The psychologist exposing the mental gymnastics that conceal racism

Keon West could reel off anecdotes about the everyday racism he experiences – but he won’t. Personal accounts rarely convince anyone, he says, and, all too often, they are dismissed or put down to some other, less offensive, cause. Instead of the feelings that racist behaviour and accusations of racism provoke, he prefers to focus on facts.

A social psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, West has consolidated hundreds of rigorous empirical studies on racism conducted over decades in his new book, The Science of Racism. By exploring how experiments can detect racism and measure its impact across societies, he builds a scientifically accurate picture of what contemporary racism is and the complexities that surround it.

While it is clear that society’s attempts to combat racism remain inadequate, there is plenty that can be done about it. The same studies that prove the existence of racism can also help us unpack the psychological gymnastics that nearly everyone performs to conceal their racist behaviours from themself. The idea is that, by becoming aware of these personal biases, many racist behaviours can gradually be dissolved.

In this interview, West sheds light on ideas like reverse racism and systemic racism and lays out the science-backed methods of spotting racism in its various guises. Doing so, he hopes, will steer public discourse away from debating whether racism exists to confronting it head on.

Amarachi Orie: What is racism?

Keon West: There are two definitions that I think are useful. There’s one that’s useful for running the scientific experiments: racism is any…