Seeing Race 95differences. For example, these categories can be further subdivided into
young males that are ‘white’ and ‘prototypically white;’ ‘black’ and
‘prototypically black.’ To this end, Neuroscientist Steven Rose and
sociologist Hilary Rose (1972) have explained how the majority of genetic
diversity has occurred within populations, and not between them when
separated by traditional race categories (in Cole, 2016).
Moreover, to isolate the detail of race is to reduce an American and
European history of racial discrimination and subjugation—not to mention
individual realities—to a 1 (White) or a 0 (Not White). Rather than
promoting the CRP goal of identity consciousness, this reduces racial
identity to independent variables. It is as if blackness might reside
somewhere between the skin color and racial phenotypicality of facial
features. There is no attention paid to the construction of these everyday
realities. The construction of racially biased perception is instead
understood as a phenomenon at the level of the information processor. It
would follow that the solution to racial discrimination would be re-
programming or re-conditioning, which would fail to address racism as a
systemic problem.
Ignoring the Subjectivity of the Subject of Investigation
Wilson et al. have caught the general public with their proverbial hand
in the cookie jar of racial discrimination, but this conclusion is not only
about the general public. There is an important demographic for whom this
study is also consequential: young black males. It is curious that the
authors have systematically removed black persons from the participant
pool on each of the studies. “We did not analyze the data from 14
participants who identified as Black...” (Wilson et al., 2017, p. 64); “we
recruited 30 non-black US residents...” (p. 64); “we excluded 5 Black
participants from the analysis...” (p. 65); and so on. Not only have the
Black participants been excluded from the study, we also do not hear from
them in the discussion.
By turning the focus of the study on racism towards the lived
experiences of the young black males who are the target of this
discrimination bias, there would be an opportunity to learn a great deal