94 Patrick M. Whitehead
- by hiding it away in a small handful of scapegoats while the rest of
the public is free to conclude that they are not themselves part of the
problem. Wilson et al. (2017) escape this criticism, demonstrating that the
perceptual bias is generalizable across a broad participant base. However,
they are guilty of a second form of atomism with similar problems for
establishing CRP.
The metaphor of “atomization” comes from physics and chemistry,
and is an example of the metaphysical framework called smallism: the
assumption that the best way to understand an object or phenomenon is to
break it down to its smallest observable units (Harman, 2018). While
racism might seem to have a complex historical, social, political, and
ethical construction, smallism maintains that whatever it is, it has a finite
number of factors, and each of these factors can be isolated and understood
by themselves. This can actually be seen in the design of the series of
studies by Wilson et al. They first demonstrate a bias in size-perception;
then they demonstrate that perceived size is related to perceived
formidability; then that perceived formidability is related to threat; and so
on.
By operating within the methodological framework of orthodox
psychology of sensation and perception, the authors are forced to isolate
variables that are not so easily isolatable. Race, which has been described
above as skin color, cannot be reducible to a discrete stimulus. For
example, the Wilson et al. (2017) admit how
the race biases we have observed thus far may unfortunately be more
difficult to control than biases rooted in top-down social category effects.
...[R]ace-based threat perception... is multiply caused, strikingly robust,
and partly based on low-level perceptual elements of racial
phenotypicality. (p. 74)This means that there is no simple category known as ‘young black
male,’ because within such a category, there are still differences that are
important to the study of racial discrimination. The categories of ‘young
black males’ and ‘young white males’ have important intra-category