Heather Wax: Racism Physically Hurts the Racist

Well, dang, this is interesting. My guess is that any form of hate/fear produces the same physiological effect in the body, including homophobia and sexism, along with racism and ethnocentrism.

Heather Wax: Science + Religion Today

Racism Physically Hurts the Racist

Could this finding have health implications for faith communities?

Monday, August 9, 2010

Psychologist Elizabeth Page-Gould observes:

In the urban metropolises of the United States and Canada, it is almost impossible to avoid talking to someone of another race. So imagine the toll it would take if every time you did, your body responded with an acute stress reaction: You experience a surge in stress hormones, and your heart pumps harder while your blood vessels constrict, inhibiting the flow of blood to your limbs and brain.

These types of bodily reactions are helpful in truly dangerous situations, but a number of recent studies have found that racially prejudiced people experience them even during benign social interactions with people of different races. This means that just navigating the supermarket, coffee shop, or modern workplace can be stressful for them. And if the racist person then has to go through this every single day, the repeated stress can become a chronic problem, which places them at heightened risk for disease in later life.

Here's the thing: Past research in the United States has noted a connection between religiosity and racism. Earlier this year, as you might remember, a team of researchers led by Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, looked at 55 studies from the past 45 years involving more than 20,000 people (mostly Christians) and found consistent evidence that highly devout religious communities show more prejudice against people of other races. At the other end of the spectrum, there is significantly less racism among people who don’t have strong religious beliefs. “Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant,” they found.

And in a later study, Wade Rowatt and his colleagues at Baylor University found that priming white Protestants and Catholics with Christian words like "gospel" and "heaven" caused "a negative shift in existing racial attitudes and that the direction of the shift represents a slight but significant increase in racial prejudice." Granted, there are some problems with the study, as Tom Rees points out on his blog:

Rowatt’s group of students were rather unusual. They were all undergraduates at a Southern Christian university, Baylor University in Texas. There is a powerful tradition of segregation in this region. Perhaps the religious prompts were triggering feelings of social conservatism?

That would fit with the results of a recent analysis of studies reaching back over several decades and looking at the correlation between different aspects of religion and racism (all of which were done mostly or entirely in the United States). This analysis, by Deborah Hall at Duke University and her colleagues, found no correlation between racism and the liberal, “questioning” form of religion. The aspect of religion that was linked strongly to racism was so-called “extrinsic” religiosity—a measure of whether the individual’s religious attitudes are driven by a desire for social conformity and social status.

An even more fascinating finding was that the strength of this correlation is declining. As racist attitudes gradually become socially unacceptable, so the link between “extrinsic” religiosity and racism is ebbing away.

That tracks with Wood's meta-analysis, which found that:

For people who are religious for conservative reasons [respect for tradition, social conventionalism], they have become less racist in recent years as racism has become less socially acceptable. But even they are still significantly racist, just that the effect has reduced in magnitude.

Tags: hate, fear, racism, homophobia, body, Health, Big Questions Online, Racism Physically Hurts the Racist, Heather Wax, Elizabeth Page-Gould, stress, hormones