In her 2019 book Biased, the Stanford University psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt shows that African Americans are consistently perceived as a threat.16 In one 2004 study, she and her colleagues cued subjects with pictures of African American faces, white faces, or no facial images at all, then progressively unblurred images of various objects, including weapons, and asked them to identify what they saw. The results found that subjects more quickly identified the weapons when cued with Black faces than they did when prompted with white faces. Eberhardt summarizes this study, noting “the
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