Understanding our own racial biases is something we all struggle with, even when we aren't aware of those struggles.

We speak with one psychologist who has been studying a more modern form of prejudice

and says ridding ourselves of those biases is practically impossible. But being aware of them

is the first step toward improving relations among different racial groups. I'm Audrey Hamilton,

and this is Speaking of Psychology.

John DeVideo is a psychology professor at Yale University and one of the leading researchers on racism,

particularly subtle or unconscious racism.

He has studied issues of social power and social relations, both between groups and between individuals.

His work explores techniques for reducing these conscious and unconscious biases.

Welcome, Dr. DeVideo.

Thank you for having me.

Your work focuses on what you call aversive racism. Can you explain what that means and how it differs from just racism? We used to think about racism in a very simple way, that people had

negative thoughts, negative feelings, hatred towards a group.

But since the 1960s, where there was the civil rights legislation, it changed the way we thought about race.

Because it was not only immoral to think that way, but it was illegal to discriminate.

And what we think is that racism has become more subtle since then, that people still have negative

feelings, but they may not be aware of those negative feelings. And instead of feelings of

hatred, it's more like feelings of avoidance and discomfort. That's where the name of verse of racism

comes from. Would you say most people have some biases against people from different racial or ethnic groups?

You know, what are the consequences of those types of implicit, or we say unconscious biases?

Yeah. There's research that shows that only a small proportion of Americans today have old-fashioned kind of racism, explicit kind of racism,

but the majority of white Americans, because they've grown up in a culture that has been historically racist in many ways,

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