This chapter has described the concept of aversive racism, considered the factors contributing to aversive racism, demonstrated empirically how it affects outcomes for blacks and shapes interracial interactions, and explored how it can be combated. Despite apparent consistent improvements in expressed racial attitudes over time, aversive racism continues to exert a subtle but pervasive influence on the lives of black Americans. This bias is expressed in indirect and rationalizable ways that restrict opportunities for blacks while insulating aversive racists from ever having to confront their prejudices. Most of the work reviewed in this chapter has focused on the influence of contemporary racial biases of whites toward blacks because of the central role that racial politics has played in the history of the United States. Within the United States, this dynamic also relates to varying degrees to orientations toward women (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1983b; Rudman & Kilianski, 2000) and more recently to homosexuals (Hebl, Foster, Mannix, & Dovidio, 2002). Moreover, we propose that many of the principles of aversive racism also apply more generally to the responses of the majority group to minority groups in contexts in which egalitarian ideals are valued and discrimination is censured (Dovidio, Gaertner, Anastasio, & Sanitioso, 1992). For instance, Pettigrew and Meertens (1995) have found that whereas blatant prejudice in Europe is related to the unconditional exclusion or severe limitation of immigrants, subtle prejudice is associated with constraints in immigration, such as prerequisite educational levels, that can be justified on the basis of factors ostensibly unrelated to race or ethnicity. However, paralleling the scenario that we described for race relations, when conditions change and people feel threatened-such as after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States-subtle biases may become more open and result not only in incidents of overt violence but also directly in attitudes and political actions against immigrants and immigration (Esses, Dovidio, & Hodson, 2002). Bias associated with aversive racism is an elusive phenomenon, and the situation plays a critical moderating role. When an interracial situation is one in which an action could be readily attributed to racial bias, aversive racists carefully monitor their interracial behaviors and do not discriminate. In fact, they may respond even more favorably to blacks than to whites as a way of affirming their nonprejudiced self-images. But when the situation is ambiguous, norms for appropriate behavior are not clear, the circumstances permit a justification for negative behavior on the basis of some factor other than race, or aversive racists are not conscious of their actions, their bias is expressed. The challenge for addressing aversive racism thus resides in its elusiveness. Because aversive racists are unaware of their unconscious negative attitudes and their effects, and truly embrace their egalitarian self-image, they are motivated to deny the existence of these feelings and not to recognize or take responsibility for the adverse impact of their behavior on blacks. The subtle processes underlying discrimination motivated by aversive racism can be identified and isolated under the controlled conditions of the laboratory; however, at the societal and organizational levels, at which the controlled conditions of an experiment are rarely possible and multiple factors may shape decision making simultaneously, this process presents a substantial challenge to the equitable treatment of members of disadvantaged groups. Krieger (1995), in the Stanford Law Review, observed: "Herein lies the practical problem. ... Validating subjective decisionmaking systems is neither empirically nor economically feasible, especially for jobs where intangible qualities, such as interpersonal skills, creativity, and ability to make sound judgments under conditions of uncertainty are critical" (p. 1232). Thus the operation of aversive racism may go largely unnoticed and unaddressed in naturalistic settings. In addition, to the extent that discrimination reflects in-group favoritism (see also Gaertner et al., 1997), it is particularly difficult to address legally. Krieger (1998) adds, "Title VII is poorly equipped to control prejudice resulting from in-group favoritism. ... In-group favoritism manifests itself gradually in subtle ways. It is unlikely to trigger mobilization of civil rights remedies because instances of this form of discrimination tend to go unnoticed. If they are noticed, they will frequently seem genuinely trivial or be economically unfeasible to pursue. ... For this reason as for others, we cannot expect existing equal opportunity tools adequately to prevent, identify, or redress this more modern form of discrimination" (pp. 1325-1326). It is apparent that new techniques are needed to address this and other contemporary forms of racism. Developing individual, intergroup, and societal-level interventions that not only control the expressions of aversive racism but also address the negative components of aversive racism has critical social implications. Aversive racism represents a latent form of bias whose expression is strongly moderated by social circumstances and norms. A change in conditions or norms can allow this bias to operate more directly and openly (see Rogers & Prentice-Dunn, 1981). For instance, research on interracial aggression has demonstrated that under normal circumstances whites are not more aggressive and harmful toward blacks than toward whites. Overt and unprovoked aggression toward blacks would readily be perceived as racist. However, when whites are first antagonized by another person's aggressiveness, when they feel freed from prevailing norms through conditions that make them feel anonymous and deindividuated, or when norms change from censuring to supporting aggression, whites exhibit more aggressiveness toward blacks than toward whites (Donnerstein & Donnerstein, 1973; Donnerstein, Donnerstein, Simon, & Ditrichs, 1972; Kawakami, Spears, & Dovidio, 2002; Rogers & Prentice-Dunn, 1981). Latent racism also has important organizational implications. In corporate settings, racial discrimination in personnel selection decisions emerges when norms, which typically sanction discrimination, change and an organizational authority condones discrimination (Brief, Buttram, Elliott, Reizenstein, & McCline, 1995). Thus, besides its subtle contemporary influence, if left unaddressed, aversive racism provides the seed for bias to emerge when conditions allow or encourage a more open expression of discrimination. Future research on aversive racism has several productive avenues to pursue. One direction involves further exploration of ways to identify aversive racists. Although there is debate about the meaning and validity of implicit associations, we believe that these techniques can provide valuable insights into the dynamics of aversive racism. Karpinski and Hilton (2000) have argued that the types of responses measured by implicit techniques, such as the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998), reflect environmental associations rather than personal endorsement of evaluations and stereotypes. In our earlier formulation of the aversive racism framework (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986), we hypothesized that a broad range of cognitive, affective, and motivational influences contributed to the unconscious forces involved in aversive racism. One of these was that exposure to sociocultural influences relating to institutional and cultural racism (Jones, 1997), the cultural transmission of stereotypes (Schaller, Conway, & Tanchuk, 2002), and the portrayal of blacks in the mass media (Devine, 1989) would create and support unconscious negative associations with blacks and influence behavior toward blacks in consequential ways. The facts that (1) these associations come to mind often automatically and without intentional control for many whites, as implicit techniques have demonstrated, and (2) that these associations predict subtle behavioral manifestations of bias (Dovidio et al., 2002; Son Hing et al., 2002), particularly in the absence of conscious personal endorsement, are consistent with our aversive racism framework. In addition, although many of the techniques used to measure implicit evaluation and stereotypes focus on processes reflective of "cold" cognition, with little involvement of affective process, implicit racial evaluations are also related to fundamental affective and motivational reactions. Phelps et al. (2000) demonstrated that responses on the Implicit Association Test, but not responses on a self-report measure of prejudice, predicted activation of the amygdala, a subcortical structure of the brain that plays a role in emotional learning and evaluation and is responsive to threats. Thus, although we still contend that unconscious affective and cognitive processes contribute to aversive racism in ways beyond the effects of implicit negative associations (Nail et al., 2003), we acknowledge that implicit associations are a key component and that the techniques developed to measure implicit evaluations and stereotypes are important tools for studying aversive racism and for distinguishing aversive racists from truly nonprejudiced people. Before the development of such measures, we generally assumed that, given the pervasive psychological and social forces promoting bias, most white Americans who said they were not prejudiced were actually aversive racists. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
