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Conversational Silencing of Racism in Psychological Science: Toward Decolonization in Practice
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231182922
Abstract
This article addresses a paradox between self-perceptions of psychology as a liberal, progressive, antiracist discipline and profession and the persistent criticisms of racism and calls for decolonization. It builds on the criticisms of epistemic exclusion and White centering, arguing that White supremacy is maintained by “conversational silencing” in which the focus on doing good psychology systematically draws attention away from the realities of racism and the operation of power. The process is illustrated by investigations of disciplinary discourse around non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic psychology and on stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction, which constitute the vanguard of liberal scholarship in the discipline. This progressive scholarship nurtures “White ignorance,” an absence of belief about systemic racism that psychology plays a part in upholding.
Racism in psychology has been exposed over decades (Helms, 2012; Lewontin et al., 1984; Martín-Baró, 1994; Richards, 1997). The hideous cornucopia of craniology, mental testing, and the African brain make a painful, unreadable history (e.g., Mahone, 2021). Nevertheless, “epistemic exclusion” continues to define the reality of psychologists of color (Buchanan et al., 2021; Settles et al., 2020, 2021, 2022), including their underrepresentation in top-tier scholarly journals (Hodgetts et al., 2020; Roberts et al., 2020) and the decentering of Black lives in the pages of published research (Garay & Remedios, 2021; Remedios, 2022). More generally, the methods, interpretations, theories, and practices of psychology devalue African and indigenous epistemologies (Kessi et al., 2022; Mkhize, 2021; Ratele, 2019; Smith, 2012) and minimize the experience of discrimination in the Global South (Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022; Boykin et al., 2020; Ratele et al., 2020). Consequently, the calls to decolonize psychology have grown more urgent as part of the broader acknowledgment that Black lives matter (Adams et al., 2015, 2017; Bulhan, 2015; Kessi & Boonzaier, 2018; Kessi et al., 2022).
At the same time, psychologists generally see themselves as progressive, scientific, objective, antiracist, and thoroughly respectable. Surveys suggest that they overwhelmingly view themselves as liberal (Inbar & Lammers, 2012; Von Hippel & Buss, 2017), and, rather than racism, accusations of liberal bias have been leveled against psychological science (Duarte et al., 2015).
The current article contributes to this critical engagement with “whitestream” psychology (Bell, 2018) by proposing and illustrating the mechanism by which racism persists and becomes resistant to change. The antiracism scholarship reviewed above attributes White supremacy to a combination of historical biases and systemic interests that have become incorporated into the practice and institutionalization of psychological science, preserving racial (and other) privileges. In focusing on racism, however, this work tends to overlook the effort psychologists have made to challenge racism within their discipline and profession. As a result, the criticism often misses its target because liberal and progressive psychologists generally view themselves as challenging rather than practicing racism. This article considers how progressive psychological science, which ostensibly challenges White privilege, may in fact maintain systemic privilege and power, explaining why racism persists after decades of critique and transformation, and despite the liberal politics of the majority.
Mick Billig’s (1999) account of dialogical repression is used to show how progressive scholarship can absorb our focus, allowing us to view ourselves as progressive, absolving us from owning racism and from the challenging work of decolonization. This complicates our understanding of “progressive” ideas in psychological science, showing how sites of innovation and transformation that seek to challenge White supremacy may be ineffective or even harmful in undoing racism. The next section of the article develops Billig’s understanding of dialogical repression as conversational silencing and shows how this can operate within psychological science to maintain “White ignorance” about racism. The remainder of the article considers how the mechanism of conversational silencing produces specific categories of White ignorance within progressive calls for non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) psychology and research on stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction. The article concludes by proposing three searching questions that can interrupt the conversational silencing of racism as we strive for decolonization in practice.
Conversational Silencing, White Ignorance, and Progressive Psychology
Billig’s (1999) theory of dialogical repression is grounded in the idea that silences are routinely and collaboratively produced in conversations (Murray & Durrheim, 2019). This occurs because we can only speak or think about one thing at a time and that speaking about topic B (e.g., our multiracial circle of friends) can be a way of not speaking about topic A (e.g., our anti-immigration opinions) to project an image of antiracism while supporting racial privilege in practice. The paradigmatic case of conversational silencing is the elephant-in-the-room phenomenon, in which polite conversation carefully circumnavigates an awkward conversational taboo that may be on everyone’s minds, such as conspicuous failings of a eulogized deceased.
Unlike Freudian repression, which is an invisible psychological mechanism, dialogical repression is a collaborative accomplishment, the exercise and effects of which are readily subject to investigation (Whitehead, 2020). In conversation, repression is flagged by discontinuity markers (e.g., “anyway” or “but”), as in using the racism disclaimer “I’m not racist, but . . .” to preface an arguably racist point (cf. Billig, 2012). Successful repression is collaborative, relying on hearers to play their part, leaving the troubling material alone, accepting the disclaimer, and moving the conversation along rather than criticizing, questioning, or returning to silenced themes. By studying conversations, therefore, we can observe collaborative silencing being done, observing how attention is carefully directed away from troubling topics of racism, injustice, and White privilege and replaced with more acceptable thoughts, namely of inclusion and antiracism.
Conversational silencing “covers its own tracks” (Billig, 1999, p. 55) when the routines of topic replacement become “sedimented into the habits of everyday life” (p. 56). Silences then become institutionalized to the point that individuals may be unaware that they are talking about B (e.g., progressive principles) rather than A (e.g., racially exclusive practices). The focus on topic B may displace earlier concerns so that the existence and roots of topic A are almost forgotten. We may become so engrossed in our progressive ethics, open science, inclusion, and prejudice reduction that our racist traditions and ongoing exclusions remain neatly forgotten (Murray & Durrheim, 2019). Billig and Marinho (2019) drew a general methodological lesson from this observation: “If we want to uncover the assumptions of our time . . . then we must try to notice beliefs that are generally used but not defended because they are generally left unquestioned” (p. 35).
The effect of conversational silencing is well described by the philosopher Charles Mills’s (2007) memorable term “White ignorance,” a willful not knowing of White privilege that forms the unquestioned assumption of our time. Interestingly, in addition to targeting false beliefs such as persistent racial stereotypes, Mills (2015), like Billig, depicted White ignorance as “an absence of belief” (p. 217) such as the color-blind refusal to acknowledge the enduring impact of racism on people of color (cf. Adams & Salter, 2019).
In The Roots of Evil, Ervin Staub (1989) provided an illustrative account of how leaders who organized and executed genocides did so respectably by a similar absence of belief. In 1939, more than a year after Kristallnacht, a high-ranking functionary in the German church praised Hitler for “improving the morals of German youth” who “drank, smoked, and engaged in debauchery until Hitler came along” (p. 300). The banality of evil was based on sophisticated ignorance, deflecting attention from the violence of Nazism by a cultivated respectability, celebrating traditional morality and the good life that Hitler defended.
White ignorance in psychological science can be understood as a similar absence of belief, in a different context and with different effect. This has been highlighted in recent critiques of psychological science. Thrift and Sugarman (2019) argued that by attributing suffering and subjugation to personal failures, the individualistic view of social justice in psychology deflects attention from “inherent inequalities” in the system (p. 12). Grzanka and Cole (2021) argued that White ignorance is perpetuated by the most progressive, “good” work in the discipline. They showed how open science perpetuates systemic inequalities, closed access, and (racial) exclusions while celebrating the values of transparency, access, and replication (cf. Bahlai et al., 2019).
These examples illustrate the “miscognition” that underpins the blindness of White ignorance (Mills, 2007). It does not stem from an individual failure of reason, prejudice, or bias but is rather tied to a structural position. It emerges from institutionalized norms of attention, procedure, and preference, underpinned by progressive values, and not necessarily motivated by defensive denial of facts or avoidance of information. Conversational silencing explains how such absence of belief may arise when troubling thoughts of racism and White privilege are replaced with salubrious thoughts of progress and color blindness. Conversational silencing may occur without words, for example, when color blindness and nationalism are naturalized in discourse, curricula, monuments, place names, ethics codes, unwaved flags, daily routine, museum design, and so on (Billig, 1995, 1999, Winter, 2019; for an alternative account of White ignorance, however, see Mueller, 2020). These structures, significations, routines, and practices quietly celebrate Whiteness, taking equality and nationalism for granted, gently focusing attention away from the violence and dispossession on which they are premised (Billig, 1995).
Conversational silencing requires ongoing work and innovation because no matter how well it covers its tracks, it cannot remove all traces of its connection to the past that it repeats. The object of silence perpetually threatens to become exposed, and this threat continually needs to be kept at bay. This occurs because silencing preserves the very thing it is designed to cover, namely, the racism that it is blind to. Conversational silencing thus not only produces an absence of belief but also a haunting effect in which the repressed content threatens to return (see Durrheim & Murray, 2019, 2021; Frosh, 2013, 2019). White ignorance must thus be maintained in an ongoing manner by compulsively refocusing on the good, turning attention away from repeating racism.
If psychological science was founded on White supremacy and race science, then White ignorance functions to preserve these inherited privileges and exclusions by opening opportunities to some and closing them down to others (Maldonado-Torres, 2016). This article considers how progressive psychology produces three categories of White ignorance: around the existence of White privilege, the reality of racism and inequality, and the mechanisms and agents of social change. This is done via a consideration of (a) how concerns about WEIRD psychology serve to privilege the privileged, (b) how research on racial stereotypes and “new racism” elide the reality of racial inequality and racism, and (c) how research on prejudice reduction obscures systemic racism and demobilizes resistance. In all cases, the discourse and practice of psychological science create an absence of belief about racism as well as conjure up threatening fictions, the horrific specters of colonial stereotypes, imperialism, and racism run amok in a psychology in which White supremacy remains undead.
Privileging the Privileged, the Weirdest People in the World
White ignorance in psychology is partly ignorance of its imperialism, “the imposition of knowledge based on research in WEIRD settings as a hegemonic standard for humanity in general” (Adams et al., 2020, p. 6). Psychological science routinely draws conclusions about human psychology from observations on a privileged few, rendering those who do not fit the mold as “other” and even pathological. In their landmark article, Henrich et al. (2010) argued that the “weirdest people in the world” were not cultural others of “seemingly ‘exotic’ societies” but the privileged research subjects of psychological science, drawn from “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (p. 61). Leading journals report findings about psychological processes that purportedly apply to people in general but are based on studies with American undergraduate students, “WEIRD people” who are “highly unrepresentative of the species” (Henrich et al., 2010, p. 79).
Concerns about WEIRD psychology signal recognition of exclusivity and exclusion, which had become normalized in the practice of psychological science. The criticism issued a clarion call for transformation: widening the empirical tent cloths to include the poor, marginalized, and seemingly exotic others, thereby redefining progressive psychological science. Henrich et al. (2010) called for structural change to include the non-WEIRD:
Research partnerships with non-WEIRD institutions . . . further the goal of expanding and diversifying the empirical base of the behavioral sciences. By . . . institutionalized relationships to populations outside the university as well as to non-WEIRD universities, these organizations can make an important contribution to building a more complete understanding of human nature. (p. 82)
A Google Scholar search for “non-WEIRD” on April 12, 2023, returned 3,650 hits, led by an article entitled “Challenges to Capture the Big Five Personality Traits in Non-WEIRD Populations” (Laajaj et al., 2019). Journal editors throughout the discipline take note of commentaries (e.g., Draper et al., 2022) and guidelines for change (e.g., Puthillam et al., 2022). The result has been the inclusion of more diverse samples and authors, with a proliferation of multisite studies and the general valuation of diversity.
While promoting change, the progressive discourse and practices that have emerged around non-WEIRD psychology continue to privilege the privileged via the mechanism of conversational silencing. All the talk about inclusion circumnavigates continuing exclusion, reproducing White ignorance of racial privilege in psychology. First, the absence of race from the list of biases summarized by the acronym WEIRD exemplifies White ignorance. The acronym is a “way for researchers in predominantly white environments to discuss history, culture and context without having to talk about race” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 173). Race is the elephant in the room. In the conversation, the non-WEIRD are non-White. They are everyone from elsewhere, seemingly exotic, lumped into a single category. They are the underbelly of the acronym, the poor, nonindustrialized, non-Western, uneducated, and nondemocratic, and dare we say Black. The non-WEIRD other is a dehumanizing fiction, deeply offensive to the actual people living outside the imperial heartland of psychology. African psychologists, for example (see Ratele, 2019), would never lay claim to being uneducated or undemocratic; neither would their students or their “non-WEIRD universities” (Henrich et al., 2010, p. 82).
Second, the criticism of WEIRD science and the call for non-WEIRD samples elides not only the race of the excluded subjects of psychological science but also the privilege and Whiteness of the scientists. Their calls for inclusion and their participation in open science cast them in good light, but they remain in the driving seat, with their hands on the levers of science and power, and now also social change. The cited passage from Henrich et al. (2010, p. 82) is clear about who are creating the research partnerships, funding the research, and driving the science. It is certainly not the uneducated non-WEIRD partners in their poor, undemocratic, non-WEIRD universities. They are the et al. of the intellectual enterprise. Their job is to help build a “more complete understanding of human nature” on the foundation already laid, with direction and support from the center.
Finally, and overarchingly, the discourse about including non-WEIRD samples seeks a technocratic solution to a political problem. In addition to eliding race and White privilege, the discourse suggests that the problem in the discipline is incomplete knowledge that can be rectified by inclusion. The original authors, for example, have even provided a tool for measuring how WEIRD countries are and for “determining which societies will provide useful comparisons” (Muthukrishna et al., 2020, p. 678). The tool relies on concepts, measures, and stimuli developed by WEIRD scientists. The approach, however, does not recognize the power dynamic imposed by the structure about who has the power to decide who is WEIRD or not, by which criteria, and what in fact constitutes good science.
Despite the calls for non-WEIRD inclusion, (White) samples from North America, Europe, and Australia continue to predominate in psychological science (Puthillam, 2022; Rad et al., 2018; Thalmayer et al., 2021). It is unsurprising really because the discourse about WEIRD psychology is a discourse of White privilege. Concerns about WEIRD-ness “reinforce rather than disrupt the practices it aims to critique” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 170). Here is dialogical repression in action, in which all the talk about inclusive open science, all the “many-labs” collaborations, and all the editorial handwringing are also ways of not talking about and undoing White privilege. The discourse about WEIRD psychology is a Mercator projection—an “epistemological violence” (Adams et al., 2020, p. 7)—that forms the world in its own image. The normalizing discourse and practice of psychological science is exclusive and pathologizing (N. Rose, 1989), prompting African psychologists (and other racialized others) to refuse the terms of selfhood and science it offers (e.g., Bulhan, 2015; Kessi et al., 2022; Martín-Baró, 1994; Ratele, 2019). The subaltern speaks (Spivak, 1988), but will anyone listen?
Stereotypes: Eliding the Reality of Racial Inequality
Another way in which psychology has sought to expel the demons of White supremacy is by studying stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction. Samelson (1978) described how, in a “dramatic reversal” between 1920 and 1940, the discipline transformed from race science to the psychology of prejudice (p. 265). Allport’s (1954) monumental Psychology of Prejudice gave impetus to the “leftward shift” among social psychologists and their efforts to “unite the country against a dangerous enemy proclaiming racial superiority” (Samelson, 1978, p. 265). By the 21st century, the discipline had swung almost entirely to the left, with a mere 6% of psychologists describing themselves as conservative (Inbar & Lammers, 2012).
Duarte et al.’s (2015) complaint about liberal bias in the field provides a clue about what is being elided. Research and writing focus too much, they argue, on the wrong thinking of racists and not enough on the reality of stereotypes. This selective attention is evident in the earliest work on stereotyping, which traced the source of White supremacy to “pictures inside the head” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 30). The whole of the science was positioned against irrational stereotyping (e.g., Macrae et al., 1996), devoted to tracking its sticky persistence in ever deeper layers of mental response (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), and to finding ways to identify and eradicate the last vestiges of White supremacy from WEIRD populations (Paluck & Green, 2009).
Swimming against the currents of liberalism, Jussim and colleagues rejected the view of stereotypes as biased representations, insisting that stereotypes persist because they hold a kernel of truth (Jussim, 2012; Jussim et al., 2015; McCauley et al., 1995). For example, they argued that stereotypes about Black men’s violence reflect actual group differences rather than prejudiced perceptions (Jussim, 2012). Although conceding that race stereotypes are not “perfectly accurate,” they argued that group representations are based on experience, necessary for rational judgment, and applied “flexibly and approximately rationally when judging individuals” (Jussim et al., 2015, p. 496).
This heresy targeted precisely the kind of unquestioned, conversationally silenced beliefs of liberalism that are concealed in the “assumptions of our time” (Billig & Marinho, 2019, p. 35). Pointing to the “unbearable accuracy of stereotypes” (Jussim et al., 2009) shifts attention from pictures inside the heads of racists to empirical facts about group differences, for example, that “African-Americans are [emphasis added] more likely to be . . . perpetrators . . . of crime” (Jussim et al., 2005, p. 90).
The ensuing debate between liberalism and conservatism in psychology itself became a conversational mechanism of silencing and White ignorance, directing attention away from systems of inequality within which stereotypes are formed and gain the attention of observers. If stereotypes are veridical in the sense that they reflect perceptions of actors from their vantage in a system of intergroup relations (Oakes et al., 1994), then we need to appreciate them as elements of the wider discursive, historical, and political context of intergroup relations (Dixon, 2017), namely, the postcolonial context of White supremacy, that is elided in the debate.
Consider, for example, the link between race and violent crime that Jussim et al. presented as a statistical fact. The “fact” is embodied in the unutterable racist stereotype of “the Black savage.” However, fact and stereotype are neither simple truths nor racist fictions. They are constructed realities (Durrheim, 2022). Fanon (1961/1963) told us how such savagery emerges from its conditions of existence, the colonial “native sector”:
a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people . . . a famished sector hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light . . . a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate. . . . The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession . . . (pp. 4–5)
Here is the wider discursive, historical, and political context—the system of intergroup relations—from which Dixon (2017) insisted that we begin to ask questions about the relations between stereotypes and reality. Calls to decolonize psychological science suggest that people of color remain locked out of this “European sector” and perhaps even cast their eyes toward privilege and nurture dreams of possession. Certainly, the idea that Black protesters are prone to violence continues to animate the White imagination (Reinka & Leach, 2017); and for good reason, because the oppressed and marginalized are structurally predisposed to disruption, including violence (Leach & Teixeira, 2021). Unfreedom remains unequally distributed by race; so too does the potential for resistance and violence, and the ghosts of stereotypes past continue to rise as specters in the White imagination and in the world.
The focus on stereotypes in the head and the more recent debate on the accuracy of these mental representations help us forget “how we got to the here and now or how the status quo is maintained” (Durrheim, 2022, p. 192). Progressive psychology sets itself against stereotypes in such a way that it conversationally silences or elides the persistent reality of racial inequality. It has turned attention away from ongoing racial exclusions to a psychology that is busy fighting stereotypes and ignorance of facts. As I now consider, it has also turned attention away from the ongoing racism that incites unrelenting resistance.
rest in link
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231182922
Abstract
This article addresses a paradox between self-perceptions of psychology as a liberal, progressive, antiracist discipline and profession and the persistent criticisms of racism and calls for decolonization. It builds on the criticisms of epistemic exclusion and White centering, arguing that White supremacy is maintained by “conversational silencing” in which the focus on doing good psychology systematically draws attention away from the realities of racism and the operation of power. The process is illustrated by investigations of disciplinary discourse around non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic psychology and on stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction, which constitute the vanguard of liberal scholarship in the discipline. This progressive scholarship nurtures “White ignorance,” an absence of belief about systemic racism that psychology plays a part in upholding.
Racism in psychology has been exposed over decades (Helms, 2012; Lewontin et al., 1984; Martín-Baró, 1994; Richards, 1997). The hideous cornucopia of craniology, mental testing, and the African brain make a painful, unreadable history (e.g., Mahone, 2021). Nevertheless, “epistemic exclusion” continues to define the reality of psychologists of color (Buchanan et al., 2021; Settles et al., 2020, 2021, 2022), including their underrepresentation in top-tier scholarly journals (Hodgetts et al., 2020; Roberts et al., 2020) and the decentering of Black lives in the pages of published research (Garay & Remedios, 2021; Remedios, 2022). More generally, the methods, interpretations, theories, and practices of psychology devalue African and indigenous epistemologies (Kessi et al., 2022; Mkhize, 2021; Ratele, 2019; Smith, 2012) and minimize the experience of discrimination in the Global South (Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022; Boykin et al., 2020; Ratele et al., 2020). Consequently, the calls to decolonize psychology have grown more urgent as part of the broader acknowledgment that Black lives matter (Adams et al., 2015, 2017; Bulhan, 2015; Kessi & Boonzaier, 2018; Kessi et al., 2022).
At the same time, psychologists generally see themselves as progressive, scientific, objective, antiracist, and thoroughly respectable. Surveys suggest that they overwhelmingly view themselves as liberal (Inbar & Lammers, 2012; Von Hippel & Buss, 2017), and, rather than racism, accusations of liberal bias have been leveled against psychological science (Duarte et al., 2015).
The current article contributes to this critical engagement with “whitestream” psychology (Bell, 2018) by proposing and illustrating the mechanism by which racism persists and becomes resistant to change. The antiracism scholarship reviewed above attributes White supremacy to a combination of historical biases and systemic interests that have become incorporated into the practice and institutionalization of psychological science, preserving racial (and other) privileges. In focusing on racism, however, this work tends to overlook the effort psychologists have made to challenge racism within their discipline and profession. As a result, the criticism often misses its target because liberal and progressive psychologists generally view themselves as challenging rather than practicing racism. This article considers how progressive psychological science, which ostensibly challenges White privilege, may in fact maintain systemic privilege and power, explaining why racism persists after decades of critique and transformation, and despite the liberal politics of the majority.
Mick Billig’s (1999) account of dialogical repression is used to show how progressive scholarship can absorb our focus, allowing us to view ourselves as progressive, absolving us from owning racism and from the challenging work of decolonization. This complicates our understanding of “progressive” ideas in psychological science, showing how sites of innovation and transformation that seek to challenge White supremacy may be ineffective or even harmful in undoing racism. The next section of the article develops Billig’s understanding of dialogical repression as conversational silencing and shows how this can operate within psychological science to maintain “White ignorance” about racism. The remainder of the article considers how the mechanism of conversational silencing produces specific categories of White ignorance within progressive calls for non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) psychology and research on stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction. The article concludes by proposing three searching questions that can interrupt the conversational silencing of racism as we strive for decolonization in practice.
Conversational Silencing, White Ignorance, and Progressive Psychology
Billig’s (1999) theory of dialogical repression is grounded in the idea that silences are routinely and collaboratively produced in conversations (Murray & Durrheim, 2019). This occurs because we can only speak or think about one thing at a time and that speaking about topic B (e.g., our multiracial circle of friends) can be a way of not speaking about topic A (e.g., our anti-immigration opinions) to project an image of antiracism while supporting racial privilege in practice. The paradigmatic case of conversational silencing is the elephant-in-the-room phenomenon, in which polite conversation carefully circumnavigates an awkward conversational taboo that may be on everyone’s minds, such as conspicuous failings of a eulogized deceased.
Unlike Freudian repression, which is an invisible psychological mechanism, dialogical repression is a collaborative accomplishment, the exercise and effects of which are readily subject to investigation (Whitehead, 2020). In conversation, repression is flagged by discontinuity markers (e.g., “anyway” or “but”), as in using the racism disclaimer “I’m not racist, but . . .” to preface an arguably racist point (cf. Billig, 2012). Successful repression is collaborative, relying on hearers to play their part, leaving the troubling material alone, accepting the disclaimer, and moving the conversation along rather than criticizing, questioning, or returning to silenced themes. By studying conversations, therefore, we can observe collaborative silencing being done, observing how attention is carefully directed away from troubling topics of racism, injustice, and White privilege and replaced with more acceptable thoughts, namely of inclusion and antiracism.
Conversational silencing “covers its own tracks” (Billig, 1999, p. 55) when the routines of topic replacement become “sedimented into the habits of everyday life” (p. 56). Silences then become institutionalized to the point that individuals may be unaware that they are talking about B (e.g., progressive principles) rather than A (e.g., racially exclusive practices). The focus on topic B may displace earlier concerns so that the existence and roots of topic A are almost forgotten. We may become so engrossed in our progressive ethics, open science, inclusion, and prejudice reduction that our racist traditions and ongoing exclusions remain neatly forgotten (Murray & Durrheim, 2019). Billig and Marinho (2019) drew a general methodological lesson from this observation: “If we want to uncover the assumptions of our time . . . then we must try to notice beliefs that are generally used but not defended because they are generally left unquestioned” (p. 35).
The effect of conversational silencing is well described by the philosopher Charles Mills’s (2007) memorable term “White ignorance,” a willful not knowing of White privilege that forms the unquestioned assumption of our time. Interestingly, in addition to targeting false beliefs such as persistent racial stereotypes, Mills (2015), like Billig, depicted White ignorance as “an absence of belief” (p. 217) such as the color-blind refusal to acknowledge the enduring impact of racism on people of color (cf. Adams & Salter, 2019).
In The Roots of Evil, Ervin Staub (1989) provided an illustrative account of how leaders who organized and executed genocides did so respectably by a similar absence of belief. In 1939, more than a year after Kristallnacht, a high-ranking functionary in the German church praised Hitler for “improving the morals of German youth” who “drank, smoked, and engaged in debauchery until Hitler came along” (p. 300). The banality of evil was based on sophisticated ignorance, deflecting attention from the violence of Nazism by a cultivated respectability, celebrating traditional morality and the good life that Hitler defended.
White ignorance in psychological science can be understood as a similar absence of belief, in a different context and with different effect. This has been highlighted in recent critiques of psychological science. Thrift and Sugarman (2019) argued that by attributing suffering and subjugation to personal failures, the individualistic view of social justice in psychology deflects attention from “inherent inequalities” in the system (p. 12). Grzanka and Cole (2021) argued that White ignorance is perpetuated by the most progressive, “good” work in the discipline. They showed how open science perpetuates systemic inequalities, closed access, and (racial) exclusions while celebrating the values of transparency, access, and replication (cf. Bahlai et al., 2019).
These examples illustrate the “miscognition” that underpins the blindness of White ignorance (Mills, 2007). It does not stem from an individual failure of reason, prejudice, or bias but is rather tied to a structural position. It emerges from institutionalized norms of attention, procedure, and preference, underpinned by progressive values, and not necessarily motivated by defensive denial of facts or avoidance of information. Conversational silencing explains how such absence of belief may arise when troubling thoughts of racism and White privilege are replaced with salubrious thoughts of progress and color blindness. Conversational silencing may occur without words, for example, when color blindness and nationalism are naturalized in discourse, curricula, monuments, place names, ethics codes, unwaved flags, daily routine, museum design, and so on (Billig, 1995, 1999, Winter, 2019; for an alternative account of White ignorance, however, see Mueller, 2020). These structures, significations, routines, and practices quietly celebrate Whiteness, taking equality and nationalism for granted, gently focusing attention away from the violence and dispossession on which they are premised (Billig, 1995).
Conversational silencing requires ongoing work and innovation because no matter how well it covers its tracks, it cannot remove all traces of its connection to the past that it repeats. The object of silence perpetually threatens to become exposed, and this threat continually needs to be kept at bay. This occurs because silencing preserves the very thing it is designed to cover, namely, the racism that it is blind to. Conversational silencing thus not only produces an absence of belief but also a haunting effect in which the repressed content threatens to return (see Durrheim & Murray, 2019, 2021; Frosh, 2013, 2019). White ignorance must thus be maintained in an ongoing manner by compulsively refocusing on the good, turning attention away from repeating racism.
If psychological science was founded on White supremacy and race science, then White ignorance functions to preserve these inherited privileges and exclusions by opening opportunities to some and closing them down to others (Maldonado-Torres, 2016). This article considers how progressive psychology produces three categories of White ignorance: around the existence of White privilege, the reality of racism and inequality, and the mechanisms and agents of social change. This is done via a consideration of (a) how concerns about WEIRD psychology serve to privilege the privileged, (b) how research on racial stereotypes and “new racism” elide the reality of racial inequality and racism, and (c) how research on prejudice reduction obscures systemic racism and demobilizes resistance. In all cases, the discourse and practice of psychological science create an absence of belief about racism as well as conjure up threatening fictions, the horrific specters of colonial stereotypes, imperialism, and racism run amok in a psychology in which White supremacy remains undead.
Privileging the Privileged, the Weirdest People in the World
White ignorance in psychology is partly ignorance of its imperialism, “the imposition of knowledge based on research in WEIRD settings as a hegemonic standard for humanity in general” (Adams et al., 2020, p. 6). Psychological science routinely draws conclusions about human psychology from observations on a privileged few, rendering those who do not fit the mold as “other” and even pathological. In their landmark article, Henrich et al. (2010) argued that the “weirdest people in the world” were not cultural others of “seemingly ‘exotic’ societies” but the privileged research subjects of psychological science, drawn from “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (p. 61). Leading journals report findings about psychological processes that purportedly apply to people in general but are based on studies with American undergraduate students, “WEIRD people” who are “highly unrepresentative of the species” (Henrich et al., 2010, p. 79).
Concerns about WEIRD psychology signal recognition of exclusivity and exclusion, which had become normalized in the practice of psychological science. The criticism issued a clarion call for transformation: widening the empirical tent cloths to include the poor, marginalized, and seemingly exotic others, thereby redefining progressive psychological science. Henrich et al. (2010) called for structural change to include the non-WEIRD:
Research partnerships with non-WEIRD institutions . . . further the goal of expanding and diversifying the empirical base of the behavioral sciences. By . . . institutionalized relationships to populations outside the university as well as to non-WEIRD universities, these organizations can make an important contribution to building a more complete understanding of human nature. (p. 82)
A Google Scholar search for “non-WEIRD” on April 12, 2023, returned 3,650 hits, led by an article entitled “Challenges to Capture the Big Five Personality Traits in Non-WEIRD Populations” (Laajaj et al., 2019). Journal editors throughout the discipline take note of commentaries (e.g., Draper et al., 2022) and guidelines for change (e.g., Puthillam et al., 2022). The result has been the inclusion of more diverse samples and authors, with a proliferation of multisite studies and the general valuation of diversity.
While promoting change, the progressive discourse and practices that have emerged around non-WEIRD psychology continue to privilege the privileged via the mechanism of conversational silencing. All the talk about inclusion circumnavigates continuing exclusion, reproducing White ignorance of racial privilege in psychology. First, the absence of race from the list of biases summarized by the acronym WEIRD exemplifies White ignorance. The acronym is a “way for researchers in predominantly white environments to discuss history, culture and context without having to talk about race” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 173). Race is the elephant in the room. In the conversation, the non-WEIRD are non-White. They are everyone from elsewhere, seemingly exotic, lumped into a single category. They are the underbelly of the acronym, the poor, nonindustrialized, non-Western, uneducated, and nondemocratic, and dare we say Black. The non-WEIRD other is a dehumanizing fiction, deeply offensive to the actual people living outside the imperial heartland of psychology. African psychologists, for example (see Ratele, 2019), would never lay claim to being uneducated or undemocratic; neither would their students or their “non-WEIRD universities” (Henrich et al., 2010, p. 82).
Second, the criticism of WEIRD science and the call for non-WEIRD samples elides not only the race of the excluded subjects of psychological science but also the privilege and Whiteness of the scientists. Their calls for inclusion and their participation in open science cast them in good light, but they remain in the driving seat, with their hands on the levers of science and power, and now also social change. The cited passage from Henrich et al. (2010, p. 82) is clear about who are creating the research partnerships, funding the research, and driving the science. It is certainly not the uneducated non-WEIRD partners in their poor, undemocratic, non-WEIRD universities. They are the et al. of the intellectual enterprise. Their job is to help build a “more complete understanding of human nature” on the foundation already laid, with direction and support from the center.
Finally, and overarchingly, the discourse about including non-WEIRD samples seeks a technocratic solution to a political problem. In addition to eliding race and White privilege, the discourse suggests that the problem in the discipline is incomplete knowledge that can be rectified by inclusion. The original authors, for example, have even provided a tool for measuring how WEIRD countries are and for “determining which societies will provide useful comparisons” (Muthukrishna et al., 2020, p. 678). The tool relies on concepts, measures, and stimuli developed by WEIRD scientists. The approach, however, does not recognize the power dynamic imposed by the structure about who has the power to decide who is WEIRD or not, by which criteria, and what in fact constitutes good science.
Despite the calls for non-WEIRD inclusion, (White) samples from North America, Europe, and Australia continue to predominate in psychological science (Puthillam, 2022; Rad et al., 2018; Thalmayer et al., 2021). It is unsurprising really because the discourse about WEIRD psychology is a discourse of White privilege. Concerns about WEIRD-ness “reinforce rather than disrupt the practices it aims to critique” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 170). Here is dialogical repression in action, in which all the talk about inclusive open science, all the “many-labs” collaborations, and all the editorial handwringing are also ways of not talking about and undoing White privilege. The discourse about WEIRD psychology is a Mercator projection—an “epistemological violence” (Adams et al., 2020, p. 7)—that forms the world in its own image. The normalizing discourse and practice of psychological science is exclusive and pathologizing (N. Rose, 1989), prompting African psychologists (and other racialized others) to refuse the terms of selfhood and science it offers (e.g., Bulhan, 2015; Kessi et al., 2022; Martín-Baró, 1994; Ratele, 2019). The subaltern speaks (Spivak, 1988), but will anyone listen?
Stereotypes: Eliding the Reality of Racial Inequality
Another way in which psychology has sought to expel the demons of White supremacy is by studying stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction. Samelson (1978) described how, in a “dramatic reversal” between 1920 and 1940, the discipline transformed from race science to the psychology of prejudice (p. 265). Allport’s (1954) monumental Psychology of Prejudice gave impetus to the “leftward shift” among social psychologists and their efforts to “unite the country against a dangerous enemy proclaiming racial superiority” (Samelson, 1978, p. 265). By the 21st century, the discipline had swung almost entirely to the left, with a mere 6% of psychologists describing themselves as conservative (Inbar & Lammers, 2012).
Duarte et al.’s (2015) complaint about liberal bias in the field provides a clue about what is being elided. Research and writing focus too much, they argue, on the wrong thinking of racists and not enough on the reality of stereotypes. This selective attention is evident in the earliest work on stereotyping, which traced the source of White supremacy to “pictures inside the head” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 30). The whole of the science was positioned against irrational stereotyping (e.g., Macrae et al., 1996), devoted to tracking its sticky persistence in ever deeper layers of mental response (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), and to finding ways to identify and eradicate the last vestiges of White supremacy from WEIRD populations (Paluck & Green, 2009).
Swimming against the currents of liberalism, Jussim and colleagues rejected the view of stereotypes as biased representations, insisting that stereotypes persist because they hold a kernel of truth (Jussim, 2012; Jussim et al., 2015; McCauley et al., 1995). For example, they argued that stereotypes about Black men’s violence reflect actual group differences rather than prejudiced perceptions (Jussim, 2012). Although conceding that race stereotypes are not “perfectly accurate,” they argued that group representations are based on experience, necessary for rational judgment, and applied “flexibly and approximately rationally when judging individuals” (Jussim et al., 2015, p. 496).
This heresy targeted precisely the kind of unquestioned, conversationally silenced beliefs of liberalism that are concealed in the “assumptions of our time” (Billig & Marinho, 2019, p. 35). Pointing to the “unbearable accuracy of stereotypes” (Jussim et al., 2009) shifts attention from pictures inside the heads of racists to empirical facts about group differences, for example, that “African-Americans are [emphasis added] more likely to be . . . perpetrators . . . of crime” (Jussim et al., 2005, p. 90).
The ensuing debate between liberalism and conservatism in psychology itself became a conversational mechanism of silencing and White ignorance, directing attention away from systems of inequality within which stereotypes are formed and gain the attention of observers. If stereotypes are veridical in the sense that they reflect perceptions of actors from their vantage in a system of intergroup relations (Oakes et al., 1994), then we need to appreciate them as elements of the wider discursive, historical, and political context of intergroup relations (Dixon, 2017), namely, the postcolonial context of White supremacy, that is elided in the debate.
Consider, for example, the link between race and violent crime that Jussim et al. presented as a statistical fact. The “fact” is embodied in the unutterable racist stereotype of “the Black savage.” However, fact and stereotype are neither simple truths nor racist fictions. They are constructed realities (Durrheim, 2022). Fanon (1961/1963) told us how such savagery emerges from its conditions of existence, the colonial “native sector”:
a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people . . . a famished sector hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light . . . a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate. . . . The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession . . . (pp. 4–5)
Here is the wider discursive, historical, and political context—the system of intergroup relations—from which Dixon (2017) insisted that we begin to ask questions about the relations between stereotypes and reality. Calls to decolonize psychological science suggest that people of color remain locked out of this “European sector” and perhaps even cast their eyes toward privilege and nurture dreams of possession. Certainly, the idea that Black protesters are prone to violence continues to animate the White imagination (Reinka & Leach, 2017); and for good reason, because the oppressed and marginalized are structurally predisposed to disruption, including violence (Leach & Teixeira, 2021). Unfreedom remains unequally distributed by race; so too does the potential for resistance and violence, and the ghosts of stereotypes past continue to rise as specters in the White imagination and in the world.
The focus on stereotypes in the head and the more recent debate on the accuracy of these mental representations help us forget “how we got to the here and now or how the status quo is maintained” (Durrheim, 2022, p. 192). Progressive psychology sets itself against stereotypes in such a way that it conversationally silences or elides the persistent reality of racial inequality. It has turned attention away from ongoing racial exclusions to a psychology that is busy fighting stereotypes and ignorance of facts. As I now consider, it has also turned attention away from the ongoing racism that incites unrelenting resistance.
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