In blind pursuit of racial equality?
Despite receiving little empirical assessment, the color-blind approach to managing diversity has become a leading institutional strategy for promoting racial equality, across domains and scales of practice. We gauged the utility of color blindness as a means to eliminating future racial inequity--its central objective--by assessing its impact on a sample of elementary-school students. Results demonstrated that students exposed to a color-blind mind-set, as opposed to a value-diversity mind-set, were actually less likely both to detect overt instances of racial discrimination and to describe such events in a manner that would prompt intervention by certified teachers. Institutional messages of color blindness may therefore artificially depress formal reporting of racial injustice. Color-blind messages may thus appear to function effectively on the surface even as they allow explicit forms of bias to persist.
Apfelbaum
Evan P
EP
Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. e-apfelbaum@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Pauker
Kristin
K
Sommers
Samuel R
SR
Ambady
Nalini
N
D002648:Child; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011287:Prejudice; D012933:Social Identification; D012935:Social Justice; D012945:Social Values; D012951:Socialization; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors