Keon West is professor of social psychology at the University of London. He was born in Trinidad, grew up in Jamaica, and studied in the US and France before coming to the UK as a Rhodes scholar in 2006 to do a doctorate at Oxford University.
Why do you think we need a book about the science of racism?
What I find frustrating, shocking and worrying is that as a society, when we talk about racism we express feelings about it and emotions and opinions, but our conversations aren’t based on facts – or science. Not only that, we make the mistake of misinterpreting our feelings as if they were facts. This leads nowhere: one person will say: “Well, I don’t see any racism, so racism is over.” And another person will say: “Well, someone didn’t hire me for a job, so racism is alive and well.” Both of these people are wrong. The second person is right in terms of the conclusion they’ve come to, but in terms of the methodology they’ve used to arrive at that conclusion, they’re both horribly wrong. You can’t tell that racism is or isn’t happening because you know a Black person who happens to earn a lot of money, or you know a Black person who wasn’t hired for a job. Neither of those anecdotes prove anything.
