Perceptions of racial confrontation: The role of color blindness and comment ambiguity.

Abstract

Because of its emphasis on diminishing race and avoiding racial discourse, color-blind racial ideology has been suggested to have negative consequences for modern day race relations. The current research examined the influence of color blindness and the ambiguity of a prejudiced remark on perceptions of a racial minority group member who confronts the remark. One hundred thirteen White participants responded to a vignette depicting a White character making a prejudiced comment of variable ambiguity, after which a Black target character confronted the comment. Results demonstrated that the target confronter was perceived more negatively and as responding less appropriately by participants high in color blindness, and that this effect was particularly pronounced when participants responded to the ambiguous comment. Implications for the ways in which color blindness, as an accepted norm that is endorsed across legal and educational settings, can facilitate Whites' complicity in racial inequality are discussed.

Racial microaggressions and perceptions of Internet memes

“…All participants rated the racial themed memes as being more offensive than the non-racial themed memes. On the surface, a lack of racial group differences may seem to contradict previous research demonstrating that Whites tend to be less bothered by racially biased Internet content (Tynes & Markoe, 2010) and less aware of ambiguous, as compared to more blatant, forms of racial discrimination (Dovidio et al, 2002;Sue et al, 2007;Zou & Dickter, 2014). However, our experimental paradigm differed from previous research in two important ways.…”

“…The cumulative effect of racial microaggressions, regardless of their form, is to disregard the lived experiences of People of Color (Sue et al, 2007). Because racial microaggressions are often ambiguous and subtle in nature, these transgressions can go undetected by perpetrators (Sue et al, 2007;Zou & Dickter, 2014).…”

“…Second, unlike research demonstrating White participants' reduced ability to detect ambiguous racial prejudice (e.g., Zou & Dickter, 2014, see also Dovidio et al, 2002;Pearson et al, 2009, for reviews), in the current study we utilized a within-subjects design where participants rated both racial themed and non-racial themed Internet memes in succession.…”

Color-blind racial attitudes: Microaggressions in the context of racism and White privilege

“…One of the main areas for this research is the concept of CoBRAs, which are the values expressed by those who claim to see all people as the same without acknowledging, or even noticing, racial identity (Kohatsu et al, 2011;Neville et al, 2000;Neville et al, 2013;Zou & Dickter, 2013).…”

“…EDWARDS / DOI: 10.5929/2017.7.1.3 Those in power denying the existence of their own prejudice and invalidating the experiences of those who experience microaggressions may be the result of CoBRAs or Color-Blind Racial Ideology (Kohatsu et al, 2011;Neville et al, 2000;Neville et al, 2013;Zou & Dickter, 2013).…”