Study: White People Think Black People Are Magical Unicorns
A new study featured in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science concludes white people may possess a "superhuman bias" against black people, and are therefore likely to attribute preternatural qualities to black people.
Jesse Singal explains at the Science of Us:
In a series of five studies, some involving so-called implicit association tests in which words are flashed on a screen quickly enough to "prime" a subject with their meaning but not for them to consciously understand what they have seen, the researchers showed that whites are quicker to associate blacks than whites with superhuman words like ghost, paranormal, and spirit.
This image of a magical black person, someone holding extraordinary mental and physical powers, has long persisted through American culture, whether it be through cringe-worthy movie roles or literature.
And the damage of such a potential bias is significant. While it's easy to understand why most clichés are both dangerous and destructive, the study suggests white people's tendency to cast a black person as a magical being—a stereotype that on its face some might claim is positive—is actually just as detrimental as say the image of the angry black woman, absent father, etc.
The superhuman image may be able to explain matters such why young black men are perceived to "be more 'adult' than White juveniles when judging culpability," write researchers Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter. If true, such a perception could outline the overwhelming racial disparities seen in prison systems throughout the country.
This bizarre phenomenon could even have contributed to the immense hope Americans placed on President Barack Obama in 2008. As the Boston Globe recently pointed out, back in 2007 David Ehrenstein described Obama's campaign as such:
Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2014/11/black-people-magical-superhuman
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A recognition of the obstacles that white supremacy puts in from of black people, and understanding what it takes for black people to succeed in spite of those obstacles.
Obviously, those black people who do succeed are seen as truly exceptional people. However, depending on whom you're talking to, whites will go out of their way to either adopt or disown these exceptional blacks as "the other."
If adopted, that black person has to be viewed as some sort of perfect role model. However, it wouldn't take a lot to disown their perfect role models, as even small errors in judgement or even realizing that their perfect model was just another human being after all. ("They're all the same."
Rejected black role models are always viewed more negatively by whites, even for doing something that any other white person would forgiven for.
Can you imagine what it's like to be a black role model in this society?
