Students filed into Cohen Auditorium yesterday from noon to 4:30 p.m. for a long-awaited Town Meeting on Campus Climate and Stereotyping.
The event was facilitated by Professor Jean Wu of the American studies program and Lisa Coleman, executive director of Tufts' Office of Institutional Diversity.
"This is a unique opportunity to formally state that bigotry has no place here at Tufts," Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg told the audience.
"We wanted to have the opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to dialogue with one another and come up with recommendations to address some of the climate issues," he said. "Our work to ensure that all members feel welcome and supported is not yet done."
During the event, psychology professors Sam Sommers and Keith Maddox gave an extensive talk on the psychological basis of stereotyping and its unconscious effects.
"We're going to address ways in which people have studied these issues scientifically," Sommers said.
He first gave the audience a version of the Implicit Association Test, which measures word association through timed trials. In the trials, students were quickly able to pair traditionally white names with "positive" words like "vacation" and traditionally black names with more negative words like "war."
But students showed a far slower reaction time - nearly double - when pairing traditionally black names with positive words.
"Pairing the concept of pleasant with [the] black category is more difficult with us," he said. The same findings hold true in the general population, he said.
"Some suggest that the conclusion we should draw is that the vast majority of us are racist," he said. But he said that such associations were hardly an anomaly, but instead very common among all groups in our society.
"Associations can be unconscious - we don't have to believe or endorse them. They can be observed in people even when they don't want them to be," he said.
Maddox continued the talk by focusing on the human tendency to categorize.
"Stereotypes are a lens - they're the glasses you're wearing, they guide what we see," he said. "We tend not to notice the things we don't expect, and we interpret in a way that tends to be consistent with stereotypes."
According to Sommers, people often act on these stereotypes without realizing it. "Even implicit, unconscious associations can predict some behaviors," he said.
In a laboratory setting simulating a job interview, he said, white interviewers speaking to black candidates tended to ask fewer questions, smile less often, and make less eye contact than with a white candidate. In turn, videos of these black candidates received worse reviews from other evaluators.
Coping with such implicit and reverse stereotyping can both be draining and have discernable consequences, which Maddox illustrated when he relayed the story of a black professor who needed to whistle Vivaldi walking down the street at night to avoid frightening white women.
That's not the only consequence, Sommers said. "The fear of confirming negative stereotype[s] can undermine performance."
Sommers referenced research by psychologist Claude Steele, which included comparably qualified black and white Stanford students. Blacks, when asked to indicate their race in a diagnostic intelligence test, underperformed compared to white students. If the race question or the diagnostic provision were removed, the gap largely disappeared.
The same effect can be observed in other groups when inadequacy is hinted at before the assessment, he said.
Trying to suppress stereotypes might work for a while, Maddox said, but there are "ironic consequences." When the suppression stops, "the stereotype comes back with a vengeance," he said.
He emphasized that the real challenge is to be aware of such stereotyping as it affects everyday decisions.
"You must ... take implicit processes and make them explicit ... people realize they are wearing glasses, and looking at the world through a filter," Maddox said.
"You can acknowledge the fact that people are different, recognize when stereotypes can cloud those differences, and strategize to minimize their impact."
After the presentation, Wu introduced a group of students from the Bias Education and Awareness Team (B.E.A.T.) who acted out scenarios concerning unconscious stereotypes at Tufts.
"These scenarios are serious situations, they're taking on a very, very tough task," Wu said. "They've spent an incredible number of hours practicing."
In one situation, black or Asian students' fears about being admitted to law school were dismissed by their friends who blithely assumed they would be admitted just because of their race. "My skin is not my transcript," the students shouted.
In other scenes, professors put minority students on the spot in the classroom, asking for expertise on "urban communities" from black students and posing a question about Mexican immigration to a student who had a Hispanic name. While the other cast members froze, minority students voiced their discomfort and frustration to the audience.
"The academic classroom is not free from unintentional racism and stereotyping," a projected caption behind the actors read. "It robs [students] of their critical thinking." Finally, the players urged the audience to speak out against stereotypes. "Silence in the face of racism condones it," read another caption.
