Educated Black Men Remembered as ‘Whiter’
▻http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/01/educated_black_men_remembered_as_whiter.html
If you happen to be intellectually successful and #black, your peers may remember your complexion as being a little bit lighter than it actually is, a new study published on Wednesday in SAGE Open has found.
The article, “When an ’Educated’ Black Man Becomes Lighter in the Mind’s Eye: Evidence for a Skin Tone Memory Bias,” finds that instead of crushing stereotypes, educated black individuals may actually be remembered as “whiter” than they are and thus perceived as “exceptions to their race,” enforcing perceptions about race and intelligence, Eureka Alert reports.
"When a Black stereotypic expectancy is violated (herein, encountering an educated Black male), this culturally incompatible information is resolved by distorting this person’s skin tone to be lighter in memory and therefore to be perceived as “Whiter,” the main researcher, Avi Ben-Zeev, writes in the study.
It’s what the authors refer to as “skin tone memory bias.”