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Variables involved in the acquisition and maintenance of racial aggression and its victims’ reactions

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Abstract

This study aimed to investigate how behavior analysis can contribute to the understanding of some variables and processes involved in the acquisition and maintenance of racial aggressors' behaviors, as well as the victims' reactions. We describe how the concepts of rule-governed behavior and motivating operations may be involved in institutional racism: Individuals belonging to ethnic groups who hold the social administration in a context may keep important reinforcers available for their own group, while other racial groups may have their access to those reinforcers hindered. For these privileges to be perpetuated, the ruling group can arrange contingencies that reinforce the behavior of following certain rules that contribute to the maintenance of relevant reinforcers for the ruling group and exclusion of Black individuals and other people of color. For those underrepresented groups, motivating operations can be manipulated and reinforcers can be provided only when their responses are deemed appropriate by the dominant group. Individual learning through discriminative training, equivalence class formation, transfer of functions, stimulus generalization, and function altering were also discussed. Patterns such as aggression, escape, and avoidance, were identified in the actions of racial aggressors. Finally, the victim’s reactions were also identified as escape, avoidance, or aggression of racial aggressors, but also as effects of processes such as learned helplessness, extinction after elimination of benefits, countercontrol, and respondent conditioning. Despite the lack of research in the field, behavior analysis has the power to elucidate some variables related to this theme, aiding, thus, evidence-based intervention proposals.

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Notes

  1. There are several conceptions for the term race. Given that, from the point of view of biology, there are no different races, but only one race, the human race, we will use race in its sociological sense, as a “social category of domination and exclusion” (Munanga, 2004, p. 23). In this sense, the term race will be used both to refer to the physical attributes of individuals (skin color, hair texture, and other phenotypic traits) and concerning the cultural aspects and origin of individuals. This is justified by the fact that substituting ethnicity for race in Brazil “does not change the reality of racism at all, as it does not destroy the hierarchical relationship between different cultures that is one of the components of racism. That is, racism, today practiced in contemporary societies no longer needs the concept of race or the biological variant, it reformulates itself based on the concepts of ethnicity, cultural difference or cultural identity, but today's victims are the same as yesterday's, and yesterday's races are today's ethnicities. What has changed in reality are the terms or concepts, but the ideological scheme that implies domination and exclusion has remained intact” (Munanga, 2004, p. 29). Therefore, race and ethnicity, in this paper, are used interchangeably to denote individuals that suffer from racist behaviors.

  2. Although in the U.S. there is a difference between who is considered African-American and people of color, in Brazil the race of an individual is given primarily by skin color. Therefore, the origin of a person is not a criterion to identify an individual’s race.

  3. But see also a study published later, by Matsuda et al. (2020), that also discussed a behavioral account of racism and reviewed research in the field.

  4. Statement emitted by a Brazilian reporter in news coverage in the city of Washington in 2016 when he felt uncomfortable with the sound of a car horn driven by an African-American.

  5. This may be defined as the failure of institutions to provide adequate treatment and/or services for some groups in society because of their skin color, racial or ethnic origin, or culture (Brasil, 2006).

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Acknowledgments

This manuscript is being published on an expedited basis, as part of a series of emergency publications designed to help practitioners of applied behavior analysis take immediate action to address police brutality and systemic racism. The journal would like to especially thank Associate Editor, Dr. Kaston Anderson-Carpenter. Additionally, the journal extends thanks to Dr. Denise Ross for their insightful and expeditious reviews of this manuscript. The views and strategies suggested by the articles in this series do not represent the positions of the Association for Behavior Analysis, International or Springer Nature.

Guest Editor, Denisha Gingles

Funding

Vinicius Pereira de Sousa is supported by a scholarship from the Coordination of Superior Level Staff Improvement (CAPES / PROSUP, Process N. 88887.200980/2018-00). Táhcita Medrado Mizael and Julio de Rose are part of Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino (INCT-ECCE), supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Process N. 573972/2008-7). Táhcita Medrado Mizael was also supported by a Postdoctoral fellowship from the São Paulo Research Foundation (Grant#2020/02548-7).

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  1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP) & Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brazil

    Vinicius Pereira de Sousa

  2. Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Táhcita Medrado Mizael

  3. Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), São Paulo, Brazil

    Júlio César de Rose

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  1. Vinicius Pereira de Sousa
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de Sousa, V.P., Mizael, T.M. & de Rose, J.C. Variables involved in the acquisition and maintenance of racial aggression and its victims’ reactions. Behav Analysis Practice 15, 1151–1160 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-022-00696-7

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