This chapter reviews research on a contemporary form of prejudice – aversive racism – and considers the important role of implicit bias in the subtle expressions of discrimination associated with aversive racism. Aversive racism characterizes the racial attitudes of a substantial portion of well-intentioned people who genuinely endorse egalitarian values and believe that they are not prejudiced but at the same time possess automatically activated, often nonconscious, negative feelings and beliefs about members of another group. Our focus in this chapter is on the bias of White Americans toward Black Americans, but we also discuss relevant findings in other intergroup contexts. We emphasize the importance of considering, jointly, both explicit and implicit biases for understanding subtle, and potentially unintentional, expressions of discrimination. The chapter concludes by discussing how research on aversive racism and implicit bias has been mutually informative and suggests specific promising directions for future work.

This chapter is about the origins of anti-Black racism in the United States. It describes two separate but related processes. The first process involves historical events, of which slavery is the most important. In addition to systemic exploitation and degradation of enslaved people, slavery produced beliefs that enslaved people were inferior human beings. Reinforcing these beliefs was scientific racism – supposedly scientific theories that purported to prove the innate inferiority of Black people. Even after slavery ended, economic competition, racist laws, and social norms created social and economic disadvantages for Black people. The second process involves the ways humans think about the people they encounter. Humans place themselves and other people in social groups largely based on physical characteristics, particularly those that society considers to be important. Perceived race is a major determinant of how people socially categorize others, which forms the psychological foundation for racial biases at both the conscious and nonconscious levels. Thus, even in the absence of malevolent intent, it is likely that people will develop negative racial beliefs and feelings. These biases lead to the tendency of White Americans to justify the disadvantages experienced by Black Americans by attributing them to inherent defects in Black people.

Globalization seemed like an irresistible, unstoppable force. Political plasticity seemed to be pushed to higher levels, as globalization accelerated and impacted all humankind. The development of larger units such as the European Union signaled, for many, the end of the nation state – a borderless world. Economic and technological forces seemed to be forcing globalization, and all humankind, down a one-way road. On closer examination, however, we realize that globalization has been taking place in a fractured manner: Just as economic and technological forces have been pushing us toward the global, basic identity needs have been pulling us back toward the local. Thus, just as Europe is integrating, there is Brexit and Basque and Scottish independence. Just as the North American Free Trade Agreement comes into place, there is Quebec nationalism and the effort by Quebec nationalists to break away from the rest of Canada. The deglobalization movement has been accelerated by the rise of authoritarian strongmen and their extremist nationalist supporters. As this chapter shows, it seems that basic identity needs and allegiances to local groups and nations have influenced developments, so that political plasticity remains limited in this domain.