Psychology majors and honor students from Bennett College attended the recent 2015 Anna Julia Cooper lecture, featuring Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt. The event, held on the campus of Wake Forest University, brings annually to the Anna Julia Cooper Center a distinguished scholar, activist, or artist to address the university and broader community.
A social psychologist at Stanford University, Dr. Eberhardt spoke on the subject, “Protecting and Policing Black Lives in the 21st Century.” Dr. Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—she has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice.
Dr. Eberhardt’s research not only shows that police officers are more likely to identify African American faces than white faces as criminal, she further shows that the race-crime association leads people to attend more closely to crime related imagery. In one experimental study, for example, people who were exposed to black faces were then more quickly able to identify a blurry image as a gun than those who were exposed to white faces or no faces.
Melissa Harris-Perry, host of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. Named for the foundational black feminist intellectual, activist, and educator of the early 20th century, the Anna Julia Cooper Project supports related programs, courses and research.
Dr. Santiba Campbell, assistant professor of psychology at Bennett College, accompanied the students to Wake Forest. “Bennett College is dedicated to providing opportunities for our students to hear from scholars whose work impact the communities in which we live,” said Dr. Campbell. “The students came away from the lecture motivated and glad to hear Dr. Eberhardt say, ‘The problems associated with race are ones we have created and they are also ones we can solve.’”
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PHOTO ID: Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, Social Psychologist from Stanford University and MacArthur Genius Award winner; Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, Director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center; Dr. Valerie Johnson, Bennett College’s Mott Distinguished Professor of Women's Studies/Director, Africana Women's Studies and member of the Steering Committee for the Anna Julia Cooper Center; and Dr. Santiba Campbell and Bennett College students
Posted By: Reginald Culpepper
Tuesday, April 7th 2015 at 5:00PM
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