Conversational Silencing of Racism in Psychological Science: Toward Decolonization in Practice

Abstract

This article addresses a paradox between self-perceptions of psychology as a liberal, progressive, antiracist discipline and profession and the persistent criticisms of racism and calls for decolonization. It builds on the criticisms of epistemic exclusion and White centering, arguing that White supremacy is maintained by “conversational silencing” in which the focus on doing good psychology systematically draws attention away from the realities of racism and the operation of power. The process is illustrated by investigations of disciplinary discourse around non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic psychology and on stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction, which constitute the vanguard of liberal scholarship in the discipline. This progressive scholarship nurtures “White ignorance,” an absence of belief about systemic racism that psychology plays a part in upholding.

Racism in psychology has been exposed over decades (Helms, 2012; Lewontin et al., 1984; Martín-Baró, 1994; Richards, 1997). The hideous cornucopia of craniology, mental testing, and the African brain make a painful, unreadable history (e.g., Mahone, 2021). Nevertheless, “epistemic exclusion” continues to define the reality of psychologists of color (Buchanan et al., 2021; Settles et al., 2020, 2021, 2022), including their underrepresentation in top-tier scholarly journals (Hodgetts et al., 2020; Roberts et al., 2020) and the decentering of Black lives in the pages of published research (Garay & Remedios, 2021; Remedios, 2022). More generally, the methods, interpretations, theories, and practices of psychology devalue African and indigenous epistemologies (Kessi et al., 2022; Mkhize, 2021; Ratele, 2019; Smith, 2012) and minimize the experience of discrimination in the Global South (Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022; Boykin et al., 2020; Ratele et al., 2020). Consequently, the calls to decolonize psychology have grown more urgent as part of the broader acknowledgment that Black lives matter (Adams et al., 2015, 2017; Bulhan, 2015; Kessi & Boonzaier, 2018; Kessi et al., 2022).

At the same time, psychologists generally see themselves as progressive, scientific, objective, antiracist, and thoroughly respectable. Surveys suggest that they overwhelmingly view themselves as liberal (Inbar & Lammers, 2012; Von Hippel & Buss, 2017), and, rather than racism, accusations of liberal bias have been leveled against psychological science (Duarte et al., 2015).

The current article contributes to this critical engagement with “whitestream” psychology (Bell, 2018) by proposing and illustrating the mechanism by which racism persists and becomes resistant to change. The antiracism scholarship reviewed above attributes White supremacy to a combination of historical biases and systemic interests that have become incorporated into the practice and institutionalization of psychological science, preserving racial (and other) privileges. In focusing on racism, however, this work tends to overlook the effort psychologists have made to challenge racism within their discipline and profession. As a result, the criticism often misses its target because liberal and progressive psychologists generally view themselves as challenging rather than practicing racism. This article considers how progressive psychological science, which ostensibly challenges White privilege, may in fact maintain systemic privilege and power, explaining why racism persists after decades of critique and transformation, and despite the liberal politics of the majority.

Mick Billig’s (1999) account of dialogical repression is used to show how progressive scholarship can absorb our focus, allowing us to view ourselves as progressive, absolving us from owning racism and from the challenging work of decolonization. This complicates our understanding of “progressive” ideas in psychological science, showing how sites of innovation and transformation that seek to challenge White supremacy may be ineffective or even harmful in undoing racism. The next section of the article develops Billig’s understanding of dialogical repression as conversational silencing and shows how this can operate within psychological science to maintain “White ignorance” about racism. The remainder of the article considers how the mechanism of conversational silencing produces specific categories of White ignorance within progressive calls for non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) psychology and research on stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction. The article concludes by proposing three searching questions that can interrupt the conversational silencing of racism as we strive for decolonization in practice.

Conversational Silencing, White Ignorance, and Progressive Psychology

Billig’s (1999) theory of dialogical repression is grounded in the idea that silences are routinely and collaboratively produced in conversations (Murray & Durrheim, 2019). This occurs because we can only speak or think about one thing at a time and that speaking about topic B (e.g., our multiracial circle of friends) can be a way of not speaking about topic A (e.g., our anti-immigration opinions) to project an image of antiracism while supporting racial privilege in practice. The paradigmatic case of conversational silencing is the elephant-in-the-room phenomenon, in which polite conversation carefully circumnavigates an awkward conversational taboo that may be on everyone’s minds, such as conspicuous failings of a eulogized deceased.

Unlike Freudian repression, which is an invisible psychological mechanism, dialogical repression is a collaborative accomplishment, the exercise and effects of which are readily subject to investigation (Whitehead, 2020). In conversation, repression is flagged by discontinuity markers (e.g., “anyway” or “but”), as in using the racism disclaimer “I’m not racist, but . . .” to preface an arguably racist point (cf. Billig, 2012). Successful repression is collaborative, relying on hearers to play their part, leaving the troubling material alone, accepting the disclaimer, and moving the conversation along rather than criticizing, questioning, or returning to silenced themes. By studying conversations, therefore, we can observe collaborative silencing being done, observing how attention is carefully directed away from troubling topics of racism, injustice, and White privilege and replaced with more acceptable thoughts, namely of inclusion and antiracism.

Conversational silencing “covers its own tracks” (Billig, 1999, p. 55) when the routines of topic replacement become “sedimented into the habits of everyday life” (p. 56). Silences then become institutionalized to the point that individuals may be unaware that they are talking about B (e.g., progressive principles) rather than A (e.g., racially exclusive practices). The focus on topic B may displace earlier concerns so that the existence and roots of topic A are almost forgotten. We may become so engrossed in our progressive ethics, open science, inclusion, and prejudice reduction that our racist traditions and ongoing exclusions remain neatly forgotten (Murray & Durrheim, 2019). Billig and Marinho (2019) drew a general methodological lesson from this observation: “If we want to uncover the assumptions of our time . . . then we must try to notice beliefs that are generally used but not defended because they are generally left unquestioned” (p. 35).

The effect of conversational silencing is well described by the philosopher Charles Mills’s (2007) memorable term “White ignorance,” a willful not knowing of White privilege that forms the unquestioned assumption of our time. Interestingly, in addition to targeting false beliefs such as persistent racial stereotypes, Mills (2015), like Billig, depicted White ignorance as “an absence of belief” (p. 217) such as the color-blind refusal to acknowledge the enduring impact of racism on people of color (cf. Adams & Salter, 2019).

In The Roots of Evil, Ervin Staub (1989) provided an illustrative account of how leaders who organized and executed genocides did so respectably by a similar absence of belief. In 1939, more than a year after Kristallnacht, a high-ranking functionary in the German church praised Hitler for “improving the morals of German youth” who “drank, smoked, and engaged in debauchery until Hitler came along” (p. 300). The banality of evil was based on sophisticated ignorance, deflecting attention from the violence of Nazism by a cultivated respectability, celebrating traditional morality and the good life that Hitler defended.

White ignorance in psychological science can be understood as a similar absence of belief, in a different context and with different effect. This has been highlighted in recent critiques of psychological science. Thrift and Sugarman (2019) argued that by attributing suffering and subjugation to personal failures, the individualistic view of social justice in psychology deflects attention from “inherent inequalities” in the system (p. 12). Grzanka and Cole (2021) argued that White ignorance is perpetuated by the most progressive, “good” work in the discipline. They showed how open science perpetuates systemic inequalities, closed access, and (racial) exclusions while celebrating the values of transparency, access, and replication (cf. Bahlai et al., 2019).

These examples illustrate the “miscognition” that underpins the blindness of White ignorance (Mills, 2007). It does not stem from an individual failure of reason, prejudice, or bias but is rather tied to a structural position. It emerges from institutionalized norms of attention, procedure, and preference, underpinned by progressive values, and not necessarily motivated by defensive denial of facts or avoidance of information. Conversational silencing explains how such absence of belief may arise when troubling thoughts of racism and White privilege are replaced with salubrious thoughts of progress and color blindness. Conversational silencing may occur without words, for example, when color blindness and nationalism are naturalized in discourse, curricula, monuments, place names, ethics codes, unwaved flags, daily routine, museum design, and so on (Billig, 1995, 1999, Winter, 2019; for an alternative account of White ignorance, however, see Mueller, 2020). These structures, significations, routines, and practices quietly celebrate Whiteness, taking equality and nationalism for granted, gently focusing attention away from the violence and dispossession on which they are premised (Billig, 1995).

Conversational silencing requires ongoing work and innovation because no matter how well it covers its tracks, it cannot remove all traces of its connection to the past that it repeats. The object of silence perpetually threatens to become exposed, and this threat continually needs to be kept at bay. This occurs because silencing preserves the very thing it is designed to cover, namely, the racism that it is blind to. Conversational silencing thus not only produces an absence of belief but also a haunting effect in which the repressed content threatens to return (see Durrheim & Murray, 2019, 2021; Frosh, 2013, 2019). White ignorance must thus be maintained in an ongoing manner by compulsively refocusing on the good, turning attention away from repeating racism.

If psychological science was founded on White supremacy and race science, then White ignorance functions to preserve these inherited privileges and exclusions by opening opportunities to some and closing them down to others (Maldonado-Torres, 2016). This article considers how progressive psychology produces three categories of White ignorance: around the existence of White privilege, the reality of racism and inequality, and the mechanisms and agents of social change. This is done via a consideration of (a) how concerns about WEIRD psychology serve to privilege the privileged, (b) how research on racial stereotypes and “new racism” elide the reality of racial inequality and racism, and (c) how research on prejudice reduction obscures systemic racism and demobilizes resistance. In all cases, the discourse and practice of psychological science create an absence of belief about racism as well as conjure up threatening fictions, the horrific specters of colonial stereotypes, imperialism, and racism run amok in a psychology in which White supremacy remains undead.

Privileging the Privileged, the Weirdest People in the World

White ignorance in psychology is partly ignorance of its imperialism, “the imposition of knowledge based on research in WEIRD settings as a hegemonic standard for humanity in general” (Adams et al., 2020, p. 6). Psychological science routinely draws conclusions about human psychology from observations on a privileged few, rendering those who do not fit the mold as “other” and even pathological. In their landmark article, Henrich et al. (2010) argued that the “weirdest people in the world” were not cultural others of “seemingly ‘exotic’ societies” but the privileged research subjects of psychological science, drawn from “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (p. 61). Leading journals report findings about psychological processes that purportedly apply to people in general but are based on studies with American undergraduate students, “WEIRD people” who are “highly unrepresentative of the species” (Henrich et al., 2010, p. 79).

Concerns about WEIRD psychology signal recognition of exclusivity and exclusion, which had become normalized in the practice of psychological science. The criticism issued a clarion call for transformation: widening the empirical tent cloths to include the poor, marginalized, and seemingly exotic others, thereby redefining progressive psychological science. Henrich et al. (2010) called for structural change to include the non-WEIRD:

Research partnerships with non-WEIRD institutions . . . further the goal of expanding and diversifying the empirical base of the behavioral sciences. By . . . institutionalized relationships to populations outside the university as well as to non-WEIRD universities, these organizations can make an important contribution to building a more complete understanding of human nature. (p. 82)

A Google Scholar search for “non-WEIRD” on April 12, 2023, returned 3,650 hits, led by an article entitled “Challenges to Capture the Big Five Personality Traits in Non-WEIRD Populations” (Laajaj et al., 2019). Journal editors throughout the discipline take note of commentaries (e.g., Draper et al., 2022) and guidelines for change (e.g., Puthillam et al., 2022). The result has been the inclusion of more diverse samples and authors, with a proliferation of multisite studies and the general valuation of diversity.

While promoting change, the progressive discourse and practices that have emerged around non-WEIRD psychology continue to privilege the privileged via the mechanism of conversational silencing. All the talk about inclusion circumnavigates continuing exclusion, reproducing White ignorance of racial privilege in psychology. First, the absence of race from the list of biases summarized by the acronym WEIRD exemplifies White ignorance. The acronym is a “way for researchers in predominantly white environments to discuss history, culture and context without having to talk about race” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 173). Race is the elephant in the room. In the conversation, the non-WEIRD are non-White. They are everyone from elsewhere, seemingly exotic, lumped into a single category. They are the underbelly of the acronym, the poor, nonindustrialized, non-Western, uneducated, and nondemocratic, and dare we say Black. The non-WEIRD other is a dehumanizing fiction, deeply offensive to the actual people living outside the imperial heartland of psychology. African psychologists, for example (see Ratele, 2019), would never lay claim to being uneducated or undemocratic; neither would their students or their “non-WEIRD universities” (Henrich et al., 2010, p. 82).

Second, the criticism of WEIRD science and the call for non-WEIRD samples elides not only the race of the excluded subjects of psychological science but also the privilege and Whiteness of the scientists. Their calls for inclusion and their participation in open science cast them in good light, but they remain in the driving seat, with their hands on the levers of science and power, and now also social change. The cited passage from Henrich et al. (2010, p. 82) is clear about who are creating the research partnerships, funding the research, and driving the science. It is certainly not the uneducated non-WEIRD partners in their poor, undemocratic, non-WEIRD universities. They are the et al. of the intellectual enterprise. Their job is to help build a “more complete understanding of human nature” on the foundation already laid, with direction and support from the center.

Finally, and overarchingly, the discourse about including non-WEIRD samples seeks a technocratic solution to a political problem. In addition to eliding race and White privilege, the discourse suggests that the problem in the discipline is incomplete knowledge that can be rectified by inclusion. The original authors, for example, have even provided a tool for measuring how WEIRD countries are and for “determining which societies will provide useful comparisons” (Muthukrishna et al., 2020, p. 678). The tool relies on concepts, measures, and stimuli developed by WEIRD scientists. The approach, however, does not recognize the power dynamic imposed by the structure about who has the power to decide who is WEIRD or not, by which criteria, and what in fact constitutes good science.

Despite the calls for non-WEIRD inclusion, (White) samples from North America, Europe, and Australia continue to predominate in psychological science (Puthillam, 2022; Rad et al., 2018; Thalmayer et al., 2021). It is unsurprising really because the discourse about WEIRD psychology is a discourse of White privilege. Concerns about WEIRD-ness “reinforce rather than disrupt the practices it aims to critique” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 170). Here is dialogical repression in action, in which all the talk about inclusive open science, all the “many-labs” collaborations, and all the editorial handwringing are also ways of not talking about and undoing White privilege. The discourse about WEIRD psychology is a Mercator projection—an “epistemological violence” (Adams et al., 2020, p. 7)—that forms the world in its own image. The normalizing discourse and practice of psychological science is exclusive and pathologizing (N. Rose, 1989), prompting African psychologists (and other racialized others) to refuse the terms of selfhood and science it offers (e.g., Bulhan, 2015; Kessi et al., 2022; Martín-Baró, 1994; Ratele, 2019). The subaltern speaks (Spivak, 1988), but will anyone listen?

Stereotypes: Eliding the Reality of Racial Inequality

Another way in which psychology has sought to expel the demons of White supremacy is by studying stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction. Samelson (1978) described how, in a “dramatic reversal” between 1920 and 1940, the discipline transformed from race science to the psychology of prejudice (p. 265). Allport’s (1954) monumental Psychology of Prejudice gave impetus to the “leftward shift” among social psychologists and their efforts to “unite the country against a dangerous enemy proclaiming racial superiority” (Samelson, 1978, p. 265). By the 21st century, the discipline had swung almost entirely to the left, with a mere 6% of psychologists describing themselves as conservative (Inbar & Lammers, 2012).

Duarte et al.’s (2015) complaint about liberal bias in the field provides a clue about what is being elided. Research and writing focus too much, they argue, on the wrong thinking of racists and not enough on the reality of stereotypes. This selective attention is evident in the earliest work on stereotyping, which traced the source of White supremacy to “pictures inside the head” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 30). The whole of the science was positioned against irrational stereotyping (e.g., Macrae et al., 1996), devoted to tracking its sticky persistence in ever deeper layers of mental response (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), and to finding ways to identify and eradicate the last vestiges of White supremacy from WEIRD populations (Paluck & Green, 2009).

Swimming against the currents of liberalism, Jussim and colleagues rejected the view of stereotypes as biased representations, insisting that stereotypes persist because they hold a kernel of truth (Jussim, 2012; Jussim et al., 2015; McCauley et al., 1995). For example, they argued that stereotypes about Black men’s violence reflect actual group differences rather than prejudiced perceptions (Jussim, 2012). Although conceding that race stereotypes are not “perfectly accurate,” they argued that group representations are based on experience, necessary for rational judgment, and applied “flexibly and approximately rationally when judging individuals” (Jussim et al., 2015, p. 496).

This heresy targeted precisely the kind of unquestioned, conversationally silenced beliefs of liberalism that are concealed in the “assumptions of our time” (Billig & Marinho, 2019, p. 35). Pointing to the “unbearable accuracy of stereotypes” (Jussim et al., 2009) shifts attention from pictures inside the heads of racists to empirical facts about group differences, for example, that “African-Americans are [emphasis added] more likely to be . . . perpetrators . . . of crime” (Jussim et al., 2005, p. 90).

The ensuing debate between liberalism and conservatism in psychology itself became a conversational mechanism of silencing and White ignorance, directing attention away from systems of inequality within which stereotypes are formed and gain the attention of observers. If stereotypes are veridical in the sense that they reflect perceptions of actors from their vantage in a system of intergroup relations (Oakes et al., 1994), then we need to appreciate them as elements of the wider discursive, historical, and political context of intergroup relations (Dixon, 2017), namely, the postcolonial context of White supremacy, that is elided in the debate.

Consider, for example, the link between race and violent crime that Jussim et al. presented as a statistical fact. The “fact” is embodied in the unutterable racist stereotype of “the Black savage.” However, fact and stereotype are neither simple truths nor racist fictions. They are constructed realities (Durrheim, 2022). Fanon (1961/1963) told us how such savagery emerges from its conditions of existence, the colonial “native sector”:

a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people . . . a famished sector hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light . . . a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate. . . . The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession . . . (pp. 4–5)

Here is the wider discursive, historical, and political context—the system of intergroup relations—from which Dixon (2017) insisted that we begin to ask questions about the relations between stereotypes and reality. Calls to decolonize psychological science suggest that people of color remain locked out of this “European sector” and perhaps even cast their eyes toward privilege and nurture dreams of possession. Certainly, the idea that Black protesters are prone to violence continues to animate the White imagination (Reinka & Leach, 2017); and for good reason, because the oppressed and marginalized are structurally predisposed to disruption, including violence (Leach & Teixeira, 2021). Unfreedom remains unequally distributed by race; so too does the potential for resistance and violence, and the ghosts of stereotypes past continue to rise as specters in the White imagination and in the world.

The focus on stereotypes in the head and the more recent debate on the accuracy of these mental representations help us forget “how we got to the here and now or how the status quo is maintained” (Durrheim, 2022, p. 192). Progressive psychology sets itself against stereotypes in such a way that it conversationally silences or elides the persistent reality of racial inequality. It has turned attention away from ongoing racial exclusions to a psychology that is busy fighting stereotypes and ignorance of facts. As I now consider, it has also turned attention away from the ongoing racism that incites unrelenting resistance.

Eliding the Reality of Racism

The cultural peculiarity of psychology is perhaps nowhere more evident than in its definition of racism. Whereas blatant prejudice, dehumanization, and hate mark intergroup conflict in many parts of the world (Bilewicz, 2012; Murray et al., 2022), restrained and subtle “modern racism” has been the focus within psychology. The story goes that once upon a time Black Americans were subject to blatant, hostile “old-fashioned” racism, but “unprecedented change in race relations in the United States changed the nature of racial attitudes” (Dovidio et al., 2017, p. 267). After victories of the Civil Rights Movement new measures of subtle, symbolic, ambivalent, and aversive racism were developed to capture racial hostilities overlaid with liberal values, egalitarian beliefs, and sympathetic attitudes. This racism incorporated color-blind principles of equality (McConahay, 1982), conservative and progressive values (Kinder, 1986; Sniderman & Tetlock, 1986), nonracial language (Kinder & Sears, 1981), implicit associations (Gaertner & McLaughlin, 1983), and nonverbal behaviors (e.g., blinking; Dovidio et al., 1997).

The Black Lives Matter movement reminds us that the “unprecedented change” underpinning the narrative of modern racism may not have been that far-reaching. George Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” condensed the experience of oppressed people everywhere. Racism in the United States is evident in the very health and well being of Black Americans (Bailey et al., 2017) including children (Shonkoff et al., 2021). Yet scientists, policymakers, elected officials, and other societal elites have been “reluctant to identify racism as a root cause of racial health inequities” (Bailey et al., 2017, p. 1453). The same is true in psychological research that underestimates the extent to which “formal expressions of racial inferiority remain active and consequential” (Leach, 2005, p. 438).

How is it possible to miss the glaring reality of racism? Most explanations account for White ignorance in terms of group differences in perception. White people simply do not see the reality and effects of racism because of (a) the way they define what counts as racism (Carter & Murphy, 2015), (b) being oblivious to the historical facts of racism (Nelson et al., 2013; Salter & Adams, 2016), and (c) their motivation to view their own privilege as deserved (Phillips & Lowery, 2020). Conversational silencing explains how White ignorance materializes in narrative and practice: Instead of listening to the voices of the targets of racism, psychologists went off in search of “covert hostilities” deep in individual minds (Durrheim & Dixon, 2004). Researchers busied themselves with modern racism, working with White survey respondents from their same WEIRD social class who had also become reluctant to acknowledge crude racism and hate (Schuman et al., 1997). In this “White centering” (Garay & Remedios, 2021; Remedios, 2022), the narrative of unprecedented societal change and the research it precipitated failed to appreciate the continuities in the psychology, practice, and experience of racism.

Conversational silencing involves joint action—collusion—to collaboratively produce a silence that preserves White privilege. White researchers and subjects jointly cultivate targeted ignorance, circumnavigating the brutality of racism experienced by Black compatriots, by directing attention to a constructed problem of “modern racism.” Steering clear of toxic racism and White privilege in conversation—and in measurement—helps to coordinate interaction in the White world and to preserve inherited inequities. This is demonstrated in “stereotyping by implication,” in which polite references, including to positive group traits, may nonetheless communicate negative cultural stereotypes (Durrheim, 2012, 2022; Whitehead, 2020). Kervyn et al. (2012) demonstrated that mentioning a positive gender stereotype about a female candidate (Pat’s friendliness) can silently communicate omitted negative stereotypes (Pat’s incompetence), leading to discrimination against Pat (Kervyn et al., 2012). By conversational silencing, talk about topic B (Pat’s friendliness), not A (toxic gender stereotypes), can communicate the idea of Pat’s incompetence, informing the agreement to exclude her. Likewise, the focus on modern racism and non-WEIRD inclusion in psychological science not only elide the reality of racism and imperialism but also help to preserve them by centering White concerns and established privilege. Conversational silencing thus preserves the thing it silences, including the shared, now ghostlike colonial stereotypes that become animated as a haunting backcloth to social action, informing policy and decision-making and relaying White supremacy into present realities (Durrheim, 2022).

Demobilizing Resistance by Prejudice Reduction

Prejudice-reduction research has enjoyed “rapid growth” and reached “optimistic conclusions” in the last decade (Paluck et al., 2021, p. 533). The rosy picture is tainted somewhat by questions about the reliability of the results (p-hacking, power, etc.), the strength and durability of its effects, and publication bias (FitzGerald et al., 2019; Forscher et al., 2019; Paluck et al., 2021; Paluck & Green, 2009; Vuletich & Payne, 2019). However, this work also functions as conversational silencing to preserve racial inequality by undermining resistance and the struggle against systemic White supremacy.

Individualism

A well-established and oft-repeated criticism (Boykin et al., 2020; A. M. Rose, 1956) is that the focus on stereotypes, cognition, emotions, and the personality of prejudiced individuals diverts attention away from structures of privilege, exclusion, and violence (see, e.g., Adams et al., 2008; Dixon & Levine, 2012). Henriques (1984) called this the “rotten apple theory” of racism (p. 60), obsessed with rooting out individual racists without upsetting the “whole apple cart” (p. 62), and shifting the responsibility for ongoing inequality or experiences of racism onto the failures of Black people.

If anything, recent work has further individualized prejudice. Paluck et al. (2021) found that the modal intervention of the past decade used “mentalizing as a salve” in prejudice reduction (p. 535). Psychologists, for example, pursue prejudice reduction by asking participants to imagine a friendly interaction with out-group members (Crisp & Turner, 2009), exposing them to counterstereotypes, facilitating recategorization, inducing positive emotion, or promoting prejudice-repression skills (see also FitzGerald et al., 2019; Forscher et al., 2019). These quick and cheap “light touch interventions” (Paluck et al., 2021) have proliferated in the scientific literature and diversity training, but they are hardly equipped to do the heavy lifting of structural change. They pay scant attention to reducing real-world prejudice, let alone in structurally unequal and conflicted contexts.

Naturalizing

Cognitive theories of prejudice emerged in reaction to what Tajfel (1981) called the “blood and guts approach” (p. 128), which attributed prejudice to deep-seated irrational and aggressive drives (see Billig, 2002). Universal processes of perception and cognition—categorization, assimilation, and coherence—replaced the “hot” motives of biology and personality (cf. Bruner, 1957; Tajfel, 1969). This eliminated some negative connotations of prejudice, which was now viewed as an inevitable outcome of normal thinking and perception rather than a particular kind of (hateful, pathological, racist) thinking (Billig, 1985, 2002).

Prejudice was further naturalized as “bias” by research on implicit prejudice and stereotyping (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Greenwald & Krieger, 2006). Its origins now lay outside individual awareness and control, in automatically activated implicit associations; and prejudice reduction interventions could claim success even when changes in implicit attitudes did not translate into changes in explicit attitudes or behavior (Forscher et al., 2019). Ordinary people also attribute less responsibility, blame, and negativity to acts motivated by unconscious prejudice (Daumeyer et al., 2019; Yen et al., 2018). Such naturalization sanitizes the concept of prejudice, “normalizes bias, absolves individuals from blame, and shifts attention away from the prevalence of intentional bias” (Grzanka & Cole, 2021, p. 19). Critically, implicit bias-reduction interventions are not designed to produce structural changes or promote diversity and equality in organizations (Onyeador et al., 2021). No wonder such interventions are “at the top of the list” of organizations seeking to address ongoing legacies of White privilege while preserving the status quo (Green & Hagiwara, 2020). If universal processes outside individual awareness and control are responsible for treating others unfairly or worse, then what need is there for structural change and policy interventions (cf. Reynolds et al., 2012)?

Ironic politics

Ironic politics accomplishes the opposite of what it sets out to do. Taboos, for example, promote transgression or at least present temptations to transgress (Billig, 1999). Several converging avenues of investigation suggest that the liberal tradition of prejudice-reduction research may have such ironic effects, producing illiberal outcomes. Saguy et al.’s (2009) “irony of harmony” experiment demonstrated how unequal but harmonious interaction promotes a sense of fairness among disadvantaged group members even as they are treated unfairly by the advantaged group. Research on intergroup helping, allyship, and contact supports the idea that friendly relations, intergroup helping, and action on behalf of disadvantaged others can promote intergroup harmony while preserving structural inequalities (Dixon et al., 2012; Radke et al., 2020). The “sedative” and “paradoxical” effects of contact are instructive (Cakal et al., 2011; Dixon et al., 2010). While reducing intergroup prejudice, positive intergroup contact can also reduce perceptions of discrimination and collective-action potential among disadvantaged groups (Hässler et al., 2021).

The research reviewed in this section shows that prejudice reduction can be system justifying. Mary Jackman recognized this a long time ago, arguing that the superficially democratic intergroup attitudes of “well-educated members of . . . dominant groups” are ideologies that “legitimize and protect their interests within the status quo” (Jackman, 1994; Jackman & Muha, 1984, p. 752). As members of dominant groups in society, psychologists can both be subjects and instruments of these legitimizing ideologies. The focus on prejudice reduction can lead us “into the trap” of thinking that “because interpersonal interactions across groups are convivial and warm that intergroup inequalities are either gone or are acceptable” (Dupree & Kraus, 2022; Wright & Baray, 2012, p. 242).

Together, these three features of liberal antiprejudice scholarship—individualism, naturalization, and ironic politics—perform conversational silencing that relays White ignorance into the present. They draw attention to processes at the intraindividual level of analysis (Doise, 1986) and reduce racism to problems inside the heads of responders. With attention focused here, it resists blaming racists, prescribing mentalizing salve and programs to rehabilitate prejudiced individuals at little personal or institutional cost. Structural change becomes ever more elusive as organizations employ diversity specialists to promote light-touch interventions and intergroup harmony, being seen to act against racism but conveniently promoting the belief that inequalities are inevitable and acceptable.

Prejudice-reduction research and writing also promotes a second silence. It elides the role of elites in mobilizing and demobilizing prejudice by suggesting that prejudice arises “unaided, from the inner working of our minds” (Reicher, 2007, p. 285). Denigrating an out-group as alien and dangerous can awaken a sense of collective identity and agency, allowing elites to portray themselves—better than their rivals—as protectors and defenders of the good and the group. Leaders leverage influence by mobilizing prejudices against out-group threats and enemies, be they Jews of Nazi Germany (Reicher, 2007) or terrorists, national enemies, antivaxxers, and immigrants of today (Durrheim et al., 2016, 2018). The mobilization of prejudice need not invoke irrational hatred toward a category of people. George W. Bush, for example, carefully distinguished Muslim “friends” and “enemies” (Alsultany, 2012) to mobilize the U.S. population for the war on terror.

Just as leaders can escalate prejudice, they can also deescalate prejudice toward targets and mobilize followers against hate. Allport (1954) recognized the value of institutional support in implementing successful prejudice-reduction interventions. Deescalating prejudice can fulfill similar personal and political functions as mobilizing prejudice. It helps leaders awaken a collective identity of tolerance and nonracism, portraying themselves—better than their rivals—as protectors of the good and defenders of that identity. In the ironic politics of prejudice reduction, the psychological tools of stereotypes, racism, and prejudice are used to deescalate prejudice, thereby demobilizing resistance to preserve stable inequalities.

Despite the central role that leaders and social elites play in mobilizing and demobilizing racism, this has hardly ever been a concern for psychologists. Allport devoted a chapter to the topic of demagogy, but Reicher (2007) observed that “neither leadership nor demagogy is even mentioned” in the collected retrospective On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport (Dovidio et al., 2005). The role of elites has been elided in the elite project to develop a psychology of stereotypes, racism, and prejudice reduction. Attention has focused almost entirely on the racism of WEIRD samples, guided by the assumption that racism is harbored as prejudice deep in the minds of individuals. The literature on modern racism emerges, then, not because of “unprecedented change in race relations” in the United States as Dovidio et al. (2017, p. 267) claimed but rather as part of an elite project to demobilize resistance to White supremacy, focusing attention on lay publics instead of elites and on covert mental prejudices rather than enduring racism in the world.

Conclusion

This article is part of a rising groundswell calling for the decolonization of psychology. Critics argue that the concepts and practices of the discipline perpetuate historical traditions of White centering and epistemic exclusion that are objects of White ignorance and thus resistant to change (Mills, 2007, 2015). I have used Billig’s (1999) account of conversational silencing to show how White ignorance has been established in psychological science. We become blind to the discrediting persistence of White privilege because it is dialogically repressed, which occurs when we collectively turn attention to praiseworthy matters—good science and progressive psychology (cf. Grzanka & Cole, 2021)—and away from persistent racism. Conversational silencing covers its own tracks when it becomes institutionalized in routines and habits of practice such as the ethical and methodological imperatives of the research traditions that have been the object of this investigation: non-WEIRD inclusion and stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction.

This article has sought to show how, by hosting a “conversation” about progressive scholarship, psychological science avoids alternative avenues for thinking and research and that this choice strategically preserves White privilege. It does this by diverting attention away from and thereby defending (a) the privilege of the privileged, (b) realities of inequality and racism, and (c) demobilizing resistance. To this end, each section of the article reviewed current work with a view to showing some of the discourse, debate, and ideation around progressive psychological science, as well as articulating its blind spots.

This builds a case for the central thesis of this article, namely, that the ignorance and blindness that defines institutions of White privilege are the strategic accomplishments of collaborative conversational silencing. The framing and practice of including the non-WEIRD is an exercise in White privilege that maintains traditional colonial relations of power rather than undoing them. So, too, the framing and practice of stereotype, racism, and prejudice reduction are part of a discourse of White privilege, centering Whiteness, eliding existing inequality and racism experienced by its targets, and working to demobilize resistance.

Progressive work provides such an effective bulwark against decolonization precisely because it appears to offer solutions to the problem of racism. It advocates tolerance, equality, and change, undoing WEIRD imperialism; at the same time it privileges the privileged, recruiting non-WEIRD people into the established enterprise, eliding the persistent reality of racism and racial inequality, and undermining resistance and the project of institutional change. It is easy to misrecognize the ideological functions of progressive psychology precisely because it progressively seeks to challenge inherited privilege, bias, and exclusion.

This analysis has attempted to highlight what White ignorance in psychology is ignorant of. By disavowing its colonial inheritance of White supremacy and condensing concerns around “the dangerous enemy” of the inveterate racist (Samelson, 1978), it misrecognizes both the reality of racism and the agents of change. The racism that is the target of decolonial critique in psychology and the Black Lives Matter movement is not modern racism, buried deep in individual minds, but racism in structures and practices that materially affect the lives and opportunities of people of color, including in the discipline and practice of psychological science. Additionally, the agents of change are not White psychologists, equipped with clear thinking, good intentions, non-WEIRD research ethics, and the instruments of science, truth, and reason. Fanon reminded us that change comes from the “native sector,” from people of color who are systematically and institutionally excluded from the whitestream and who nurture dreams of possession. In contrast, the institutional elites work to shore up privilege, trading in stereotypes of deracialized WEIRD and compliant non-WEIRD subjects, casting race stereotypes as fictions, and demobilizing resistance via “prejudice reduction.”

Conversational silencing helps to defend the status quo, but it suffers from a critical flaw. It produces threat because it preserves the very thing it silences, namely, White privilege, inequality, and racism (see Durrheim & Murray, 2019, 2021; Frosh, 2013, 2019). As a result, the specter of racism perpetually threatens to return. For silencing to be effective, therefore, it must compellingly draw attention to and promote what Billig (1999) called praiseworthy matters of replacement. The urgent calls for decolonization inside the academy, violent resistance outside, and the erosion of authority of elite theories of racism signal where we are in the historical drama. The “master’s tools” have outworn their use (Lorde, 1984), and threatening specters of savages and racists are at the door of tranquil White privilege.

Several incisive recommendations have been made about how psychology can challenge White supremacy and promote epistemic inclusion in the way that science is conducted, reported, reviewed, and disseminated (Adams et al., 2008; Buchanan et al., 2021). This article reminds us that change must extend to the very content and methods of psychological science. We have seen how innovative methods (non-WEIRD sampling), theories (about stereotypes and racism), and progressive interventions (prejudice reduction) can all be instruments of White ignorance.

Ultimately, it is a question of whose psychology is it. Epistemic inclusion (Settles et al., 2020) will not result from benevolence. If psychology is going to become a liberation psychology that includes excluded peoples and realities (Martín-Baró, 1994; Ratele, 2019) it will have to let go of many things that were once thought to be “good psychology” and start rebuilding, this time together, with equal partners.

The subheadings in this article help us to think about how we might promote decolonization in practice. They provide searching questions about the way that science is conducted, reported, reviewed, and disseminated as well as the theories, methods, and interventions it promotes. The questions to ask of any proposed change, intervention, or new avenue of progressive psychology are (a) whether it privileges the privileged, (b) whether it elides the reality of racial privilege and racism, and (c) whether it demobilizes resistance.

Transparency

Action Editor: Tim Pleskac

Editor: Interim Editorial Panel