Stanford professor wins MacArthur 'genius grant' for racial awareness studies

America is pushing forward in a post-racial society, blind to skin color. That's the conventional wisdom.

But the research of Jennifer Eberhardt, the Bay Area's newest and only recipient of the famed MacArthur fellowship, the "genius grants," has proved otherwise.

She has found that skin color prejudices the perceptions of jurors, police officers and even the ordinary student who volunteers in research at Stanford University.

Black people, especially those with very dark skin and kinky hair, are more likely to be linked to crime, handed stiffer punishments or even sentenced to death than lighter-appearing individuals, according to her research.

Social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. (AP Photo/Courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Eberhardt is among two dozen scientists, scholars, artists and civic-minded people to reap the $625,000 windfall, announced Wednesday morning by the MacArthur Foundation.

Other 2014 winners include an engineer who is unraveling the effects of soot on climate and human health, a computer scientist fueling a revolution in cryptography, a poet who is translating modern Arab poetry into English and an artist transforming a long-neglected neighborhood in Houston into an arts and community venue.

The fellowships, awarded to those with a record of tenacity, imagination and risk-taking, are meant to encourage creative development into fresh new fields. Like Eberhardt's current study of footage from Oakland police officers' "body camera" videos..

"We want to use the work to help people understand how race can influence us in lots of different ways, often in ways beyond our control and beyond our awareness," said Eberhardt, 49, an associate professor in the university's Department of Psychology.She acknowledges that facts, not social psychology, are needed to explain exactly what happened to Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri or Trayvon Martin in Florida, two black men killed under widely questioned circumstances.
"But research is relevant to who is seen as a threat, under what conditions and why," she said. "Black men are associated with danger, threat, aggression and crime, all of those things. It may have played a role in those situations."

She got the MacArthur news not in one, but two, surprise calls. Cellphone service is lousy at her Stanford home and the first incoming call -- from an unfamiliar area code, with a garbled message about a prize -- was dropped.

"Then they called back, so I knew it was real," she said. "It was pretty overwhelming."
The mother of three sons is married to Stanford Law School professor Ralph Richard Banks, an expert on issues of race, inequality and the law.

Her eyes were opened to the geographic gulf between places and people when her parents moved from one Cleveland neighborhood to another. Unlike her original African-American community, her new home -- virtually all Jewish -- "had higher quality schools. Better facilities. More experienced teachers. And there was an expectation you would go to college. It wasn't a choice.
"The neighborhoods were close together, just a bike ride away. But they were 1,000 miles away in terms of culture, resources and opportunities," she said. "It was a pivotal time for me. It was game changing."
The field of psychology gave her a way to study how race is associated with such different living conditions and opportunities.
After graduate school at Harvard University, she was an assistant professor of psychology and of African and African American studies at Yale University. At Stanford, she has conducted research in areas ranging from social neuroscience to the intersection of psychology and law.
Most lay people report they do not think about race very often, Eberhardt said.

"But biases endure ...they are harder to shake than people imagine," she said. "Social processes can influence how we see something."
She has found that a person's skin color and hair texture influence the sentencing decisions of jurors; stereotypically black defendants are more likely to get the death sentence than white defendants. Black juvenile offenders are perceived as being more adult-like -- and therefore more worthy of severe punishment. She has found that police officers are more likely to mistakenly identify African-American faces as criminal than white faces.

She is now working with the Oakland Police Department to interpret what is learned in footage from the video cameras that police officers wear. 

"What we find out can be used in training, to better understand how officers react," she said. "We want to involve society with what we learn, and help them improve their relationships with the public."

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