Abstract
Debate over the appropriateness of discussing racism in U.S. educational settings is ongoing. Whereas some believe discussing racism will improve race relations, others argue that such discussions are divisive and cause unnecessary distress, especially among White students. In a preregistered study, we investigated whether people who do not identify as Black or African American indeed experience emotional distress in response to the suggestion that they may have acted in a manner indicating subtle anti-Black bias. Non-Black U.S. college students (N = 326; mean age = 18.86; 69.0% women, 30.4% men, and 0.6% reported another gender; 56.1% White, 16.9% Asian/Pacific Islander, 16.6% Hispanic, 2.1% reported another race/ethnicity, and 5.7% reported multiple racial/ethnic identities) imagined committing two interpersonal transgressions, one of which was race-related. For each transgression, participants reported their feelings about the situation, including how responsible they would feel for perpetrating the transgression and whether they would feel negatively about themselves. Overall, many participants reported feeling responsible and negatively about themselves when imagining committing a race-related transgression. However, this response was more common among participants who scored higher on measures of habitual concern about behaving in nonprejudiced ways, and these participants also tended to report on an open-ended measure that they would react by apologizing and correcting their behavior. Our results suggest that, when discussing racism, those most likely to experience distress are people who are already concerned about expressing prejudice. Accordingly, discussions of racism may benefit from mentioning ways to reduce prejudice.
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Data Availability
Data, stimuli, and measures, and preregistration are available at https://osf.io/qn8uk/.
Notes
As preregistered, we followed the procedures outlined at http://www.john-uebersax.com/stat/mcnemar.htm#propor and reduced the 2 × 3 classification table into three separate 2 × 2 classification tables by collapsing across two self-forgiveness categories at a time. McNemar tests were then conducted on the resulting reduced 2 × 2 tables. For example, collapsing (i.e., summing) across genuine and pseudo self-forgiveness in both scenarios allowed for a test of whether the rate of self-condemnation (relative to either genuine or pseudo self-forgiveness) differed as a function of whether the imagined transgression was race-related or filler.
We note that our preregistered analysis plan did involve direct comparisons between the two scenarios. In retrospect, we believe these comparisons are not directly informative in the context of our specific research questions. Preregistered analyses are nonetheless available in Supplemental Materials.
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Mezzapelle, J.L., Reiman, AK. How Do Non-Black U.S. College Students Think They Would Feel After Committing a Race-Related Interpersonal Transgression?. Race Soc Probl 15, 474–489 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-023-09392-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-023-09392-9