The quote of the week for this week (though it’s only Thursday) concerns “implicit bias.” You may recall that, for a number of years, the concept of implicit bias dominated discussions at the Feminist Philosophers blog and other contexts elsewhere in philosophy. In these discussions, the concept of implicit bias served as a versatile causal explanation and quasi-justification for discrimination and inequality.

Nevertheless, some of us successfully pushed back against the primacy attributed to implicit bias in various philosophical circles, that is, to the individualistic psychologizing of structural oppressions that we observed taking place within philosophical discourse (for example, see my critique in Tremain 2017). Hence, uncritical acceptance and discussion of implicit bias are now virtually nonexistent in philosophy, sent to the dustbin of failed hypotheses along with other mistaken ideas, such the alleged impartiality and neutrality of anonymous CVs/writing samples/entire applications in philosophy job searches.

Indeed, critical examination of arguments advanced with respect to implicit bias and philosophical analyses of racism and white supremacy in particular has continued to deepen and has become increasingly broader in scope. The careful treatment that Elena Ruíz gives the idea of implicit bias in her outstanding new monograph, Structural Violence: The Makings of Settler Colonial Impunity, is a case in point. In the book, Ruíz engages in a critical genealogical discussion of the hapless emergence of the notion of implicit bias, the social-scientific research and empirical studies that developed to elaborate and support the notion, and the settler-colonial motivation for the very concept itself. Here is a quoted excerpt from the section “Implicit Bias” of the first chapter of Ruíz’s illuminating new book:

The framing of “tacit racism” witnessed a resurgence in scholarly interest following the 2012 shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, and a national resurgence in public interest in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd by Derrick Chauvin in Minneapolis and the police killing of Breonna Taylor as she slept in her home in Louisville, Kentucky. The public outcry against police brutality produced a renewed interest in framing state violence through unconscious human biases and implicit racism as powerful drivers of social inequality. This gained traction in popular media outlets, as it was a preferrable framing to the more implicatory and precise diagnosis of state-sponsored terrorism against minority populations (think of the murder of Fred Hampton). Between August 2004 and August 2022, Google searches for “implicit bias” peaked in the summer of 2020. They also saw a significant bump in the months leading up to the 2016 [US] election.

While it may have seemed new at the time to many of those witnessing the discussion, talk of “implicit bias” in 2020 was a very public return to decades-old research on covert racism that included studies on uncritical habits of mind as “dysconscious,” “automatic” prejudice, “implicit stereotyping,” “implicit social cognition,” and of course, “implicit bias”. The ground has been prepared for implicit bias to function as the neurobiological and psychometric version of “racism is over” racism.

Not all psychologists embrace the implicit-bias paradigm. Some argue that disciplinary habits, entrenched social practices and community norms–for example, ways of doing psychology in a traditionally cisgendered, white, and male-dominated field that promotes naturalized objectivity at all costs–have enabled the construction of a social cognitive concept that reproduces these norms rather than scientifically explains them: “The analytic anchor becomes the implicitness, not the structural actors that socially condition the association or the actual discrimination and its effects (i.e., racism and White supremacy). Psychology’s epistemic values prioritize understanding the automatic responses to stimuli, obscuring how responsibility, restitution, rehabilitation, and reparation fit into the social problem of systematic racism.” [….]

Attributions of blame for discriminatory actions resulting from implicit bias typically focus solely on the discriminating agents’ self-regulation of prejudiced responses to biases once they have been made conscious or explicit. This mainstream framing of implicit bias as a universal susceptibility and unconscious phenomenon is a double-edged sword meant to blunt the personal and collective attribution of blame in settler colonial societies.

Without functional accounts of racism as constituted by historical social orders and institutional practices that operate and distribute power inequitably irrespective of individual attitudes, contemporary accounts of implicit bias make it exceedingly difficult to hold institutions, social groups, states, and their systemic policies accountable for the reliably deadly and racist worlds they design, ratify, and historically help to maintain through race-enabling and adaptive infrastructures such as law, policy, and technology enforcement mechanisms. Implicit bias helps create the fungible background conditions against which political and financial power is concentrated in white settler dynastic chains, a phenomenon aptly described as a “kleptocracy” of white societies rooted in “a culture of impunity” that relies on the public narrative of implicit bias (as a preferred intervention tool) to succeed.

What the implicit-bias framework does best is mystify the origins and causes of systemic racism by framing discriminatory acts as no one’s fault. The framework then enables the development of real-world institutional mechanisms that reinforce this belief. … The value of the implicit-bias framework to those who wield it is less dependent on truth than on its function. As a framework, implicit bias is more than a psychological account of how social imprinting, memory, categorization, and other modulators of human agency and behavior relate to volitional action. It is a functional social tool that epistemically operates within a historical economy of power and stands in specific relation to existing institutional elements of societies rooted in racial systems. By ignoring and eliding structural power relations, the implicit-bias framework allows employers, for instance, to frame antidiscrimination interventions in such a way that white protagonists are positioned as the true victims of biased judgments. (pp. 46-49)

[superscript references removed throughout for clarity and brevity]