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In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality?

Evan P. Apfelbaum¹; Kristin Pauker²; Samuel R. Sommers³; Nalini Ambady³

¹ Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University · ² Department of Psychology, Stanford University · ³ Department of Psychology, Tufts University

Despite receiving little empirical assessment, the color-blind approach to managing diversity has become a leading institutional strategy for promoting racial equality, across domains and scales of practice. We gauged the utility of color blindness as a means to eliminating future racial inequity—its central objective—by assessing its impact on a sample of elementary-school students. Results demonstrated that students exposed to a color-blind mind-set, as opposed to a value-diversity mind-set, were actually less likely both to detect overt instances of racial discrimination and to describe such events in a manner that would prompt intervention by certified teachers. Institutional messages of color blindness may therefore artificially depress formal reporting of racial injustice. Color-blind messages may thus appear to function effectively on the surface even as they allow explicit forms of bias to persist.

DOI

10.1177/0956797610384741

Volume

21 (11)

Pages

1587-1592

Language

en

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