Rethinking Implicit Bias

Abstract

This chapter describes implicit bias and the limits to science as a tool of racial justice. Over the past 20 years, the frame of implicit bias has emerged within legal scholarship and practice to challenge the Supreme Court’s “intentional blindness” largely on its own terms. This approach takes on the concept of intent and tries to reconfigure it in a manner more conducive to serving the interests of racial justice. Specifically, it invokes recent findings in the psychology and neuroscience of implicit social cognition (ISC) to argue that while explicit intent or bias may be increasingly difficult to identify, implicit intent or bias remains pervasive and deeply salient in society, to an extent that both supports findings of discrimination and justifies taking affirmative action to redress resulting racial inequities. Many of those adopting this approach refer to themselves as “behavioral realists.” However, a primary focus on implicit bias tends to obscure the distinctive historical place of racism in the United States that makes it different from other biases.