There is racial and sex/gender inequity in the United States (Grusky, Reference Grusky2019; Healey, Stepnick, & Eileen, Reference Healey, Stepnick and Eileen2008). Social psychologists assert implicit bias plays a role in creating these inequities. Cesario contends one cannot draw substantive conclusions about real-world action from implicit bias research, arguing proponents must show that implicit bias, in and of itself, can be directly responsible for racial and sex/gender inequities – a straw-man argument. Implicit bias is not the only, or the dominant, factor generating discriminatory processes and outcomes of systemic racism and sexism in the United States. But it plays a role.

The purpose of our critique is not to defend implicit bias research or testing. Rather, we contest Cesario's obfuscation of racist and sexist realities in the United States. Cesario misrepresents or ignores data on real-world racism and sexism in an attempt to discredit the assumptions of implicit bias experimentation. His position stands in stark contradiction to decades of research demonstrating how social constructs in the forms of concepts, beliefs, and stereotypes shape action in the context of racism and sexism (Rosa & Díaz, Reference Rosa and Díaz2020; Krieger, Reference Krieger2020; Roberts & Rollins, Reference Roberts and Rollins2020).

Cesario argues that implicit bias tests are invalid because the “subjects” might justifiably elicit biased reactions. He asserts “the behavior of the targets themselves and the cognitive, motivational, and behavioral differences that exist across groups” (sect. 3.2, para. 1) may be what is most salient. He argues that not including these “real” differences between races and sex/genders “may leave experimental participants with no useful information to render a judgment other than the target's social category.” Cesario offers fatal police encounters as an example, ignoring extensive empirical research demonstrating real-world disproportionate violence against and discrimination toward Black individuals by police. He seeks to devalue the reality of these data, suggesting it is the neighborhood context and the behavior of Black individuals that play the dominant role in explaining why Black people are disproportionately shot and killed by police. Cesario states that being more violent and having higher rates of exposure to police by engaging in more violent crime “greatly – if not entirely – accounts for the overall per capita disparities in being fatally shot by police.” This is not accurate in regard to overall crime patterns (FBI UCR, n.d.) or in the fact that police bias against Black individuals is marked and repeatedly demonstrated across multiple geographies, social, economic, and otherwise (Dunham & Petersen, Reference Dunham and Petersen2017; Hehman, Flake, & Calanchini, Reference Hehman, Flake and Calanchini2018; Swencionis & Goff, Reference Swencionis and Goff2017). Cesario fails to take into account that the reason Black individuals encounter police at higher rates is largely because police departments target segregated Black neighborhoods for greater surveillance and intervention (Gordon, Reference Gordon2020). Police violence is structured to impact Black individuals more.

Officers' justifications for shooting to kill an unarmed Black person are often based on a racially biased judgment. Officers defend their lethal actions by claiming they “feared for their life,” often using racial stereotypes to convince a jury that it was “reasonable” to feel afraid. For example, white officer Darren Wilson persuaded a St. Louis County grand jury not to indict him for murder after killing 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. in part by testifying that Brown “looked like a demon” (Waldman, Reference Waldman2014). The U.S. Supreme Court's 1985 decision, Tennessee v. Garner, held that police may use deadly force to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect if the officer has a good-faith belief that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the police officer or others. In the 4 years preceding the decision, “officer under attack” was cited in just 33% of police killings; 20 years later, it was cited 62% of the time, becoming an almost infallible means for police officers to defend themselves (Ralph, Reference Ralph2019).

Cesario does note “demographic groups in the U.S. continued to obtain unequal outcomes,” but states that this is surprising as there is “little overt, official discrimination for several decades (and in places like academia, preferential policies in favor of underrepresented groups), coupled with increasingly egalitarian attitudes.” Cesario's assertion is belied by research demonstrating significant bias and discrimination along racial and sex/gender categories in the academy and across multiple professional contexts without there necessarily being overt/official racism or sexism (Pager & Shepherd, Reference Pager and Shepherd2008; Small & Pager, Reference Small and Pager2020). Cesario's misleading assertion about the “real world” presents a view of the “reality” of racial and sex/gender discrimination in the United States that stretches beyond the structural and intellectual merits of implicit bias tests.

Cesario attempts to avoid the critique we offer by stating that he is only asking the question of whether decision-maker bias produces group disparities in the immediate outcomes of that decision. He acknowledges that “decision-maker bias may enter earlier in the chain of events” – that racism and sexism may enter in at some point, but that decision maker bias in the implicit bias test is not reflective of, or connected to, such processes. Such a position creates an artificial line dividing individual “in the moment” and systemic processes that serves his argument but does not reflect real-world processes. Serious discussion on this topic must engage the scholarship demonstrating systemic bias affects decision-making (e.g., Amutah et al., Reference Amutah, Greenidge, Mante, Munyikwa, Surya, Higginbotham and Aysola2021; Bailey et al., Reference Bailey2021; Beliso De Jesús, Reference Beliso De Jesús2020; Dror et al., Reference Dror, Melinek, Arden, Kukucka, Hawkins, Carter and Atherton2021; Schlosser, Reference Schlosser2013). There may be conceptual problems and methodological weaknesses with implicit bias tests, but it is another thing to argue that implicit bias tests in isolation must explain real-world discriminatory actions and outcomes or they are invalid.

Cesario concludes that his goal is to “correct some of the misleading claims about the human mind that have extended out from academia in the last two decades.” Here is the true rationale for the article – to challenge the recent convergence across the social sciences of recognition of the widespread, systematic, and structuring processes of racism and sexism. A compelling body of research demonstrates that police often act on their racial biases and justify it on racially biased grounds. Rather than deny this reality, we should explore how implicit bias research – and its critics – can center the relationship between structural racism and individual bias.