Beyond bad apples, toward Black life: A re-reading of the implicit bias research
| Author | Amanda M Petersen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618759012 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618759012
Theoretical Criminology
2019, Vol. 23(4) 491 –508
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480618759012
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Beyond bad apples, toward
Black life: A re-reading of
the implicit bias research
Amanda M Petersen
University of California, Irvine, USA
Abstract
Increasingly, the death of Black individuals at the hands of the US legal system is
interpreted in relation to the social science research on implicit bias. Having flourished in
the past decade, this oft-cited framework for recognizing and eliminating anti-Blackness
not only overwhelms the socio-legal and criminological scholarship, but also pervades
political discourse and popular culture. Using as a site of study my own empirical
research on implicit bias and Oregon prison sentences, I discuss problems related to
the study of implicit bias and legal outcomes in the social sciences. Further, I examine
common understandings of implicit bias research and the troubling application of
these knowledges to legal policies and practices. In interrupting the current fascination
with and use of implicit bias research, I turn toward “abolitionist pedagogy” in my
interpretation of empirical evidence.
Keywords
Abolition, implicit bias, policing, race, sentencing
Two explanatory frameworks dominate the public conversation on the killing of Black
citizens by police in the USA. The “bad apple” framework is perhaps the more recogniz-
able, where most police officers are perceived as good and decent professionals who
want to do their job and return safely to their families at the end of the night; there are
simply a few bad apples who give the rest a bad name. In the context of police murders,
“bad” may be replaced with “overtly racist”, and when the murders are not explained as
Corresponding author:
Amanda M Petersen, University of California, Irvine, 2340 Social Ecology II, Irvine, CA 92697-7080, USA.
Email: ampeter1@uci.edu
759012TCR0010.1177/1362480618759012Theoretical CriminologyPetersen
research-article2018
Article
492 Theoretical Criminology 23(4)
an unfortunate collision of training and tough luck, they are said to be caused by racist
individuals slipping into an otherwise defensible institution. When guided by this frame-
work, police departments proceed as usual, save an enhanced screening protocol or dis-
ciplinary procedure. I suspect that many individuals exposed to a lifetime of less explicit
forms of prejudice and discrimination—accompanied by those who have not been his-
torically targeted but who have a more inclusive understanding of racism—would
quickly find fault with this strategy.
The metaphor of the bad apple spills over, albeit tacitly, into the second explanation
for police killings of Black citizens: the now-popular framework of implicit bias, or what
is sometimes called automatic or unconscious bias. This explanation, especially common
among academics, theorizes that while overt racism is functionally dead, automatic ste-
reotyping is a natural cognitive function to which we are all subject; we all have implicit
biases, and it is these biases that cause apparent anti-Blackness and White supremacy. In
this second framing, the possibility of there being a few bad apples evolves into a percep-
tion that we are all kind of bad apples.1 In the case of citizen killings by police, we are
told that the momentary stress of an overwhelming situation can result in an otherwise
good officer relying on automatic anti-Black stereotyping to make quick decisions. In
these scenarios, it is this unfortunate cognitive mechanism of implicit bias that leads to
the death of Black individuals.
These two frames—the original bad apple metaphor and the new kind of bad apple
framework of implicit bias—manifest continually in discussions of policing, as well as
other stages of control in the US legal system. Decisions regarding sentencing, paroling,
executing, bail, fees, risk assessments, and ticketing are all sites where we learn that
disparities are caused either by rogue uniformed racists or mysterious and pervasive
implicit biases. Although the original bad apple metaphor is still prolific in popular
media discourse, the kind of bad apples explanatory framework has become the academic
norm for understanding discrimination and institutional racism. Indeed, academic litera-
ture on the effect of implicit bias has proliferated with great speed over the last 10
years—with Google Scholar returning 136 results for a search of “implicit bias” for 2003
and 3380 results for 2017. While researchers and policy-makers who promote and inter-
act with the topic of implicit bias presumably intend to develop a more sophisticated and
discerning intellectual framework for understanding racism and discrimination—and
certainly these goals have often been realized—the explanation is not beyond reproach
(e.g. Banks and Ford, 2008; Kahn, 2014, 2017; Tetlock and Mitchell, 2009).
My present purpose is to discuss problems related to the study of implicit bias and
legal outcomes. I ground this analysis in a critique of my own 2014 research on
Afrocentric facial feature bias and prison sentences as I do an aggressive counterreading
(Butler, 1993) of the production of empirical knowledge related to implicit bias and the
mobilization of the resultant findings toward policy change. Through this reading, I pro-
pose that these findings and their normative readings: (1) reveal the limitations of bias
control as a reform strategy; (2) contribute to what Murakawa and Beckett (2010) term a
“penology of racial innocence”; and (3) obscure the role of White supremacy and anti-
Blackness in the foundation and maintenance of the US legal system. Ultimately, I argue
that reliance on empirical knowledge related to implicit bias hinders legal change and
future research when guided by the kind of bad apples, implicit bias framework. In
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