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#Future teachers more likely to perceive black children as angrier, study says

#Future teachers more likely to perceive black children as angrier, study says

July 7, 2020 | 4:49pm

Prospective teachers cannot read black children’s faces as well as white kids’ and more frequently misinterpret black girls and boys to be angry when they are not, according to new research.

A study published July 2 in the journal “Emotion” came to this disturbing conclusion about the phenomenon, called “racialized anger bias,” after documenting how future educators interpreted kids’ facial expressions.

“Racialized anger bias means that people are seeing anger where none exists,” study co-author and North Carolina State University psychology professor Amy Halberstadt says in a press release.

Previous research had already confirmed that black adults experience racialized anger bias, but the new study finds the phenomenon also happens to black children, with black girls mistaken to be angry more often than black boys.

“Although never statistically examined before, the misperceptions of black girls’ anger verifies qualitative research of black girls’ and women’s experiences, that they too are seen as angry when they are not,” says Halberstadt.

The study looked at 178 prospective teachers — 89% of whom were women and 70% of whom were white, the same gender and race ratio of US public school teachers generally — from three Southeast teacher training programs.

The prospective teachers were asked to identify the emotion displayed in 72 clips of black and white child actors’ facial expressions. Participants, researchers found, were 1.16 times more likely to mistake black boys as angry and 1.74 times more likely to mistake black girls as angry, compared to white boys and girls.

“Essentially, we found that prospective teachers are more likely to view black children as being angry, even when they’re not,” says Halberstadt.

Participants also took a questionnaire to assess their conscious and subconscious racial biases, but study authors found no correlation between increased bias and increased misinterpretation of black children’s facial expressions for anger. More biased participants, however, were found to interpret white children as being less angry.

“The more biased prospective teachers were, the more likely those prospective teachers were to give white children the benefit of the doubt. In other words, if the teacher had higher levels of explicit or implicit racial bias, they were a bit more likely to give white kids a ‘free pass,’ ” says Halberstadt.

The study’s findings should be acted on immediately, authors say, as they are likely contributing to disparities in how black and white children are disciplined in school.

“The level of bias we found here could have significant adverse effects on children in classrooms. We already know that black students experience many more suspensions, expulsions and disciplinary actions than white students, often for the same behavior. And this study suggests that misperceiving anger — even at an unconscious level — could play a significant role in that disparity,” says Halberstadt. “This finding highlights the urgent need to address conscious and unconscious bias in educators.”

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