Section Three
Module 9: Stereotypes, Prejudices, and Discrimination
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When is a stereotype a problem?
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After working with the material in this module, readers will be able to
define and differentiate among stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, and give several examples of each
compare individual prejudice and discrimination to systemic prejudice and discrimination, and give several examples of each
explain the importance to client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology of avoiding both intentional and unintentional discrimination in clinical service delivery and in the domains of professional practice
use the issues raised by several common cognitive heuristics and biases to engage in critical thinking about stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination, as these apply to clinical and professional practice (cf. ASHA Certification Standard V-B, requiring critical thinking and decision-making skills)
The social constructs we can refer to as stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination have been studied for centuries in several disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology (see Dovidio et al., 2010, whose definitions this module has adopted). Let’s explore the words themselves and the underlying constructs and issues they represent, as part of thinking about client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology.
Stereotypes as Solidified and Oversimplified Beliefs
The word stereotype originally referred to a printing process. Let’s start this module with an etymological detour.
As you might remember from your art history classes, printing for creative artistic and linguistic expression tends to be dated to approximately the year 0 B.C.E./C.E. and tends to be described as first developed in Asia. (Some versions of printing, meaning the transfer of an image from one medium to another through rubbing, pressing, and/or colored substances, occurred in the earliest human cultures, probably in Africa.) Originally, printing was assumed and intended to create a complete image; that is, a whole picture was carved in wood or stone to represent an entire image, a full section of a scroll, or a whole page of writing, and that complete carving was used to transfer the whole image to fabric, paper, or another surface.
During the following centuries, printing processes used for artwork diverged from those used for language, in part because artworks are intended to be creative and unique whereas printed language re-uses the same relatively few fixed forms (i.e., characters or letters). For printing language, therefore, it was possible to carve individual characters or letters ahead of time and then arrange them as needed, a much more efficient process than engraving every scroll or full page of writing as a whole every time. Sets of pre-carved individual pieces, each representing one character or letter and known as “moveable type,” could be arranged quickly, used to print, and then re-arranged to print the next job.
One disadvantage of moveable-type systems emerged, however, when authors or printers wanted to print more copies of the same work at a later date. Because the moveable type had long since been repurposed for other jobs, no permanent engraving existed from which to print more copies. Thus, to create more copies, the moveable characters or letters had to be arranged again, a process that not only duplicated previous effort but also tended to introduce minor differences between the original product and any later printings.
Printers solved this problem in the late 1700s by borrowing techniques from sculptors and other artists. To use the new methods, printers again began by arranging moveable type into the necessary format for a particular desired printed page. Instead of inking that arrangement and printing from it, however, the printer then created a mold of the arrangement (often with wax); created a solid cast by filling the mold; and then finally used the single, solid, page-sized cast, rather than the original layout of moveable pieces, to print the final product. This multistep process (arranging moveable type, creating the mold and then the cast, and finally printing from the cast) took slightly longer than printing directly from the moveable type, but it remained substantially faster than having to carve every complete plate as a whole. Most importantly, the resulting solid casts were thin plates, easily retained to be re-used as needed, and the process freed the moveable type to be reset for other jobs.
Have you guessed the new name that was devised for this new process, the one that started with moveable type and created a solid, re-usable cast? You’re right: Stereotype printing! Etymologically, “stereo” means solid; its Greek and Proto-Indo-European roots are related to our current English words starch and cholesterol. The word “stereotype” was created, in other words, to serve as the opposite of the phrase “movable type,” because the creation and re-use of the solid, or immovable, cast or plate served as the important distinction between the two processes. (During the late 20th century, we tended to refer to 2-channel audio recordings as being “in stereo,” but stereophonic recordings were so named because their production process fixed, or made solid, two audio tracks onto the same physical medium such that both could be replayed simultaneously. “Duo” is a completely different root.)
Did you enjoy our extended etymological detour about printing? I hope so, and it was important for many reasons, including that it provides a means of understanding several points about cognitive stereotypes. But we are not quite finished yet, are we? How did the meaning of “stereotype” shift from describing a new printing process, in the late 1700s, to its current usage describing people’s generally negative opinions about other people?
The answer lies in the advantages and the disadvantages of stereotype printing, and in the linguistic tendency for physical words to take on figurative meanings.
The advantage of stereotype printing, to repeat, is that it preserves one arrangement of moveable type, facilitating rapid future reprinting of the same text.
As a corresponding disadvantage, stereotype printing reduces an infinitely re-arrangeable set of moveable type to a single, permanent, fixed cast that can do little more than re-print the same page repeatedly.
Given these implications, and drawing especially on the disadvantages of stereotype printing, art critics had stretched the word by the late 1890s to refer not only to printed words but to any repetitive physical image. Berenson (1897), for example, described the postures and expressions of people painted in the backgrounds of some paintings as appearing stereotyped, by which he meant that they looked as if they had been reprinted from a single cast or lacked the variation that he expected to see in realistically painted people. By the early 1920s, the word had been extended to refer not only to physical images but also to the fixed and often simplified cognitive images or beliefs that we each hold about the world (Lippmann, 1922), and from there it was a short leap to the word’s current use referring primarily to negative beliefs; thus, within only another few decades, “stereotype” came to be used to refer largely to the unchanging, and therefore simplified, and therefore limiting, views or beliefs that human beings often hold about other groups of people. In current usage, therefore, a stereotype is a fixed, unchanging, oversimplified, and therefore inaccurate representation of a dynamic and complex reality (Dovidio et al., 2010).
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A stereotype is a fixed, unchanging, oversimplified, and therefore inaccurate representation of a dynamic and complex reality (Dovidio et al., 2010).
The funny thing is, as Mercier (2022) emphasized a century later, human beings often do need to reduce excessive detail. Framed positively, or as a strength, we describe the importance of simplification by calling it elegance, efficiency, or the need to “see the point,” “cut to the chase,” or “find the take-home message.” The problems with cognitive stereotypes begin to emerge when we shift from using them as expedient reductions in unnecessary detail to allowing them to represent unwavering beliefs about complex and dynamic realities, especially about other people.
Stereotypes become problematic, in other words, when they lead us to believe that we know a single immutable answer, when we have not allowed for necessary complexity or dynamism, when we have not asked necessary questions, or when we have not tried to understand any necessary larger context. The error is akin to having printed one page one way once and then expecting that every printed page ever made from the same box of moveable type will be the same as that first one — or, sometimes, the error is akin to accidentally dropping the box of moveable type pieces on the floor, making a cast of the resulting mess, and then somehow assuming that all future prints made from that entire box of type pieces will look the same as that one does. Most stereotypes are not only “fixed and oversimplified,” but fixed and oversimplified and overgeneralized to the point of being untrue.
And the problems do not stop there, for at least two reasons. First, our stereotyped beliefs are also problematically strengthened by our human cognitive tendencies to notice and accept evidence that confirms what we already believe to be true and, simultaneously, to avoid or ignore counterevidence [the confirming evidence bias (Oswald & Grosjean, 2004) or “myside” bias (Mercier, 2022); see also the complete Pohl (2022)]. If I am sure that dogs are good pets, for example, my tendency as a human thinker is to notice all the good dogs, think to myself “See? There’s another good dog! Dogs are such good pets,” and not even notice all the bad dogs. Second, as the matched-guise research demonstrates, our stereotypes not only affect our expectations but actually guide our perceptions.
The result, when we combine these two tendencies, is the circle that the matched-guise research demonstrates (Module 8): When people enter a situation believing in a stereotype, then that stereotype, in a problematically circular way, can actually lead them to perceive evidence that confirms the stereotype, preventing them from recognizing that the information they are being given contradicts their stereotype entirely. Stereotypes are much more than prints and much more than a passive lens through which we see things; because of how human cognition works, our stereotypes are actually actively shaping what we see.
Your Turn
There is a lot to think about here! Go back to a simple current definition of a stereotype: a fixed, oversimplified belief about something that is actually dynamic and complex. Try the example of starting to look for a housepet, using the options of buying a dog, a baby otter, or an elephant. How will your “stereotyped” views of dogs, baby otters, and elephants affect your thinking? Is that a problem?
If you and your group can manage the conversation without hurting anyone, try discussing any of the social stereotypes that you have heard people express (of the form “people from such-and-such background tend to”). Have you ever been aware that a person who seemed to hold that stereotype was managing to find what they perceived to be confirming evidence of it, as the end of this segment described?
Prejudices Reflect Rankings
Now take the next step. What happens if my fixed and oversimplified belief is not a simple description of one thing but, instead, functions for me either as a belief about how things are ranked or as a belief that leads me to rank things in a certain way?
Try the housepet example from the Your Turn segment.
My oversimplified beliefs about baby otters (cute, need water), elephants (huge), and small dogs (could live in my apartment) did not start out as an attempt to rank otters, elephants, and dogs. But my oversimplified understandings of these animals definitely led me to create a ranking system: small dogs would be best as pets, baby otters would be a distant second, and elephants are the worst possible pets. My stereotypes led me, in other words, to a prejudice: Before I even started to gather any new information, I had pre-ranked everything about the entire global pet-worthiness of many animals I had never met and know almost nothing about.
This pre-ranking defines a prejudice. A prejudice is a stereotype that reflects, supports, or asserts a difference in ranking between two or more groups (Dovidio et al., 2010). Prejudices extend and complicate the notion of stereotypes by combining several elements, again drawing on what we can describe as several heuristics in human thinking and decision-making. In addition to accepting confirming evidence, we as human thinkers tend to oversimplify our fixed views of other groups (the out-group homogeneity bias, from Module 5); rate or rank differences that might otherwise be described merely as differences (from Module 2); prefer the familiar (Bornstein & Craver-Lemley, 2022); and interpret whole people through our knowledge of a single characteristic (part-whole fallacies including the halo effect; Laham & Forgas, 2022). Prejudices can be framed to emphasize the positive (admiration, respect, or honorific views; the fixed belief that members of a group deserve to be ranked more highly, on any scale, than members of another group) or framed to emphasize the negative (oversimplified views that the members of any group are less able, less qualified, lesser in any other way, or more likely to exhibit problematic behaviors than the members of any other group). Either way, the problem with a prejudice lies in the fact that it is a fixed, oversimplified belief or set of beliefs not only that two things or groups differ but that they differ in a way that makes one of them fundamentally better than the other.
A prejudice is a stereotype that reflects, supports, or asserts a difference in ranking between two or more groups (Dovidio et al., 2010). A prejudice asserts not only that two things differ, but also that they differ in a way that makes one of them fundamentally better than the other.
Prejudices about people cause problems in many ways. Like stereotypes, prejudices oversimplify or frankly misstate the complexity of a group, misstate the abilities or characteristics of any individual within that group, and prevent people who hold those prejudices from responding appropriately to new information. Positively framed prejudices, interestingly, can be as problematic as negative prejudices; well-documented abuse scandals involving athletic coaches and members of the clergy, among other examples, have occurred when some members of these typically admired and respected groups continued to be treated as worthy of admiration, respect, or deference even though their behavior did not warrant such judgments at all.
More often, and especially as the word tends to be used, prejudices are problematic because they reflect fixed, oversimplified beliefs (stereotypes) that members of one group of people are in some way worse than members of another group of people. Prejudices serve not only to establish a simplified view of another group (the stereotype element of a prejudice) but also to maintain a system of interconnected beliefs about how two groups should be ranked and, based on that ranking, how they should be treated. Prejudices convince us that a trait or characteristic is problematic; that the person or group believed to hold that trait or characteristic therefore deserves to be ranked below another group; and often that, because the one problematic trait exists, the person or group being judged probably has other problematic traits as well (the negative version of a halo effect; Laham & Forgas, 2022). To continue with my search for a pet: If I am convinced that dogs are the best pets, then that belief will be reinforced every time I come across a friendly dog, as we mentioned above. It will also be reinforced every time I come across an angry cat, and it will lead me to completely ignore the evidence provided by all the angry dogs and friendly cats I might also encounter.
And keep going: What else might happen, if I begin and continue with a fixed belief that dogs are cleaner, friendlier, and overall better pets than cats (or otters)?
I will probably start my interaction with any new cat assuming that it is smelly and mean, a style that could lead the animal to react in unpleasant ways – which I would proceed to assume were characteristic of all cats, not reactions to the way I had treated this cat. I will start all my interactions with dogs, on the other hand, assuming that they are clean and friendly, potentially causing the dog to interact in a friendly way, something that I will then interpret as more evidence about the friendliness of dogs.
I will probably interpret even the quietest of cat noises as evidence that this particular cat is problematically loud, or as evidence that all cats are bad, because my initial beliefs prime me to see additional evidence that cats are bad pets.
I will find some way to excuse or explain away a dog who is “having a bad day” and happens to be a little angry, and I will be ready to accept new positive information about dogs, because that information is consistent with my current belief that dogs are better. I will grant no such leniency to cats, given my certainty that any cat who is acting out is not simply having a bad day but is, as all cats are known to be, consistently mean and smelly.
Dogs and cats are a silly example, but are you still clinging to your belief that one or the other is a “better” pet, even as you are reading what you know to be a silly example? And were you awkwardly or perhaps angrily aware, as you were reading these three little bullet points about imaginary pets, that parallels to these dog and cat problems absolutely exist in how people treat each other?
The influence of our many prejudices (i.e., our fixed and simplified pre-judgments as to the relative ranking of people or things) on our decision-making processes and behaviors cannot be overstated. As anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have long recognized, our cognitive and social behaviors are controlled, in many ways, by the stereotypes and the presumed rankings we start with – whether we are correct or not, whether the question can have a single correct answer or not, and often to the point of allowing our beliefs to influence the information the world is trying to give us and also to result in distinct harm to other people. We will address that harm in the next segment, using a third word: discrimination.
Your Turn
We allowed in the previous segment that some of the fixed and oversimplified beliefs we can call “stereotypes” might represent useful, efficient, or elegant ways of finding a core message or cutting through unnecessary complexities. Given the definition that a prejudice is a stereotype that reflects, supports, or asserts a difference in ranking between two or more groups, are any prejudices ever similarly useful or necessary? Are any prejudices about groups of human beings useful, efficient, and elegant? Are any prejudices about specific individual human beings you have never met useful, efficient, or elegant?
Consider the statement “Speech-language pathologists are caring, client-centered professionals.” Is it a stereotype? Is it a prejudice? If you believe this statement, how does it affect your thinking or your actions?
These discussions of stereotypes and prejudices have mentioned several cognitive biases. If you are not familiar with some of the heuristics and biases that influence human thought and decision-making, Morrisette’s “Cognitive Bias Codex” provides one accessible layout (see also Paul & Elder, 2021). Explore Morrisette’s Codex, and try using it to think about other examples where predictable human thinking patterns can become problematic when we use them to rate or rank other people.
Discrimination Confers an Advantage
Dogs and cats were fun, and otters are adorable, but prejudice and discrimination are serious. Let’s use serious examples this time.
Discrimination refers to two related constructs. First, discrimination can refer to actions that are based on or reflect a prejudice and that result in the members of one group receiving an unwarranted advantage as compared with members of another group. Second, discrimination can refer to the unwarranted advantage itself, as an outcome of actions or systems that were based on or reflect a prejudice.
Discrimination includes two related constructs:
actions that are based on or that reflect a prejudice and that result in members of one group receiving an unwarranted advantage as compared with members of another group
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the unwarranted advantage itself, if the unwarranted advantage is an outcome of actions or systems that were based on or reflect a prejudice.
Did that definition surprise you?
Had you previously thought of discrimination and stereotyping as being the same thing? Or would you have defined discrimination in terms of being negatively biased, judgmental, or cruel to a person or to a group, or as an active attempt to harm someone or limit their opportunities, perhaps based on their race or on another of their group-based or individual characteristics?
You are not entirely wrong; actively attempting to limit someone’s opportunities based on their race, or being judgmental about their abilities based on their race, religious background, sexual orientation, or any other personal characteristic, is discriminatory and represents one example of our broader definition.
We use this broad definition of discrimination, phrased to emphasize the relative advantages that accrue to the members of one group, for several reasons.
One reason to use this broad definition is that it covers both of two possible situations. In one kind of discrimination, the unwarranted advantage for Group A occurs because they are treated in a baseline or neutral fashion while the members of Group B are subjected to some negative effects, limitations, or penalties. This situation, in which the disfavored group actively receives something negative or is overtly harmed or limited, might be what you first thought of as a definition of “discrimination.” In a second and equally problematic situation, the advantage for Group A occurs because they are given something extra or allowed some advantage while the members of Group B are given only the baseline or neutral information, status, activities, or resources. In both cases, Group A ends up with an unwarranted advantage over Group B; the difference lies only in whether Group A is unfairly ahead of some theoretical neutral point or whether Group B is unfairly behind (or both). Either situation is problematic if an objectively fair situation would place both groups at neutral, but we need to distinguish between them because their solutions differ.
Another important reason to use this broad definition, for speech-language pathology in particular, is that most of us, as well-meaning speech-language pathologists, do not view ourselves as actively, unreasonably cruel toward other people; or as being overtly and unfairly judgmental about other people; or as having ever actively attempted to limit the opportunities of another person or group based on their race or on another group-based or individual characteristic.
What would happen, then, if we limited our definition of discrimination to narrow and negative examples of actively attempting to harm someone?
One thing that would probably happen is that most of us would categorize the problem as external, distance ourselves from it, or view it as something that someone else needs to fix about their behavior, not as something that influences our own behaviors and systems in clinical service delivery and professional practice. The uncomfortable truth, however, as we will address toward the end of this module and again in Section Four, is that we are members of systems that have led to distinctly discriminatory situations, whether we think of ourselves as ever having been overtly and unreasonably cruel to another human being or not. The even more uncomfortable truth, for almost everyone, is that we have beliefs about how other people can or should be ranked that influence our behaviors in smaller and larger ways – sometimes as what has been termed implicit bias or microaggressions (e.g., Williams et al., 2021, and as we will come back to at the end of this module), and sometimes in less problematic ways.
The complexities of human beliefs, cognition, relationships, and decision-making lead to the reality, in other words, that decisions and actions occur in our society, and in our very own profession, that increase opportunities for some groups, and decrease opportunities for other groups, in unwarranted ways that stem from people’s stereotypes and prejudices. Later parts of this website will discuss many examples, and the fundamental purpose of most of these modules, in many ways, is simply to help us all think about the ways that our knowledge and beliefs shape our decision making, our current actions, our own futures as individual professionals, and the future of our profession.
Your Turn
I dislike talking with students about academic honesty at the beginning of the semester. I am aware that any such discussion often feels, to students, as if I were either accusing them of past academic dishonesty or accusing them of contemplating future academic dishonesty, even when my only goal is to make sure we understand each others’ expectations so we can move forward as a team. Did you feel any such reaction to this material about discrimination? I promise I have no idea who you are. I am not accusing you of past discrimination, and I am not accusing you of contemplating future discrimination. My best guess, in fact, if you are a speech-language pathologist or a speech-language pathology student, is that you are probably a kind and well-intentioned person who has never been intentionally cruel to any person or intentionally discriminatory about any group. Why do these discussions manage to make us feel bad, or guilty, or angry?
Try thinking about how a reader’s initial views about social justice issues or about prejudice and discrimination might come into play as she reads this module. Would someone whose journey so far in her life has led her to believe that prejudice and discrimination are not large problems in our society or in speech-language pathology question some parts of this material? Would someone who starts with the belief that prejudice and discrimination are widespread and problematic accept the definitions, examples, and issues in this module, and find herself thinking about multiple other known examples as she reads? Extend the two readers’ different experiences with this single module forward a few years into their careers as speech-language pathologists. What implications will their original beliefs ultimately have on their clients and on our profession as a whole?
You might have recognized that many of the issues addressed in this discussion of discrimination are similar to the issues raised in discussions of what has been termed “implicit bias,” which we mentioned in Module 8. I have avoided that term here in favor of the better-established and better-studied notions of stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination, but the general point that people may not be consciously aware of their own assumptions is accurate (see also our discussion of fish in water, in Module 7). If the notion of implicit biases is familiar to you, try using it to analyze the problems associated with stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination from this module. You might also want to read FitzGerald and Hurst (2017) or Gawronski (2019).
Individual versus Systemic Prejudices and Discrimination
We need to add one more distinction, before we leave this discussion of stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination, and I am going to use a literally deadly example to make the point: pedestrian fatalities. Take care of yourself emotionally here, as you read, if your life has been touched by such a traumatizing occurrence. If your life has not been directly affected, be ready to acknowledge that other people’s lives have. (We need not have walked in all the shoes to be able to recognize that someone else has, or to understand that those shoes must hurt terribly.)
The first data we need for this example come from research about the interactions between cars and pedestrians at marked crosswalks in the U.S.
In many well-designed studies, researchers have established that drivers, on average, treat Black pedestrians at or in crosswalks differently than they treat White pedestrians, regardless of the driver’s race or gender. In one well-designed study, Black men waiting at the same crosswalk were passed by twice as many cars before being able to cross, and had to wait 32% longer before entering the crosswalk, as compared with White men (Kahn et al., 2015).
A related study with men and women as pedestrians showed not only that drivers were less likely to stop for Black pedestrians, but also that, when drivers did stop, they were more likely to stop closer to Black pedestrians. In Kahn et al.’s (2017) study, the cars that did stop for a Black pedestrian stopped on or past the large stripe painted in the street ahead of the crosswalk 71% of the time when the pedestrian was a Black man but only 52-55% (52% for men, 55% for women) of the time when the pedestrian was White. In other words, the large “stop bar” served its intended function of creating space between cars and pedestrians almost half the time for White pedestrians but only 29% of the time for Black men (Kahn et al., 2017).
Similarly, in a separate study, different researchers (Coughenor et al., 2017) found that motorists were more than 7 times more likely to drive through the same crosswalk when a Black pedestrian was already in the road than when a White pedestrian was already in the road. Summarized a different way, Coughenor et al.’s data showed that one or more cars drove through the same intersection during only 2.9 percent of crossings taken by a White pedestrian but during 20.6 percent of crossings taken by a Black pedestrian.
The other data we need to complete this example were summarized at the end of one recent analysis of the 32,059 pedestrian fatalities documented by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration between 2012 and 2017:
“Compared to White pedestrians, Black and Native American pedestrians are at increased risk for being killed overall and specifically in darkness; Black and Hispanic youth are at increased risk compared to White youth; and Asian women and elders are at increased risk compared to White women and elders…. Furthermore, we found that roadway design factors associated with pedestrian injury severity, such as speed and number of lanes, often lost significance when neighborhood population dynamics were considered. This troubling finding likely reflects that certain neighborhoods, particularly those with higher percentages of Black Americans, have been disproportionately surrounded by and/or built near higher-speed, higher-volume roads, as found in other research (Schneider et al., 2021; Roll, 2021).” (Sanders & Schneider, 2022, pp. 9-10)
This pedestrian-fatalities problem is not new; data from 2001 to 2010 showed the pedestrian fatality rates for black and Hispanic men to be approximately twice that of White men (Coughenour et al., 2017), as did data from both 2009 and 2018 (1.8 deaths per 100,000 people among White Americans in 2018, versus 2.9 for people categorized as Hispanic and 3.6 for non-Hispanic Black Americans; QuickStats, 2020).
What’s happening here? And why are we discussing pedestrian safety on a website about speech-language pathology?
Experts on road safety, pedestrian safety, urban planning, and related disciplines agree that a combination of factors is in play.
Some factors are individual, or primarily under the control of one person. Individual drivers, alone in a car and noticing a pedestrian waiting at a crosswalk, must decide very quickly, on their own, to stop and let the pedestrian pass or to drive on through the crosswalk. What might lead a driver to stop or not stop, or to stop safely behind the line versus stopping closer to the pedestrian? The crosswalk data reviewed above show quite clearly that part of how some drivers make some of their individual decisions is based on the pedestrian’s race. It is very difficult to explain the observed data in any other way.
What exactly does that mean? It does not mean that every White driver looks at every Black pedestrian and makes an explicit decision to refuse to let them cross, to stop too close to the crosswalk, or to force their car into the crosswalk while the pedestrian is there. Not stopping for a Black pedestrian who is waiting to cross the street when a driver might have (or might not have) stopped for a White pedestrian, or stopping on the line when one might have (or might not have) otherwise stopped behind it, provides an excellent example of a microaggression: a “small…and sometimes ambiguous” action that is nevertheless “particularly stressful for those on the receiving end” (Williams, 2020, p. 3).
But discrimination need not be large, constant, and unambiguous to be discrimination; recall that discrimination requires only that one group end up with an advantage because of a prejudice, where a prejudice is defined as a fixed, oversimplified belief that serves the purpose of ranking people in some way. As a group, overall, the data show clearly that White pedestrians enjoy the advantage of being viewed, by at least some drivers, as people who deserve to cross the street safely, to the point of literally being able to survive crossing the street more often that Black pedestrians. This advantage exists as an overall group outcome, and as an experience for many individuals, even if some White pedestrians have to wait, even if many drivers allow many Black pedestrians to cross, and even if most Black pedestrians do eventually manage to cross the street.
Other relevant factors, for pedestrian safety or for anything else, emerge from or are sustained by the system itself, as a function of the system’s typical general resources, procedures, or infrastructure. Such factors are referred to as systemic, meaning that they occur because of the system, not because of any one person.
In the case of pedestrian safety, our country’s overall general beliefs and decisions about which places need to be linked by highways, and which places need to be preserved as safe neighborhoods, for whom, by whom, and why, have led to a situation where Black, Hispanic, and lower income neighborhoods are “disproportionately surrounded by and/or built near higher-speed, higher-volume roads” (Sanders & Schneider, 2022, p. 10). Regardless of any individual decision made by any individual driver (or any individual city planner), therefore, Black residents walking for exercise, walking to shop, or walking to the subway station are disproportionately and systemically likely to walk on less safe roads, as compared with White pedestrians. Pedestrian fatality “hotspots” (as Sanders & Schneider, 2022, labeled them) in the U.S., as a result, are disproportionately located along the higher-speed, higher-volume arterial roads that tend to characterize Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. (Do notice that location did not influence the crosswalk studies described above; they consisted of observations all conducted at the same intersection.)
Crosswalk safety and pedestrian fatalities might have seemed a bit far from culturally-appropriate speech-language pathology, but have you recognized some of the connections?
Individuals, including speech-language pathologists, make an almost infinite number of decisions every day, many of them based on simple, helpful initial beliefs (effectively, “stereotypes”) that organize our options and streamline our efforts in useful ways. Some of our individual decisions, however, might reflect untrue stereotypes or prejudices, occasionally resulting in smaller or larger acts of intentional or unintentional discrimination – such as stopping for some pedestrians but not others, responding to some job applicants but not others (see Kline et al., 2022, for one thorough discussion), asking some adolescents but not others about their college plans, or being ready with an instant and empathetic smile for some new clients but not others. Many other of our decisions and actions occur within broad contexts that reflect longstanding societal stereotypes or prejudices, or reflect the continuation of historical patterns that we as individuals did not create and might genuinely know nothing about – such as the decisions made in the 1950s as the interstate highways were first planned, and such as the centuries of financial and social systems through which education and healthcare in the U.S. have been organized.
As we apply the distinction to our own decisions as individual practitioners and to the general systems in our profession as a whole, the message is not that any one of us has been bad. The message is not that you have discriminated against someone or that you were planning to. The message is that client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology, like any other complex human endeavor, requires us to understand and address both individual and systemic sources and results of prejudice and discrimination.
We as individual professionals act on our own in many situations, but our individual decisions are also made within larger contexts. Even if we as individuals did not create the larger layers of our current contexts, we as individuals and as groups work within all the layers of our current contexts. In many ways, therefore, from sidewalks to highways to speech-language pathology, we need to be aware of the influence of a wide range of individual, systemic, and societal variables on our individual decisions and on the policies and practices of our groups, organizations, agencies, districts, and communities. I will continue to repeat that we each do it in our own way, and I will also continue to repeat that our work as speech-language pathologists requires us to engage routinely and thoughtfully with everything that culture, language, and identity can mean.
Your Turn
Did your previous experiences as a driver or as a pedestrian influence your interaction with this material? Did you feel validated, as a Black pedestrian, or feel criticized, as a White driver, or feel left out, if you are neither? Remember, from Module 1, that we have each experienced the journeys we have experienced, and that there is no single correct journey through life, and that there is no single correct way to approach becoming even more culturally informed, culturally focused, culturally aware, or culturally appropriate in our work. Try talking about this information with other people in a way that actively allows everyone to have their own experiences and their own journeys.
Discussions such as this one have become politically tinged during the early 21st century in the United States, often characterized as designed to make White people feel bad about themselves. Do you perceive the pedestrian-safety data or the concepts discussed in this section as intentionally critical of you, your actions, people like you, or any particular group of people? Why or why not?
The distinction between individual discrimination and systemic discrimination often leads people to spend time disagreeing about backward-facing responsibility (i.e., discussing potential blame or credit; see Module 1) when a conversation about forward-facing responsibility might be more productive (one can have a responsibility to act whether one caused the current situation or not). Think about several different problematic situations in which a systemic issue might lead a group or an individual to need help you can provide, where the systemic issue is of neither their making nor your own. Would you attempt to help? Why or why not? How do the examples you discuss relate to your decisions and actions as a speech-language pathologist?
(If you can’t think of any examples, start with extreme ones. If you survived a plane crash that you did not cause, would you attempt to help other passengers? Or imagine that a city council has voted repeatedly not to fund path maintenance in the park, and a child has tripped on a poorly-maintained path and fallen in front of you. Would you help the child up, even though neither you nor the child serve on the city council or on the path-maintenance committee? Would you help if other people were watching, and not helping, and making fun of you for helping? Will you go to the next city council meeting to demand better path maintenance, now that you are aware of the problem, or is it okay with you that some children are going to fall down in the park?)
The distinction between individual biases or discrimination and systemic biases or discrimination has appeared in many national and regional news stories during the last several years. What examples are notable in your area or in the national news as you are reading this module? Analyze one current example using this website’s basic emphasis on attempting to recognize, respect, and respond to each client’s and each colleague’s needs, or using ASHA’s (2017) straightforward statements that we are to serve all populations without allowing quality of care to vary because of clients’ cultural backgrounds (from Module 3). (Module 25 returns to the complexities of enterprise-level or organization-level issues; feel free to skip ahead and read it!)
Drivers’ behavior at crosswalks has become one of my own personal examples about the learnability of culturally influenced behaviors and about the pervasiveness of little decisions. I am a distance runner and a frequent pedestrian, and I know that most drivers do not stop for me. (I also know that I deal with catcalls from motorists much more when I run on my own than when I run with my husband – although the catcalls have become much less frequent as I have gotten older, a lovely example of interactions among several identities!) When I am the driver, I have always tried to stop at crosswalks, but I also know that I have driven past pedestrians seeking to cross when I should have stopped. When I first learned about the crosswalk research, close to 10 years ago, I realized that I could not honestly be sure that the pedestrian’s race had never entered my decision-making as a driver. I am sure now, now that I am aware of the issue, that I do now consciously seek to allow pedestrians, and especially pedestrians whose racial, ethnic, national, or other background I recognize as those we lump together in the U.S. and call “Black” or “Asian” or “darker skinned,” to cross at any crosswalk they are waiting for. What small individual efforts might you make to change a systemic problem?
Highlight Questions for Module 9
Define and differentiate among a stereotype, a prejudice, and discrimination. Give examples of each from several categories, such as historic world events, speech-language pathology as a profession, fictional movies or novels, or your own experiences.
Compare individual prejudice and discrimination to systemic prejudice and discrimination. Which do you find more problematic? Why?
Explain the importance to client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology of avoiding both intentional discrimination and unintentional discrimination in clinical service delivery. Do your answers differ as you consider the domains of professional practice, as opposed to clinical service delivery?
Find Morrisette’s “Cognitive Bias Codex” online and spend some time thinking about some of the known and common flaws in human decision-making. How do the confirming-evidence bias and the out-group homogeneity bias, in particular, interact with our notions of what constitutes a stereotype, a prejudice, or a problematically discriminatory practice or outcome?