The Science of Racism with Dr Keon West
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode we're speaking to Professor Keon West, a social psychologist at the University of London who specialises in identity, prejudice and representation. He sat down with author and educator Geoffrey Boacce to discuss his new book, The Science of Racism,

a thoroughly researched and illuminating book which aims to shed light on what we know about racism, exactly how we know it, and what we can do about it. They cut through the divisive anecdotes and rhetoric which define modern conversations about race, and drew on scientific findings on everything from unconscious bias to DEI initiatives. Let's join Jeffrey now with more.

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Boakye and it's my absolute pleasure to be gearing up for an interview, an exclusive Intelligence Squared interview with, there's a long list here, okay, if you read the whole CV, the professor, presenter, consultant with a doctorate from Oxford University and the author of over 80 journals, we'll get into some of that, and this book,

The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know But Probably Don't Yet, Professor Kion West. Now, this is an absolute privilege to be in the same space with you, Kion. First of all, hello and how are you? I'm fine, thanks very much. That was a very kind introduction, so I appreciate that very much. Did you enjoy the intro, yeah?

I did. I really did enjoy it. Thank you. No worries. No worries. I mean, first things first, just to say on a personal note, as someone that talks a lot about anti-racism, that thinks and writes about these issues, thank you so much for writing this book.

I mean, the science of racism. If anyone watching this interview has not yet read the book, the first thing you must do is go and find it and read it because it's a remarkable work. And I can see you're smiling already. How are you feeling having got to the end point? We'll go into the detail, but how are you feeling now that this book is out there? I'm feeling very... I'm not a religious person. I used to be, but I'm feeling very... It's in God's hands now, actually. I think...

it's a lot of work writing a book like that. It's a lot of effort. And then you put it out there. And now that it's out, all I can do is hope that it resonates with people, that people enjoy it, that they learn something from it, that it means something to them. And actually what I hope, which many people subtly don't realize or ignore, is that it makes a difference, is that it changes how people treat race and racism and what they do about it.

Yeah, I definitely got that from the minute I picked it up. This is a book that is trying to make change happen. And we're obviously going to talk about the content of the book and your aims. I want to start there, though. For me, it was full of insights, full of clarity, illuminating. Give us the elevator pitch. First of all, who is this book for and what made you want to write it? The Science of Racism.

This book is for everyone. So it means a lot to me when you say that you find this book illuminating because I'm going to take a guess, you identify as a black man. I mean, you look like a black man, so that works for me. And I think I've read a lot of books about racism and sometimes these books are affirming, but not necessarily illuminating. These are things that I recognize that I know about experiences that we've shared

And so maybe these are things that would surprise white people, but not necessarily things that would surprise us. And I wanted to write a book that wasn't just based on my experiences or anyone's experience. It's not a collection of stories. So if you read through the book, you find very little about me, actually. You can read it and not know very much about what my politics are or what my beliefs are or what anything I think emotionally. It's about the science. It's not about me. It's about the science. And I wrote it because I found that

In general, the conversation we're having about racism is stunted. It's aggressively stunted. It is a conversation that's based on assumptions, emotions, feelings, politics, and even people who are intelligent, who are kind, who are well-meaning, who have experienced it themselves, there are things that they get wrong. And this is just, I mean, we say even those people, there are a lot of people who aren't kind and who aren't well-educated on the subject and who aren't experiencing it, and they get lots wrong.

And I think we haven't done ourselves enough of a service in explaining what we know and how we know it. I think we expect people to enter this conversation from a purely emotional place or from a trust me place or from an I'm an authority place. And I wanted none of that. I wanted very simply trust.

This is the truth. This is how we know the truth. And this is how you can know it too. It's not a divisive book. It's a book that I hope can pull people together as they can recognize, oh, this is a reality we're living with. Now, what can we do about it?

Yeah, yeah. And it's a book that's actually full of evidence, like evidence based research studies. You live in academia, right? Come on, Professor Keyon West, right? We said that again, over 80 journals and counting. So you live in this academic space.

Does science, is that something that you find ballast in? Was a scientific approach? Did you find that helpful in this work? Or was it something that you had to manage?

I think it's incredibly helpful. And thank you for bringing that up because I think a lot of people talk about the science of racism and they see the racism. They really focus on that, but that's only half of it. It's the science of racism. And, you know, the first two chapters of the book or something like that, I can't remember exactly how I learned it. I think it's the first two or three chapters. Some people have said, oh, you know, you haven't really got to the racism yet in the first two chapters. I'm like, but I first want to explain to you how the science works. And I want you to be

perfectly clear on it, completely convinced so that when I launch into what the science finds, you understand the methodology, you see how rock solid it is and you see how much you can get out of it. And one of the lessons I hope people take from the book

is that you don't have to guess about these things. If you have a question about something that's affecting your life, you can design an experiment that tests that question. Most of the questions we think are unanswerable are completely answerable, if you know what you're doing. And I hope the book teaches people to do that. Definitely. For me personally, the book really started to...

come into its own when you went for this unconscious bias. The narrative, you already reacted, but it's a term that many people in mainstream discourse or social media will be very familiar with now over the past five years, unconscious bias.

But your work, I'm not gonna put words into your mouth, but I'm wondering, is it time to retire unconscious bias as a concept? Because you go into a far more useful space. Why do you think first of all, that unconscious bias as an idea is so popular, that people are so happy to have this thing unconsciously in their own head?

Yes. Should we retire the concept? Some people think so. So I was talking the other day to Professor Lassana Harris at UCL, and he doesn't like the term. He thinks we should get rid of it completely.

and he's a very accomplished psychologist. I'm slightly more hesitant. I don't think we should get rid of it completely, but I do think it has its problems. I do think one of the many problems is that people are going around saying things like, "All bias nowadays is unconscious." Utter rubbish, utterly scientifically rubbish, not true. Most bias is unconscious. Where do you see that? What possible evidence could you have for that? They don't have it.

They assume that when people do things that are biased, that these things are done unconsciously. Again, what's the evidence? And when you go through the evidence, you don't find it. That's not what you find. So should we retire the term? Maybe. I'd like to point out that scientifically it was never the term to begin with, that it started with a different term, which is implicit bias, which is just bias that's hard to detect. Totally different term.

Should we retire it? Maybe, maybe not. But what we have to do is to be honest about the fact that unconscious bias can't be in the limelight all the time. That a lot of bias is extremely conscious, that people know exactly what they're doing, that there's scientific evidence that sometimes people know they're being racist and they just lie about it.

There's scientific evidence that they know they're discriminating by race, but they're making up excuses for it. And so when we call everything unconscious, that doesn't help. And in fact, the science shows that when we do that, it makes people more racist. It makes them less concerned about racism, less likely to deal with it, less likely to confront it,

it's a burden it's a serious problem those were some of the parts of the book where i i just couldn't stop reading because this idea that there's denial and deception happening and it's something that i always felt i knew and i kind of personally anecdotally felt

felt evidence of this, but to see the research laid bare for you to be guiding the reader through that was really, really powerful. I mean, let's be blunt about this, right? We're living in a majority white country. A lot of the people that pick up the science of racism will be white readers. How do you navigate or deal with white comfort and white discomfort when we're talking about racism and white supremacy?

Well, I want to start off by saying, you know, I've got nothing against white people. A lot of my best friends are white. Standard reverse racism speak. No, but in honesty, a lot of my best friends are white. I do mean that. And a lot of them are very well-meaning. Some of them are extremely well-versed on racism. Some are less so. And I want people to pick it up and to read it and to see the things that they wouldn't necessarily see. And I have to be honest,

I have noticed a difference in the responses I get from black people versus white people or from any ethnic minority versus white people. In general, from anyone who's not white, I get what you said, actually. Thank you for writing this down. I've kind of always known, but now I have proof of it.

people feel like they've been gaslit, to use a term that the young people like to use, that people have been gaslighting them. I knew this was happening. I knew they'd take the CB and throw it away. I knew the name made a difference. I knew this, but I didn't have proof. And now I have proof. White people are much more likely to get shock. They say, this is incredibly shocking. It's depressing. It's incredibly surprising. I had no idea. Whereas I think other people had some idea.

But they just didn't know how to put it into words or put the proof to it. And so there was a bit of a split in how people respond.

there was a phrase that came up which, I'm not sure if you've coined this term, but 'conflicted racism'. It's when you were talking about aversive racism and this idea that the uncomfortable truth is that most people do racist things at least some of the time and then there's a bit of a conflict in there that leads to sometimes this thing called colour blindness. I should explain it and I should say I think the whole book's exciting but there's some parts that I personally really, really like talking about. So aversive racism

is, I don't like the name, it's an old name, decades old, but the idea is that people are averse to ethnic minorities, white people, they're averse to ethnic minorities, but they're also averse to the idea that they are biased. So they call it aversive racism because these two aversions colliding. I don't like the name. So I would call it something like conflicted racism. But the idea is that you are super racist, but you also really hate the idea that you could be super racist. That makes you seriously uncomfortable.

And so what aversive racism proposes is that so long as you can find no excuse for your behavior, you are going to be as egalitarian as possible. But the second you get an excuse, the racism comes out. And one could say, well, that's incredibly complicated. That's impossible. It's convoluted. How do you test for it? It's actually really easy. You just get, let's say, perfectly identical CVs. I often start with that example in the studies, but...

You can do it for relationships. You can do it for anything. But you get people who are perfectly identical, except that one is white and one's black. So you just change the name at the top of the CV to make one of them sound like they're white and one of them sound like they're black. If you send in CVs that are 100% stellar, perfect, no flaws, nothing wrong with them, people will treat the white person and the black person the same.

If you send in CVs that are absolutely, clearly, unambiguously horrible, rubbish, could not possibly be hired, they'll treat the white person and the black person the same. But if you send people, if you send in CVs that are in the middle, then people assume the best of the white person, offer that person all the jobs, assume the worst of the black person, don't offer them any jobs.

And that's where the aversive racism comes in. So long as you can't possibly excuse it, you're egalitarian. The second there's ambiguity, the second you look at evidence and it's not entirely clear. I think I say somewhere in the book that being innocent until proven guilty is a privilege of whiteness. Other people do not get that. Other people are just guilty until proven guilty. And you really have to be 100% perfect for anything else to come out.

And then you can see how that works. Whenever there's ambiguity, whenever there's doubt, white people get treated much better than ethnic minorities. And the sad troubling truth about life is nobody has a perfect life. Jesus used to hang around with all sorts of dodgy characters,

tax workers and all sorts of people. It just, it was terrible. If you could give Jesus Christ the ethnic minority treatment, you could make him look terrible. And if you were to give other people, the white people treatment, you could really elevate all their ambiguous stuff to make it sound wonderful. Everyone's life is ambiguous. Everyone's life has room for doubt.

And if you could imagine always being given the benefit of the doubt or always being presumed to be the worst version of yourself, that difference is massive in real life. It's only in experiments when you get perfect people who are perfectly competent or perfectly incompetent. Yeah. And that's why that's so frightening. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

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You mentioned earlier that this is a book that isn't so preoccupied with your personal experiences, your biography, your anecdotes. But I did get a sense of Keon West, the person reading this book. Sorry, it slipped through. It slipped out. What slipped out then? What slipped out? Well, this is the thing. It's actually linking to the conversation that we've just been having because I didn't realise, I sort of always knew, but I knew...

I hadn't articulated what you've written so beautifully about, this idea that ambiguity is a threat to Black existence in a white supremacist world and therefore Black excellence is a burden that a lot of Black people have to live with. My question for you is,

Is this something that you feel you've had to navigate in the spaces that you occupy, be it academia, publishing, media? Do you have to be unambiguously excellent? And how do you navigate that?

That's a personal question. Yeah, it's a lot of pressure, I'll be completely honest. And I am not perfect. Nobody is perfect. But admittedly, the strategy for a lot of my life was just being as unambiguously good as possible. I think as soon as I figured out how racism works, so it's not that you can't get

a job at all that's not true it just means that you're at a disadvantage but because we have the science we know that there's a measurable disadvantage it's not impossible so you know say for the exactly the same cvs when you conduct the experiments white people get 50 more callbacks than you do well that gives you a number you need to be better you need to be at least 50 better than all the white people in order to get the job that is a burden i'm not going to deny that but it's a burden that you can beat you can just be better than everyone

But to live your whole life having to do that is exhausting. And also, the truth of the matter is, I'll tell you about another study that I did actually with some of my students, both of whom were white actually, really nice students. So I'm serious, some of my best friends, white people, some of them are great, they're great. But we did this other study in which

It was a relationship study, so it was again testing the aversive racism idea, where we had two couples, and in both couples, the woman was white, but in one couple, the man was also white, and in the other couple, the man was black. And so long as all the information about the couple was perfect, then everyone thought they were a good couple. Everyone thought he was great, he was meeting her needs, she should stay with him, that's good.

But then there was another version of the study in which we told people that there was a rumor about the man in the relationship. And we were really clear about this. There is zero evidence that he has done anything at all. The person who's starting the rumor is an unreliable source of information. We were really clear about that. And we saw that the likability scores for the white man went down a bit, but the likability scores for the black man went down a lot. And so in that instance,

What that study shows you is that even if you don't actually mess up, even if you are still being perfect, you don't need to do anything wrong. You just need someone to say you've done something wrong. And that's enough. That is enough to cause that kind of damage. And that's a serious problem.

one part of the book that made me almost drop the book where I was standing. Page 134. It's a study that was carried out and it was a very troubling idea that the displaying of racist attitudes from white respondents in the study actually made them more popular

- Oh yes, yes, I do remember that. - So when there was no display of explicit racism, there didn't seem to be much of an effect on what people thought of them. But when there was a display of racism, it actually made other people more likely to want to work with them. Now that was fascinating to me because it led me straight to this idea of likability. We've got very divisive figures in populism. We've got your Trumps, your Farages, you know, you've got all these figures.

Is there something in that that helps us to understand the, for want of a better phrase, the popularity of racist ideology? Is there something in that? Yes. Now, I have to be clear, in that study, they didn't ask why. So the why question that you're asking, they did not check for it. But you're absolutely right that they had a number of conditions where they asked why people...

how would you feel about working with someone who did explicitly racist stuff in the future? And everyone said that this would make them less likely to work with such a person. But then they ran another set of white people through such a condition. And when people were explicitly racist, their popularity went up. People wanted to work with them more.

So that study didn't look at why, but there's a lot of potential reasons why that could be. The most obvious ones being people think racist stuff all the time. And it is somewhat relaxing to be around someone who just echoes the things that you say, you know, someone who finally tells it like it is, you know, you finally willing to say what the others won't say. The implication is you want to say it, but you feel held back by one thing or another. So you found someone who just makes you feel better.

better. The truth is people have racist ideas, but even people who know they have racist ideas are probably too smart to go out and say it in public all the time. Now, if you acquire a certain amount of power or influence and you can say it, those people will find you more attractive. That's part of it.

It also might be just simple honesty that, look, even as a black person, if I have to be surrounded by racists, I'd like my racists where I can see them. I have to be totally honest. So I would rather a racist who just said their racist beliefs up front than someone who said them behind my back or hid it behind a veil of something else, you know, some progressive value or something that they are pretending to endorse while being racist.

So there could be that as well. So the exact reasoning wasn't clear in that study, but you're right, the finding is terrible. The finding is shocking because it means that while we expect there to be negative consequences for racism all the time, sometimes there aren't. Sometimes you become more popular and people should be aware of that. Yeah, which leads on to a question which I often ponder in the early hours of the morning.

What does society, mainstream Western society, white mainstream Western society, what does it have to gain from actually eradicating racism? Because we know what your marginalized, minoritized, racialized groups have to gain, which is their safety and their prosperity.

But what does the white capitalist patriarchal mainstream have to gain by even getting rid of this problem? What are your thoughts on that? I'm not asking for a whole answer, but I'm just curious to know what you think. So I think, first of all, I want to acknowledge that

they would be losing something by eradicating racism. I want to acknowledge that. If you are at the top of an oppressive system, if you are getting money from other people's hard work, if you are getting jobs that you would not get if you had to compete fairly, if you are getting lighter prison sentences and more favourable treatment and the benefit of everyone's doubts and coming out of rumours looking good,

I could see that that's a lot. So you could say, I don't want to give that up. You know, you read the book, you know, maybe some white people read The Science of Racism and they think, oh, wow, this is great. You know, I don't want to give up on this racism stuff. Possible. I would discourage that. There is one study I didn't include in the book because it was really complicated to explain, but I'm going to try and explain it now. So this is me being brave, right? Let's go on.

Let's imagine you and I are in an experiment, right? And I can offer you money and you can accept my offer or you can just turn it down. You can just say, no, I reject the offer. If you accept it, then whatever I offer you, you take and I take and we walk away. If you reject it, you get nothing, but I also get nothing, right? You understand the play. So let's say I get 10 pounds and I say, I've got the 10 pounds. I'll give you three. I keep seven. Do you accept or reject? What would you do?

- I would accept because I get something, I get three pounds. - 'Cause you get three pounds. Not everybody would, right? Some people would say, "No, you're being a jerk. You're taking seven, I get three. I'd rather get nothing, right? And you walk away with nothing. I'd rather hurt myself and hurt you." Some people would say that. Now the question is, when do people make those choices? And there was an interesting experiment

where they had white people play a game like that with a computer, but they thought they were playing with either a white person or a black person.

And when they played with what they thought were black people, they made less money because white people would become more unreasonable. They become more stringent. They reject more offers. They'd be like a white person offers me three pounds and take seven. That's cool. A black person offers me three pounds and take seven. No, I reject the whole thing. We can both lose out. I refuse to do that. And that is it's an interesting experiment. And because it's hard to explain, I didn't keep it in the book. But what it shows is that sometimes as a white person,

you lose, like you actually just lose monetarily because you're making bad decisions and you can expand this to other parts of life as well. So you are missing out on really great partners because they're not white. You are missing out on amazing people who work for your company because they're not white. You are missing out on people you could go out with and dance with and talk with and have friends with and you're missing out on so much. And I think this expands to other areas. I'm sure maybe this will make me unpopular in certain parts of the internet,

I know some men want women who will just be quiet, subservient servants who will do nothing, who will just shut up and make them food and have sex with them and do nothing else.

And I can see the power you get over women if you do that, but you lose a lot as well. You lose out on friends, on co-workers, on inspirations, on teachers, and you lose out in your home. You don't have someone you can have a conversation with. You don't have someone who can teach you and make you grow intellectually. You give up. When you decide to oppress people, you lose a lot in the exchange as well. And sometimes you just lose money. And I think people should be aware of that. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a really, really succinctly put point that speaks to the word power, actually, which is something that comes up quite a lot. A definition that occurs in

in your book is racism as prejudice plus power. And there's a quote which you refer to a couple of times from Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture, he says, let me get this right, "If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If a white man has the power to lynch me, that's my problem."

So let's talk a bit about the power structures, because really, as we get towards the end of this book, that's the thing that's been interrogated here, how racism exists as a power structure. Is this something which you...

confirmed as you did more and more research? Was it something you always knew? I mean, I don't want to take credit for confirming it. So a lot of the research I cite in the book isn't mine. This research has been going on for, I think the oldest thing I cited is from the 1940s, and I'm not that old.

I haven't been around that long. So this is the work of a lifetime of psychologists putting all this stuff together. Some of my work is cited, yes, absolutely, but not all of it. But a lot of people have looked at it and have understood racism as prejudice plus power for a very long time.

And that's one of the things that makes white people really angry, because it sounds like we're cheating. And I could understand why if they thought everything was equal, it would feel like we're cheating. So you get to say you don't like white people and that's not racist. But if I say I don't like black people, then that's racist. And the answer is yes, actually. The answer is completely yes, because of the power and the power dynamics involved.

I sometimes explain to people using other physical characteristics. So I, for example, I've got my widow's peak, you know, my wonderful receding hairline, although it's not, I've looked like that since I was a child. I've always had a widow's peak like that. My son has unfortunately inherited the same thing. So he'll always look like that.

And you've got your very straight hairlines right across the back. Yeah, it's all right. I push it back every now and again by accident. But yeah, we're hanging on in there. We're hanging on in there. Yeah. So we could call like me a peaker and you a straight liner. And I could decide that I hate straight liners. Anyone with a straight hairline, I hate them. I'm never going to hire them for a job. I despise them. I don't want my children dating them. I could say that.

But it's meaningless. I have no power over them. There's not a system in place that says straight liners are going to go to prison for longer for committing the same crimes, that they're not going to get their CVs accepted for the same jobs at the same qualifications. That doesn't exist. So I could do it, but it's meaningless.

However, if you were to do it for a group where that system does exist, like black people, now it's not meaningless. Now you are tapping into the power of a system that's designed to make some people's lives harder. And that's why when black people do it to white people, it doesn't work the same way. There is no system to disadvantage white people. This does not exist. And because it doesn't exist,

Yes, the hate could be the same, but the effect isn't. And you can measure that effect, and people have been measuring the effect, and it isn't the same. And because we know that, it has to be prejudice plus power. It can't just be the hatred. It has to be more than that.

And that leads me to think about the wider context that all of this sits in. So how interested or concerned are you with the roots of racism? If you go back to the 1600s, the slave codes that were embedding racism into law, scientific racism around the time of the European Enlightenment, the triangular trade where you sort of had to have racism to justify the dehumanization of stolen people.

How much of that do you find useful and how much of that just gives you a context for the work that you're exploring and carrying out?

I think it's extremely useful and I think it's extremely important. I don't talk about it a lot in my book and there's a couple of reasons. I'll tell you the one place I do talk about it, it's in explaining systemic racism because systemic racism I think is incredibly important and it's a part that we overlook a lot because a lot of racism we assume has to do with how racist someone feels or acts.

And systemic racism is totally different. It's the kind of racism where even if you don't feel or act racist, racist stuff still happens because that's the rules. And in order often to explain that, you need to explain some of the history of where these rules came from and how they work. So that's really important. Other than that, I try not to touch it in the book for two reasons. Reason number one, I'm not a historian.

Look, I'm a social psychologist, so everything I do, you know, you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I'm just going to do the social psychology bit. I think that's really important. I don't want to start doing history. I don't do biology. I know some other people who write really great books on race and biology. I'm not touching it because I'm not a biologist. I know the experiments I do. I touch those. The other reason I don't want to do it, though.

And there have been some amazing books about racism and history, amazing books about the slave trade, amazing books about scientific racism and pseudoscientific racism and all that stuff. I don't want to touch it.

because I think there are so many of those books that people have got comfortable now thinking, oh, racism is a thing of the past. It's the historians writing about racism. So racism is history. And I'm like, no, no, this book is not history. This book is now. I want you to understand that now.

Today, right now, when white people and black people commit the same crimes, they don't get the same prison sentences. When the same evidence is presented against them, they're not equally likely to get found guilty. When they apply for the same job, to the same qualifications, the same experience at the same time, they don't get the same callback to the same money. None of this is a past. This is now. And if you don't understand that it's now, you don't know how to solve racism.

100%. I mean, that sense of urgency and that sense of presence, it screams throughout the whole book. There's a number of passages where you reference studies and ongoing research, and it's amazing how recent these studies are. All 21st century, 2020, 2021. Do you feel as though progress is happening in these conversations?

So first of all, thank you for noticing that, because that was on purpose, because there's a whole lot of really good studies from the 80s and the 90s that I wasn't drawing on, not because they're not good. And sometimes I do. Sometimes I go back, especially when we talk about who invented implicit bias measures. That was in the 90s, so I have to talk about that.

but i do try to keep the references up to date i want to say no we replicated all this stuff in the 2020s and it's still happening and that comes the other question are things getting better some things are so if you follow the polls for example uh like a simple one would be a gallup poll looking at how acceptable which is it's crazy that this is still a question but how acceptable is you know mixed race dating you know how much do people think that's a thing you're that's okay to do

It's nuts that you can still ask this, but some people don't, right? But if you go back to the beginning of the poll, the number of people who think that's okay has steadily increased over the years. So you don't want to go back

uh 10 years 20 years 30 years you don't want to do that because life gets more racist when you do that but just because some things are going that way doesn't mean that everything is going that way there was a really great meta-analysis looking at hiring discrimination so exactly what happens when white people and black people are perfectly equally qualified and they apply for the same jobs and they found that over a span of decades that didn't go down at all that it remained completely stable

There are some other things that I didn't even, like I said, I couldn't include everything in the book, but there are certain areas of media where representation has actually got worse and significantly noticeably worse. And this is anecdotal, so don't take this. This is not evidence. This is just my life.

But I remember being a child, and maybe it's just because my parents picked good things for me to watch, but I'd watch like The Muppets Take Manhattan. I know that great piece of brilliant cinema. And you just see like a black jewelry store owner who just owned a jewelry store. And that was the whole thing. Like he wasn't singing any music. He wasn't committing any crimes. He was just a black guy who owned a jewelry store. And that's...

hard to find sometimes in contemporary media. There's more representation, but sometimes it's really narrow, cliched representation. And I thought, yeah, it has got worse, actually. When you look at the numbers, they say the representation has got worse in certain areas. It's got better in others, but you can't rely on history always moving forward. History moves forward because we move it forward, and it will move back when other people decide to move it back, and when we get lazy and let them move

And I think that's also a lesson I want people to take from the book. History isn't inevitable. Things won't get better inevitably. They got better because people made them better. And they will get worse if people make them worse.

I mean, I know exactly what you mean because I can remember even as recently as the mid 1990s, there just seemed to be a little bit more in the media landscape that was kind of for black communities. There were more sitcoms. There was just slightly more going on and I'm seeing less of that now. And it does raise a very interesting question about what does progress look like? I mean, you highlight intergroup contact.

education and exposure to kind of like positive media as something that can be very beneficial to individuals before we look at the system. Could you just kind of talk about that? Because I thought that was a very optimistic part of the book and actually quite a practical part of the book too. So just give us your thoughts about where that sits in this wider conversation.

Yeah, and there's a lot of stuff I could have talked about, a lot of interventions, but I wanted to stick to, like you said, practical, like really straightforward, do this. So, Intergroup Contact, incredibly straightforward, one of the best studied, most reliable,

interventions in all of psychological history. It's incredible how ridiculously reliable it is. If you are a psychology student and you are lazy and you want to design a study that absolutely works, just do a contact study at work every time. It's so good. I did it myself a lot during my doctorate. It was just amazing. You do it, you can't go wrong. But essentially, it's just you interact with the people who you don't like very much and you interact with them under certain conditions, especially. They're not necessary, but they help.

but you interact with them under these conditions, you start to like them more. And there's a lot of reasons for that, including just being less anxious around the people and learning more about the people and being more empathetic. But you don't need to know why. You just need to know that it works. You can read about why.

but you can know that it works. So if you don't like black people, you get up and you go to the first majority black thing that you can find and you go and you spend some time there. You don't like Muslims, you go, you find the local mosque, just go inside, do some prayers, talk to people, learn some things,

This works really well. And the more you do it, the better it works. The same is true for education. You educate yourself. You will become less racist over time. If you change your media diet, you'll become less racist and sometimes shockingly quickly. People don't realize how fast that works in both directions. Like

I remember there was one study in particular that looked at looking at the news, just regular news stories. And I think within about 10 minutes, people were more racist after just watching regular news stories. It happens so fast. So you have to be more, you have to be very careful about what you're watching. And the more you look at healthy, positive,

less racist media, the less racist you're going to be. So absolutely, those things work. And I think they're practical. Just go out and buy a book right now. Go hang out at the Baptist church right now. Just do it right now. You can do these things today if you want to be less racist.

Well said, Professor West. Well said. I mean, there's so much we can talk about. I do want to, again, just express thanks for having written the book. I feel as though it's an essential resource for anyone who's working in this sphere. I feel as though it will definitely offer insights and illuminations that you won't find necessarily in

other books that might be looking more at historical factors or more kind of personal biographies. And I know that anyone that reads that book will come away slightly better or a lot better equipped to have these conversations. I can guarantee it. So that's my seal of approval. How do you like that?

I appreciate that. I appreciate that very much. And I'd say only one thing in addition, which is don't believe me. I'm really clear about this in the book. I don't want you to take anything I say on faith. Someone commented, actually at my book launch, they'd never seen a book for lay people with so many scientific citations at the back, just scientific paper after scientific paper.

I am completely serious. If you doubt what I say, go read them. Go read the papers. Go read more papers. I want you to doubt me. I want you to check it. Because when you doubt me and when you check it and when you read the papers for yourself, then you'll realize that I was even more correct than you thought at first. So go ahead and find that out for yourself.

Brilliant, brilliant. Well, listen, I feel like we could talk forever, but I'm going to have to wrap that up there. Professor Keon West, The Science of Racism, everything you need to know but probably don't yet. That is out now, available via Picador. I would highly, highly recommend you go and find a copy.

read it, stick with it. You will learn from it. You will grow. And I really hope you've enjoyed this Intelligence Squared interview with myself, Geoffrey Blatchey and Professor Keon West. Thank you very much. And do keep in touch. Let people know how you found it. And yeah, hopefully we can keep the conversation moving. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Bea Duncan. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.