White People Think Black People Are Magical
Social scientists have known for a while that racism isn’t just about explicit hatred and animosity. Often, prejudice is the result of split-second, gut-level decision-making rather than the acts of bad people with malicious intentions. A recent study in Social Psychological and Personality Science casts an interesting new light on this: White people apparently have a “superhumanization bias” when it comes to black people — that is, they associate them with superhuman abilities.