Abstract
Tamar Gendler argues that, for those living in a society in which race is a salient sociological feature, it is impossible to be fully rational: members of such a society must either fail to encode relevant information containing race, or suffer epistemic costs by being implicitly racist. However, I argue that, although Gendler calls attention to a pitfall worthy of study, she fails to conclusively demonstrate that there are epistemic (or cognitive) costs of being racist. Gendler offers three supporting phenomena. First, implicit racists expend cognitive energy repressing their implicit biases. I reply, citing Ellen Bialystok’s research, that constant use of executive functioning can be beneficial. Second, Gendler argues that awareness of a negative stereotype of one’s own race with regard to a given task negatively affects one’s performance of that task. This phenomenon, I argue, demonstrates that those against whom the stigma is directed suffer costs, but it fails to demonstrate that the stigmatizers suffer cognitively. Finally, Gendler argues that racists are less competent when recognizing faces of other races than when recognizing faces of their own race because, in the first instance, they encode the race of the face (taking up cognitive space that could have been used to encode fine-grained distinctions), whereas in the second instance they encode no race. I argue that in-group/out-group categorization rather than racism is the cognitive cost. I conclude that Gendler has failed to demonstrate that there are cognitive costs associated with being a racist.
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Notes
Note that Gendler is committed to the claim that rationality is always truth seeking. That is, a rational agent will always aim to form true beliefs.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer’s suggested use of this distinction.
Gendler would say that the aversive racist alieves that their race is superior. However, I think nothing hangs on Gendler’s account of alief and am unclear as to how one’s beliefs, desires, and reasons interact with ones aliefs, cesires, and easons. See Gendler (2011, pp. 41–42) and Gendler (2008) for further discussion.
This well-known test involves the subject being shown the names of colors written in various colored prints. The subject is asked to give the name of the print-color. The faster the participant gives the color of the print (rather than the word), the higher executive functioning and less tired that participant is, while the slower the participant gives the name of the color of print, the lower the participant’s executive functioning and more cognitively tired the participant.
This is an empirical prediction. To test it, we should take aversive racists and non-racists who both frequently interact with members of other races and see (when not primed) who does better on the Stroop Task. If interacting with members of other races gives aversive racists a mental workout (as it were), then they should perform better on the Stroop Task.
In the empirical literature, enhanced executive function has been tied to the ability to delay gratification. For example, Carlson (2005) notes that as children, increase their executive function, they also gain the ability to delay gratification.
Perhaps the cognitive system involved in suppressing a language (in the case of bilingualism) is different from the system involved in suppressing implicitly racist beliefs. If this is right, one might claim that one of these systems is like a muscle and one is not. Such a claim, however, would be odd, since both research programs take the Stroop Task to be the paradigmatic measurement of the cognitive system they are studying. (Thanks to Muhammad Ali Khalidi for pointing this out).
This claim is further supported by Aronson et al. (1999) who demonstrate that white men’s performance declines when they are told that their math tests scores will be compared to Asian men’s scores.
As Gendler rightly points out, this phenomenon generalizes in that people are better at identifying in-group members than out-group members (see Kurzban et al. 2001). Because Gendler limits her discussion to race (specially black and white), I will do the same.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Kristin Andrews, Brian Hus, Devin Curry, Marc Champagne, and Jacob Beck for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. Thank you to Sharon Mugg for her helpful discussion and stylistic suggestions. Thank you to Alexis Shotwell for her comments on this paper at the Canadian Philosophical Association.
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Mugg, J. What are the cognitive costs of racism? A reply to Gendler. Philos Stud 166, 217–229 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0036-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0036-z