Bennett Students Attend the Anna Julia Cooper Lecture

Psychology majors and honor students from Bennett College attended the recent 2015 Anna Julia Cooper lecture, featuring Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt.  The event, held on the campus of Wake Forest University, brings annually to the Anna Julia Cooper Center a distinguished scholar, activist, or artist to address the university and broader community.

A social psychologist at Stanford University, Dr. Eberhardt spoke on the subject, “Protecting and Policing Black Lives in the 21st Century.”  Dr. Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—she has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice.

Dr. Eberhardt’s research not only shows that police officers are more likely to identify African American faces than white faces as criminal, she further shows that the race-crime association leads people to attend more closely to crime related imagery.