Seeing Race 93confirmed with photometers or decibel meters. Indeed, it can only be
understood within the context of colonialism, the impact of which is
difficult to assert. It is only through such so-called misperceptions that it
can be understood.
Consequently, the goal should not be to correct the perception, but to
better understand it. This is the argument that is made by W. J. T. Mitchell
in his book Seeing Through Race (2012). In it he argues that the idea of a
post-racial world is a dubious one, and, furthermore, that it should not be
an objective. It is in phenomena like Wilson et al. (2017) have
demonstrated that we can better understand the social world we live in.
Falling Short of CRP
On the surface, it seems as though the Wilson, et al. study has
succeeded in demonstrating the influence that an irrelevant independent
sense-variable (such as skin color) has on the perception of size,
formidability, and threat. Like the hash-marks on the lines in the Müller-
Lyer Illusion, the independent variable of race is found to influence
perceptual judgments. Have Wilson et al. demonstrated racism? It seems
they have. However, within the confines of the cognitivist model of
perception, this still falls short of CRP as it has been described by Adams
et al. (2011, 2013). There are three problems that stand out with the design
and discussion of this study: (1) By isolating variables, the authors
contribute to the problem of atomizing the problem of racism; (2) in their
discussion of the race-based differences in perception, it is assumed that
the perception of the young white man is the standard; (3) the voice of the
young black male, who is ostensibly the subject of the study, is noticeably
absent from the data.
Atomizing Racism
As it is introduced by Adams et al. (2011), the atomization of racism
occurs when it is assumed that the latter is a result of a few bad apples. It
isn’t that social perception in general is racially biased, but that a few
individuals, harboring racist ideologies, perpetuate racism. This has the
effect of minimizing the depth of structural racism (See Ture & Hamilton,