Member-only story
The White Bear Problem Explains Why Anti-racism Training Doesn’t Work
Studies of anti-racism training find it doesn’t work or makes racism worse. The reason seems counter-intuitive to anti-racists: Teaching people to think more about race can make them more racist. But the reason is clear if you remember this old observation:
“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 1863
Just as telling people not to think of white bears makes them think of white bears, telling people that race is not real makes them suspect race is real. They begin to see race in every interaction. In the last decade, racially-obsessed people have come to think race is so important that they capitalize the racial terms of white, brown, and black as though race is no different than nationality and religion.
Daniel Wegner gave the White Bear Problem its formal name, Ironic Process Theory:
The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987 (Vol. 53, №1) initiated an entirely new field of study on thought suppression. Over the next decade, Wegner developed his theory of “ironic processes” to explain why it’s so hard to tamp down unwanted thoughts. He found evidence that…
