Essay On Controlling Racial Prejudice

A very important current ongoing debate is whether police officers should be held accountable for their reactions, specifically their weapon bias, during emergency situations to racial out-groups or minorities. As an example, when an officer shoots and kills an innocent black male solely based off the assumption that his reach into his pocket was for a gun rather than identification— as was the case for Philando Castile (in 2016)— was his judgement based on an intent to kill or unconscious racial categorization of black males to be dangerous? Would the outcome of this situation be the same if that victim had been a white male? To be able to correctly identify accountability, the intent of the officer should be at question. If racial profiling and categorization is truly an automatic, and an uncontrollable process, then the officers are acting without intent to harm and therefore cannot be held accountable.

1. Wheeler, M. E., & Fiske, S. T. (2005). Controlling Racial Prejudice. Psychological Science, 16(1), 56-63.
Two main experiments were run, each with three distinct goals, to test whether social categorization would be activated. One experiment looked at amygdala activation which represents the early and unconscious neural activation that occurs when one perceives a threat, and the second experiment looked at response times when primed with black or white faces during a lexical priming activity. This article is in support of the idea that amygdala activation can predict whether an individual perceives an unfamiliar individual from an out-group as a threat based off of their available stereotype knowledge. This can be used in my research as I plan to utilize functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test amygdala activation as evidence of stereotype