've been smoking for 20 years and I'm fine, that doesn't prove anything about smoking, you need to do an experiment, you need your data.

And I think it's interesting that we know better than that in some areas.

We wouldn't accept it talking about smoking, but we do when we talk about racism, and I think that's a bit odd.

And I also hope the book helps to change that conversation, to help us see how silly those kinds of statements are.

- So how do people come to these statements, these silly statements, these beliefs?

Is it something you're born with, is it the culture you're raised in where you got all of the above?

- Well, I think the scientific method was developed over a really long period of time, and a lot of people got it really wrong.

So if you read some of the early works, people like Aristotle, some of the things I believe are just idiotic, and it's not fair, if you can't go back in time and beat up on Aristotle, because we've had the benefit of centuries of education and the refinement of the scientific method.

But without it, we tend to fall into silly beliefs.

And I kind of, I can say that about people who say, well, there's no more racism in America, but I can also say this, and it gets much more sensitive, and for obvious reasons, about people who do make claims about racism, people often say, well, I know racism exists because I applied for a job that I felt I was qualified for and I didn't get it.

And while I'm going to acknowledge that racism is real, we know that from the experiments, and that is a painful thing, and an unfair thing to happen, that is not proof of racism.

So this isn't one side having excellent knowledge of science, and being able to explain it well, and the other side being totally wrong.

Whether people believe in racism or not, the way they explain it is bad, and it's really terrible.

And I can see why they can't convince each other, and why they can't agree.

And what I hope the book allows us to do is to elevate the whole conversation.

So no one's saying, I think racism is real, 'cause someone shouted at me, and no one says, I think it's not, because I haven't seen anyone shout for a while, both of which are equally silly.

Like let's talk about how we can actually know racism exists so we can have a more useful conversation.

- You know, there's so much in the book that we need a couple of hours to really unpack it fully with you, but in the United States right now, we're having a debate about diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, in part because our new president, Donald Trump has said that the federal government will recognize DEI programs as discriminatory in and of themselves.

Proponents say that those kinds of programs are necessary to counter racism, that has long plagued American society.

What does the science say about the value of those programs, and what are your thoughts about the Trump administration's efforts in this regard?

- Yes, so I would say, so where do I have to agree with the Trump administration?

So what I'd have to say to agree with the Trump administration is, pointing out that, the value of some of these programs is questionable.

So they don't all work, they're inconsistent.

Some of them work, some of them don't seem to add a lot, and do seem to cost a lot of money.

So I do think that that's an important consideration.

And I'm not the only person to point this out.

There's been a lot of other research by really amazing, brilliantly qualified psychologists who've tracked, like, let's say hundreds of companies over several decades to see what they've done with their diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what the outcome is, and find that some things don't work that well, some things actually make stuff worse.

And so there's a lot of inconsistency.

What I think the Trump administration has ignored, wholesale, which I think is what makes the position really dangerously out of sync with reality, is the idea that what we have in the absence of these programs is a fair system, and we do not have that, nothing in the scientific literature suggests we have anything approaching a fair system.

So what they're ignoring is the necessity for these programs, that something has to be there.

If you have nothing, then what you have is a situation in which equally qualified ethnic minorities are not being hired for the jobs they deserve, and that's not historical, that is today.

That's right now, today, people with the right qualifications, the right experience, they're not being hired, they're not being promoted, they're not being treated well, and this is because of their race, and we know this.

So if you do nothing, you're just allowing that to continue.

And so I think the good question, the proper question has to be how do we make these programs better?

Which are the most effective programs?

Let's just do those, which are the least, let's ignore them.

But we can't say, well get rid of the DEI programs, and now we have meritocracy, no, no.

What you have is just the same old fashioned discrimination thing you've always had, and that you're now strangely refusing to fix.

- So in the end, you come back to systemic racism.

- Yeah.

- How do we counter that?

- So systemic racism, I think we have to explain it first.

Systemic racism is different from the racism we normally think about.

So we normally think about racism in terms of someone being racist, or a bunch of people being racist.

So if you think about the CV study, it requires somebody, some human being to do a racist thing.

To look at a CV, and for one reason or another, not call that person in, even though they're qualified.

And they do that in reliable, predictable patterns.

So they call white people more than they call Black people, or Indian people, or Chinese people, or whatever else, and we know that that happens.

But systemic racism is different, it doesn't actually require anyone to be racist for it to work, it's just a matter of the rules that you put together.

So if you, for example, knew something else about a group of people, so let's say, well, you know that this neighborhood has a lot of non-white people in it, then you could create rules set up in such a way that you say, well, this neighborhood is going to be marked as an area of poor investment, and therefore nobody living in this area is going to be able to get a loan to buy a house, and that devalues the entire property market in that area.

And that means that a whole group of people who happen to be mostly ethnic minority people don't make as much money.

Now, you might be racist when you set up that rule, but nobody after you has to be racist.

They just have to see the rules that you've drawn up, the lines you've drawn on the map, and they will continue to perpetuate that racism just because they're following the rules.

Now, I described what is called redlining, and what most people understand is redlining, but they don't understand why it's set up in a racist way, and you can do this with anything.

You can put voting booths in some neighborhoods, but not other neighborhoods.

And by doing so, nobody in the voting booth has to be racist, but still, some people are going to be able to vote and some people aren't.

You can set up immigration laws to say that you're taking some paperwork, but not other paperwork, and no one who works in the immigration office has to be racist, the rules just mean they'll end up taking in more white immigrants and fewer immigrants who aren't white.

And so the thing about systemic racism is, even if you were to get rid of all the racism in everyone's hearts, and everyone's minds, you just, you make everyone perfectly non-racist, there's a whole bunch of racism that would just keep happening until you go back to the old maps and erase the red lines, until you change the rules about what paperwork you accept for immigration, until you redistribute the voting booths, because these are built into the system, not just into the people.

- You know, Keon, we've got about a minute left here.

I'm curious if we can do it in that, if we can do this justice in that short period of time, what can we as individuals do?

What do we have to do to root out individual racism?

You've got some recommendations in the book.

- Yeah.

So if we're just going to talk about individual, not systemic racism, two things you can do really, really quickly.

One, if you invest any energy into being colorblind, stop.

It doesn't work, it takes up energy, and it actually makes you more racist.

There's a whole bunch of evidence about that in the book.

But if you take nothing from this other than just stop being colorblind and walk away, that would be great, actually, you're already making progress.

And thing number two, if you can recognize that you are less favorable towards a certain group of people, go and spend time with them.

If it's Muslims, go visit a mosque, spend time, talk to them, have tea and cake afterwards, discuss life with them.

If you don't like Black people, go to the nearest Black Baptist church, just spend time there, do whatever you want, just hang out, and be someone in that space.

Weirdly, even if you're not trying to be less racist, even if you're actively trying not to be less racist, just interacting with the people that you find so distasteful actually tends to make you like them more.

So those would be my two very quick pieces of advice, if you do nothing else, I think those would work.

- It's a great place for us to leave it.

Keon West, the book is, "The Science of Racism," and it's tremendous.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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