Everyone’s a little bit racist…
Every time I write about experiments like the one I am going to discuss today, I have to think of the song from the musical Avenue Q that gave this post its name. The point is not that people are racist, nor that society is ‘systemically racist’. That is mostly nonsense if you ask me. But as the song so neatly explains, ‘no-one’s really colour-blind’, and that clouds their judgement in subconscious ways.
And since we are on the topic, let me clarify my stance. I think that the claims that the US or the UK are systemically racist are pretty over the top and not supported by evidence. On the other hand, I find the arguments of anti-DEI activists that we should purely judge people based on merits correct but impossible to implement in practice. Most people try to judge other people based on their deeds rather than their gender, ethnicity, etc. Otherwise, this song’s lyrics wouldn’t get such a laugh.
But there is a plethora of evidence that we are not treating people equally and independently of their gender, ethnicity, etc. We are humans and thus subject to many unconscious biases. To counteract these biases and give people of minority ethnicities a truly fair chance in job applications, career progression, etc., we need to put corrective measures in place.
Are gender or ethnic quotas the proper correctives? That is very much up for debate and should be debated rationally based on evidence and without appeals to slippery slope arguments, political slogans, or other polemic tools. Shouting slogans and absurdities at each other doesn’t help anyone and is what got us into the mess we are in today.
Thus, consider the following not as a call for ethnic or gender quotas or other affirmative action but as another piece of data to consider when considering your actions and how businesses deal with investors and other stakeholders.
A group of academics from the University of Illinois and the University of Amsterdam sent letters to the investor relations teams of Stoxx Europe 600 companies asking for ESG information about their companies. These letters were identical except that they differed in the name of the retail investor who sent the request. The letter was sent in English and the investor relations team must have perceived it as coming from the UK.
Below is the response rate of the different investor relations teams to the requests based on the investor's name. Note that the response rates are overall quite low because the request came from a retail investor rather than an institution or a professional analyst at a bank or broker.
Response rate to retail investor requests about ESG
Source: Brown et al. (2025)
Obviously, the key insight is that requests from someone with the name of an ethnic minority tend to be answered less often than requests from someone with a name indicating a European heritage (James). The differences in response rates are statistically significant for two of the three names with an ethnic minority background and when comparing James with the average combined response rates of all other names.
Again, this is not conclusive evidence for widespread bias, but it is another data point in many studies that point in this direction. If you are curious about whether you have some unconscious bias, you can test it for yourself with Harvard University’s online implicit bias tests for a wide variety of potential biases. Having taken these tests, I know I am slightly biased in some areas, but I will not tell you which ones. That remains my secret.
And the implicit bias starts very early. A story from the book: Biased (https://tinyurl.com/t9zsutua), the best book I have read on this topic:
I explained that some years ago my son Everett and I were on a plane. He was five years old, wide-eyed, and trying to take it all in. He looked around and saw a black passenger. He said, “Hey, that guy looks like Daddy.” I looked at the man, and truth be told, he did not look anything like Daddy—not in any way. I looked around for anyone else Everett might be referring to. But there was only one black man on the plane. I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony: the race researcher having to explain to her black child that not all black people look alike. But then I paused and thought about the fact that kids see the world differently from adults. Maybe Everett was seeing something that I missed. I decided to take another look.
I checked the guy’s height. No resemblance there. He was several inches shorter than my husband. I studied his face. There was nothing in his features that looked familiar. I looked at his skin color. No similarity there either. Then I took a look at his hair. This man had dreadlocks flowing down his back. Everett’s father is bald.
I gathered my thoughts and turned to my son, prepared to lecture him in the
way that I might inform an unobservant student in my class. But before I could
begin, he looked up at me and said,
“I hope that man doesn’t rob the plane.”
Maybe I didn’t get that right.
“What did you say?” I asked him, wishing I had not heard what I heard. And he said it again, as innocently and as sweetly as you can imagine from a bright-eyed boy trying to understand the world: “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.” I was on the brink of being upset. “Why would you say that?”
I asked as gently as I could. “You know Daddy wouldn’t rob a plane.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“Well, why did you say that?” This time my voice dropped an octave and turned sharp.
Everett looked up at me with a really sad face and said very solemnly, “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I was thinking that.”
We are living with such
severe racial stratification that even a five-year-old can tell us what’s supposed to happen next. Even with no malice—even with no hatred—the black-crime association made its way into the mind of my five-year-old son, into all of our children, into all of us.
I believe that the above story is a powerful illustration of how deeply ingrained implicit bias can be, even in young children who have no conscious intention of harm or prejudice. It highlights the pervasive influence of societal stereotypes and media portrayals that link race, in this case, Blackness, with criminality.
The critical question is how much do we lose when a qualified individual is excluded. I found it amusing when Dr. Santa Ono President of University of Florida wrote an opinion piece saying he was anti-dei and against Antisemitism . Not long ago he would have been excluded by his ethnicity. I remember when there were virtually no Jews in executive positions in major corporations.