Alarmed or Aware? - The Effects of Black Student Collegiate Protests on Implicit Racial Attitudes

Abstract

The face of racial prejudice and stereotyping is an ever changing and complex one as each era redefines the meaning of racism and expresses it in different ways. This study aims to investigate how Black student collegiate protests may have changed implicit racial attitudes by either creating awareness or alarm, looking specifically at the Black Justice League protest at Princeton University. Participants consisted of the current freshman and senior classes at Princeton of various gender and racial/ethnic identities. All participants completed an implicit association test to measure base levels of prejudice. Then, participants were randomly assigned to either write about the BJL experience to prime them about the protest or about residential college dining hall food as a control condition. Afterwards, participants completed a face perception task of White and Black faces where they judged how threatening a faceappeared. Existing literature suggested that priming for the BJL protest and/or mere experience of the BJL protest would lower implicit prejudice in subjects as determined by lower threat ratings of faces. However, analysis of the data suggested no significant results.Keywords: face perception, threat perception, implicit prejudice, modern racism, collegiate protests, racial equality