The American Girl: Playing with the Wrong Dollie?

This essay explores the American Girl Just Like You doll through a variety of feminist lenses. It was inspired by my experiences chaperoning my friend Grace (aged eleven) to the American Girl Store in New York City, and returning to the store to shop for my own doll. I returned to the store because I was not sure why I was so extremely disturbed by this doll. The doll is not emaciated, not overtly sexy, and marketed along with outfits that supposedly send girls the message that they can achieve their goals. She comes in a variety of skin, eye, and hair colors, and the line is therefore marketed as racially and ethnically sensitive. I argue that although the Just Like You line appears to be empowering and racially sensitive on a superficial level, an in‐depth feminist analysis indicates that it is not. In fact, the Just Like You line is highly problematic from a feminist perspective.     

Saving Face: Identifying Voter Responses to Black Candidates and Female Candidates

Much of what we know about the responses of voters to Black candidates and female candidates comes from experimental research. Yet the accuracy of experimental data can be threatened by the possibility that social desirability pressures contaminate self‐reporting. We address this threat in a project that considers psychological approaches to reducing social desirability pressures. Offering participants the opportunity to explain their decisions about sensitive subjects, such as voting for a Black or female candidate, can lessen social desirability pressures. We analyze this approach across three commonly used samples: undergraduate, adult convenience, and adult national. Our results suggest that existing experimental research overestimates voter support for Black and female candidates, but these issues can be mitigated with the simple innovation presented here.     

Faking revisited: Exerting strategic control over performance on the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure

Across four studies, we demonstrate that effects obtained from the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure, like those obtained from other indirect procedures, are not impervious to strategic manipulation. In experiment 1, we found that merely informing participants to “fake” their performance without providing a concrete strategy to do so did not eliminate, reverse, or in any way alter the obtained outcomes. However, when those same instructions orientated attention toward the core parameters of the task, participants spontaneously derived a strategy that allowed them to eliminate their effects (experiment 2). When the participants were provided with a viable response strategy, they successfully reversed the direction of their overall Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure effect (experiment 3). By refining the nature of those instructions, we managed to target and alter individual trial‐type effects in isolation with some success (experiment 4).     

Investigating the roots of the favourite–longshot bias: an analysis of decision making by supply‐ and demand‐side agents in parallel betting markets

This paper offers new insights into the behavioural origins of the ‘favourite–longshot’ bias — an established feature of betting markets, whereby longshots win less often than the subjective probabilities imply and favourites more often. A number of alternative explanations has been offered for this phenomenon but the main debate focuses on whether it is caused by the behaviour of those supplying betting markets (bookmakers) or of the demand‐side agents in these markets (bettors) . This study analyses a new data source which offers detailed information for a large sample of recent UK horseraces on decision‐making behaviour within the parimutuel and the parallel bookmaker‐based betting markets. The results offer strong evidence for the existence of the ‘favourite–longshot’ bias in bookmaker‐based markets, with a corresponding absence of such an effect in the parimutuel case. These results offer support for the view that the origins of the ‘favourite–longshot’ bias lie principally in the decisions of bookmakers rather than in the decisions of bettors. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Conservation of Races”

Nothing was more important for W. E. B. Du Bois than to promote the upward mobility of African Americans. This essay revisits his “Conversation of Races” to demonstrate its general philosophical importance. Ultimately, Du Bois’s three motivations for giving the address reveal his view of the nature of philosophical inquiry: to critique earlier phenotypic conceptions of race, to show the essentiality of history, and to promote a reflexive practice. Commentators have been unduly invested in the hermeneutic readings and as a result have misunderstood its philosophical dimensions. Du Bois did more than introduce the concept of race into the purview of philosophy, he provided a method for philosophical inquiry into a concept that is notoriously difficult to approach with precision. The goal here is to show why no introduction to philosophy and no discussion about the nature of philosophical inquiry is complete without consideration of “Conservation.” Certainly, it is a text about race, but it is also an important philosophical text in general.     

With respect to prejudice

The basic assumptions of psychotherapy must necessarily reflect the cultural orientations and dilemmas of the western societies, and historical periods, in which these originated. This paper considers how the racialised biases of that period, namely, the era of European domination built upon the conquest, colonisation and enslavement of non‐European peoples, may linger in psychotherapeutic training and practice today. This not only limits the potential usefulness of the discipline in the multicultural populations of the west, but also risks it being read as covert neo‐colonialism in the ‘non‐west’. In a world that ever more clearly demonstrates the human costs of prejudice psychotherapists in general, and Jungians in particular, might wish to consider how, wittingly or otherwise, they maintain prejudiced ways of thinking. This paper examines material from the author's professional and personal experience, using literature that lies outside the specifically Jungian canon, to expose how such bias might work.     

CHRISTIAN THOUGHT,RACE, BLUMENBACH,AND HISTORICIZING

Terence Keel's Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science attributes the origins of “racial science” to Christian intellectual history. This is a bold and original argument, but it is not without deep difficulties, particularly in the early sections of the book. The concept of “race” is not sufficiently historicized and the treatment of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach needs to be more firmly grounded in the world of eighteenth‐century natural history.     

“WHITE CRISIS” AND/AS “EXISTENTIAL RISK,” OR THE ENTANGLED APOCALYPTICISM OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

In this article, I present a critique of Robert Geraci's Apocalyptic artificial intelligence (AI) discourse, drawing attention to certain shortcomings which become apparent when the analytical lens shifts from religion to the race–religion nexus. Building on earlier work, I explore the phenomenon of existential risk associated with Apocalyptic AI in relation to “White Crisis,” a modern racial phenomenon with premodern religious origins. Adopting a critical race theoretical and decolonial perspective, I argue that all three phenomena are entangled and they should be understood as a strategy, albeit perhaps merely rhetorical, for maintaining white hegemony under nonwhite contestation. I further suggest that this claim can be shown to be supported by the disclosure of continuity through change in the long‐durée entanglement of race and religion associated with the establishment, maintenance, expansion, and refinement of the modern/colonial world system if and when such phenomena are understood as iterative shifts in a programmatic trajectory of domination which might usefully be framed as “algorithmic racism.”     

“Know Whence you Came”: Psychoanalytic Theory,Queer Theory,and the Mixed-Race Experience

Deeply rooted U.S. cultural practices and legislative processes have facilitated the dissociation, erasure, and evasion of engagement with mixed-race subjectivities. As multiracial clinicians, we attempt to reexamine the discourse around race in psychoanalytic literature, questioning the process by which dominant monoracial norms have been constructed, reproduced, and codified as normal and acceptable. We propose that the absence of multiracial subjectivities from the psychoanalytic literature reflects a broader social discomfort with and cultural dissociation of the mixed-race experience. We further suggest that it is necessary to engage both analytically and queer-ly with the subjective experience of racial multiplicity—positing that multiracial subjectivities might best be understood as subjectivities that are “racially queer.”     

Slavery in the White Psyche

This article was born out of the hypothesis that slavery—as historical reality, signifier, and symbol—has deep psychological implications for contemporary white Americans. Using data collected in an exploratory, qualitative study, my participants’ responses serve to illuminate the psychic structure of whiteness, which functions as a distortion that gets passed down intergenerationally (and horizontally) through a white collective unconscious. Housed in individual psyches, I suggest that this distorted structure of self actively resists and prevents white Americans (as a collective) from making contact with the racialized realities, both past and present, that would potentially lead to opportunities for choice, reparation, and transformation.