Professor Keon West has long been interested in the gap between what people think they know about racism and what the science actually shows.
Alongside his academic work, he regularly appears at events like Cheltenham Science Festival, opening up conversations about bias, scientific literacy, and why facts matter even in the most emotionally charged topics.
In this episode, we talk about applying science to racism, the misconceptions that persist, and what happens when research meets real-world audiences.
Image Source: Adobe Stock Images / AYSIA
Transcript
Todd Beanlands:
Hello, I’m Todd – welcome to ResearchPod.
Racism is often discussed through personal stories or political framing, but social psychology asks a different question: what can evidence based studies tell us about how prejudice works? Or, what is the science of racism?
In this episode, we’re joined by Professor Keon West, whose work explores how people understand racism, why misconceptions persist, and how scientific thinking can help make sense of real-world inequalities.
We also consider what public events like Cheltenham Science Festival reveal about how audiences engage with these questions, and how research can inform wider conversations – from everyday interactions to the systems and data models that shape our society.
Professor Keon West:
I’m Keon West. I suppose in terms of my specialism and expertise, I am a professor of social psychology. I think my last full-time post was at the University of London. I do still hold an honorary post at University College London, UCL, and a visiting professor post at the LSE, so the London School of Economics. Although now I mostly work for charities and think tanks, that kind of space, doing research on social psychological things, things that consider the society we live in and how to make it better.
Todd Beanlands:
Brilliant. And I guess because this interview was arranged off the back of Cheltenham Science Festival, I was just wondering if you could, first of all, just tell me about your experience at Cheltenham Science Festival and perhaps festivals in general.
Professor Keon West:
Well, I don’t go to that many festivals, I have to be honest. I’ve never been to Glastonbury. There’s lots of other places I’ve never been. I’m not generally a festival-y person in the traditional sense, in that I really like showers and personal space. I’m not that into drugs, I’ll be completely honest. I’m really not that into it. So there’s not a lot of appeal and there’s quite a few downsides, but the Science Festival was great. I didn’t get to see many other talks, but it was really lovely giving a talk there and interacting with people who I respect and who I admire. I was interviewed by someone who’d written her own book, who was very intelligent, who was very insightful about a whole bunch of other things. And I got to see people who I knew as a child, as scientists, people like Brian Cox. He’s a famous person in his own right, and he’s also promoting a book. So I thought, oh good, I guess this means I’m a real scientist if this space promoting mine.
Todd Beanlands:
It’s funny you mention Glastonbury because there’s quite a lot of presence of science and scientific ideas at now quite mainstream festivals. So at Glastonbury they have a whole stage dedicated to science called the Laboratory Stage.
Professor Keon West:
Maybe I will go, although they still don’t have showers do they? Probably not, actually.
Todd Beanlands:
Yeah. I was just wondering about your thoughts on integrating science and science festivals, perhaps into more mainstream festivals, and whether that’s a good idea.
Professor Keon West:
I think it’s an incredibly good idea. I do think it depends, to some extent, on what people mean. The Science Museum is one of my favourite museums. You go to the Natural History Museum, you go to the British Museum, you go to the Science Museum. I love the Science Museum. I love playing with magnets. I would take my children. I have two sons. We’d play with magnets. We’d play with Rubik’s cubes. We’d make things float around. And I’d really enjoy that.
But sometimes I feel like the science museum is a bit more the effects of science museum or some cool scientific findings museum. And what I really like about science is the science, is how it’s done. And I have a firm belief that other people can like that too. When I tried to pitch my book, The Science of Racism, people actually weren’t that bothered about the racism part. They’re like, oh yeah, sure. You can write a book about racism. Oh, thank you. That’s nice. But they didn’t like the science part. They said, what, experiments? Actual scientific design? No, no, no. That’s incredibly boring. No one wants to hear that. People just want to hear about the time someone called you the N-word. And I thought, no, that’s not what people want. I don’t think so. Or at least it’s what they already have in abundance.
If you want to pick up a book or listen to an interview or watch a podcast or whatever else about someone who was at some point racially abused, there’s thousands of those that I didn’t need to do another one. I can’t imagine anyone in the world would learn something new from finding out that I was called the N-word at some point. We all have been called the N-word at some point. I think what I had to offer was something more interesting, which was an understanding of what science is, how it works, and how we can apply it to even something as seemingly intangible as racism. And that’s something that I think the book aims to do and does from people I’ve sent it to, including other scientists, other social psychologists, and other people in other scientific fields, something that they appreciate about it is how much it reads a bit like books like Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, books that aren’t just focused on saying, here’s what we found, but here’s how we found it. Not just here’s what we know, but here’s how we know it. So that the next time someone tries to shoot you something that’s complete nonsense, you can not only identify that it’s nonsense, but you can know why it’s nonsense. You can figure this out for yourself.
Todd Beanlands:
Going back to what you just said about people being opposed to the idea of science when talking about racism, what misconceptions do you think people have about science and racism, and particularly when it’s together?
Professor Keon West:
Oh, I could write a whole book just about that. So, so many misconceptions people have about science and racism. What I would say is people, by and large, don’t know anything about the science of racism. And that sounds really bad, really critical, but it’s the truth. People not only don’t know about the science of racism, they don’t even know that there is science about racism.
Most people, and this is something my editor said when they brought it up, they’re like, we can’t call your book The Science of Racism because they will assume that you’re a Nazi or a eugenicist. Because the only people who talk about science and racism are racists. And first of all, it’s not true. Actually, there’s some really great books about science and racism, though they might not be entitled that way. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, it does lean a bit into story, a lot more into story than mine, I’ll be completely honest. But there’s also other books like How to Argue with a Racist by Adam Rutherford, which is just about science. It’s literally a scientific book, a biological book But that is a scientific book about race, which is still about the limit to which most people will go. Most people can understand that there’s science about race. And so they’ll think, well, there’s an argument about, are races real scientifically? Some people say yes, some people say no.
Newsflash, if you read Adam Rutherford’s book, How to Argue with a Racist, the answer is no. That you think there’s such a thing as white people or Black people, and depending on where you come from, you think there’s such a thing as, let’s say, Latinos. But none of these categories are real. They are invented categories. They’re not biological. But this is about the level of argument that people are willing to go to. And maybe people are willing to talk about books like The Bell Curve. Are some races more intelligent than others? Again, the answer is no, according to the science, but The problem is, when you say science, the conversation is almost always dominated by pseudoscientific ideas. So what we’re talking about is, does race exist? Are some races more intelligent than others? These are pseudoscientific questions. But there are scientific questions about racism that we don’t even ask. Not only do we not know the answers to them, we don’t even ask them.
So every Black History Month or so, depending on where you live, this will be every October, every February, or wherever it is for you, you’ll see stats floating around. I’m sure you’ve seen these, Will. You’ll see stats like black mothers are five times as likely to die in childbirth, or black children are three to five times as likely to be suspended or excluded from school. So we’ve all seen stats like these. And these are the things we can all comfortably agree on. But then when you say, well, why are they more likely to die? Why are black mothers more likely to die in childbirth? Why are black children more likely to be excluded from school? Suddenly everyone pretends, oh, we couldn’t possibly know that. We couldn’t possibly figure that out. That’s too complicated a question. It’s too nuanced. There’d be no way of proving it. There’s no way to do that. And that is a lie. That is a total lie. Not only can we know why these things happen, we can weed out nonsense explanations like, oh, well, Black mothers just have inferior genes or Black children are fundamentally harder to teach for some interior reason. And we can prove the existence of racism. We can prove that black mothers are treated worse than white mothers, even when they do exactly the same things. We can prove that black children face harder punishments, even when they behave in exactly the same way. We can prove that teachers have lower expectations of black children, even when they’ve done literally nothing wrong. And we can do all of this with scientific methods, as clear and as unassailable as the scientific methods that we use to tell you whether or not a vitamin will make you feel better, to tell you whether or not a vegetable will make you grow taller.
We can do these things. And most people don’t know that we can do these things. They haven’t even considered the idea, which I think is such a shame. And one thing that the book does is it allows you to consider that idea. How can we test racism scientifically? And when we do that, what do we find?
Todd Beanlands:
Going a little bit back to Cheltenham Science Festival and events and outreach in general, I was wondering as well about whether you think having conversations, like you said, you’re on a panel talking with someone, whether that’s useful in better understanding racism?
Professor Keon West:
I think so. I do think panels serve their purpose. To be honest, I think they all serve their purpose. I think even those very short form videos that we’re all supposed to hate so much because they suck our attention away and have provably really negative effects on our mental health and attention spans, those portrait videos that only last about 60 seconds, even they can convey information and interesting and accurate information. And the same is true for a five minute interview or one hour long podcast. or a whole book, or a panel discussion like at the Science Festival. I think these all do different things. And I think the important thing to do is to recognize what they can all do.
The idea that you could be as educated about the science of racism from a 60-second scrolling video as you could from a 250-page book, that’s an obvious fallacy. That’s clearly a problem. But also the idea that a book could grab your attention as quickly or have an impact on you as quickly as a 60-second video, that’s also a fallacy. And I think we have to understand where everything sits. I love having these discussions at these kinds of events. I love it. I love that people get to ask me questions, because obviously I couldn’t include everything in the book. I wrote as much as I could. But if I wrote everything I knew in the book, it would be thousands of pages and much less interesting. And so I don’t think people would want to read that.
I think some focus, some editing is required. And people get to ask me new things. They get to teach me new ideas. I get to learn from them. And I really enjoy that. And I think an opportunity to hear someone who’s written a book say a story, to hear the tone of their voice, to be physically, biologically present with them in that space, it teaches you something new. I wouldn’t say it teaches you something that replaces a book, but it does teach you something new.
Todd Beanlands:
I was wondering as well whether due to there being quite a few misconceptions around science and racism, what sort of reactions you’ve had when you’ve been speaking publicly or speaking with an audience?
Professor Keon West:
I’ve had many reactions and some of them have surprised me. I’ve learned to grow accustomed to them more often as they come out over and over again. So what I’ve learned is that there are some things that you can’t just tell people, that you have to ease them into it. So one of the things that comes out in the book is the uselessness of colorblindness as a way of dealing with racism.
What’s interesting is that for me, all the information in the book is scientific information. So you run an experiment, you find a result, you report the result. That’s how scientists do things. For a long time, for example, people thought that things fell to the ground because they were being pulled to their natural place, so that you want stone in a particular layer and water in a particular layer and air in a particular layer. And that’s a nice view, but it doesn’t actually account for the ways that we know gravity bends space-time around us now. It just doesn’t lead to the correct prediction. So when you change your model of the world, you get a world in which, for example, light will bend around something because you know it’s bending spacetime. And that sounds really complicated, but the point is that when you change your model of the world, you just update your information.
That’s how science works. When you find out that actually Pluto isn’t a planet, you don’t go up in arms and say, well, I’ve been taught my whole life Pluto’s a planet. I’m really angry at you now, scientists, for telling me it’s not. People don’t get mad at you in the same way. At least I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong. If you’re a scientist who has to talk about Pluto to an angry audience, do correct me. But I find that when you’re talking about racism, people do that. Their feelings are so caught up in it that if you tell them something that they don’t believe or they don’t want to believe, the second they get into that emotional state, facts very quickly cease to be something that hold their attention. And so when I tell people, for example, that colorblindness isn’t a good technique, people have got furious. They said, oh, you’re part of the problem. You’re making things worse. And then I calmly try to show them a graph, but they don’t want to see the graph.
At this point, they’re way beyond seeing a graph, because essentially what they’ve heard is that a strategy they’ve been applying their whole lives, that they were using as a shield to say, I’m a good person, is not good and has made them a bad person. and there is such a strong reaction to it that in some sense I could see why some editors would say about the book, I don’t know if people want this calm explanation of what works and what doesn’t because they’re so emotionally invested. But my response to that is we can’t have books that are all just emotional investment as well. At some point, we do need some facts. And actually, I think a lot of people are really, really hungry for that. They’re really hungry to pick up something that isn’t just another person who’s matching their emotional intensity with their own emotional intensity.
So we’re both now shouting at each other. I’m not interested in shouting at anyone. I think part of the essence of science, and of the Science Festival, and of the book, The Science of Racism, is really that kind of calm, measured, reasonable, this is what we know because this is what happens. And that takes precedence over what you think. You can have desires to believe what you want about anything in science, about climate change, or about evolution, or about whatever you want. But at some point, if we’re doing science, the facts have to take precedence. And that’s the kind of vibe I wanted to bring. Can we calmly discuss the facts? Because the facts have been there for a century, and for some bizarre reason, we haven’t been discussing them.
Todd Beanlands:
Talking about the objective nature of science and using facts, I was wondering also about data modelling and AI at the moment and how present that is and how that might be able to change how we can talk about racism?
I think data modeling is a tool. I think it’s a potentially useful tool. I think AI is a tool as well, again, potentially useful. I think all tools have to be controlled. There’s a saying, at least they used to say it when I was a child, I don’t know if they say it now, but they say fire is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. And that if you allow your tools to run amok over you, you’re setting yourself up for danger.
For the most part, I never consider in the book advanced data modeling or AI. And there’s a reason for that. The reason is we are not yet as a society at the level of discussing those things. I once gave a talk about the book. And actually, it was a talk I gave in Oxford. So I did my doctorate at Oxford University and I was invited back to talk about the book, which was a real honour because I used to see people in that bookstore on Broad Street, the main street in Oxford, and think, oh, if I could only be one of those. And then I was one of those. And then I thought, oh, gosh, now I want to do something else. And I realised people can never be made happy. Happiness is a treadmill, but that’s a divergence. But I was sitting there in that room talking to this person, and she said, wow, this is very complicated. Could we solve this with AI? And my response to her was, we could solve this with pen and paper. We could have solved this 50 years ago.
We don’t need AI. And I kind of think AI and data modeling is too advanced. When I’m talking about the levels of stuff we’re talking about here, we are literally saying people do not know whether racism is still happening. there is still a debate in our society, and not just at lower levels with people who don’t have power, people who will not affect anything. I’m saying heads of state, people who are important, people who are making decisions, do not know if when two people behave exactly the same way, but one of them’s white and one of them’s black, Will one of them be more likely to be tased by the police or shot by the police? People don’t know that. And scientists do know the answer to that. And the answer is yes. People don’t know whether if two people who have exactly the same CV, but one of them’s white, one of them’s black, submit their CVs to the same jobs.
People at this time cannot tell you whether they’ll get different callback rates or the same callback rates. But scientists have known for 50 years the answer to that question. And the answer is they will get different rates. Not only that they’ll be different, we can tell you the numbers of how different they’ll be and how different they’d be if one was Asian, how different they’d be if one was South versus East Asian. We can tell you these numbers, and most people do not realize we have those facts. But we don’t need AI or complex data modeling to tell you that for exactly the same CV, a black Caribbean person will get 50% fewer callback rates or be paid a similar amount less than a white person who’s equally qualified.
I think the idea that we need data modeling to give such a simple percentage is trying to cross the street with a jet engine. And I’m not saying that it’ll never be useful. In my own research, I’ve done some fairly complex data modeling At least the most complex stuff I did was some structural equation modeling, which I know if you’re a very fancy economist or physicist, you’ll laugh at the idea that this is what psychologists think is fancy. But to the average person, structural equation modeling is quite fancy. But most experiments don’t require that. Most experiments you can literally describe with percentages. They will be 50% less likely to get a callback despite being perfectly equally qualified. We don’t need data modeling. We don’t need AI. We don’t need supercomputers to recognize that problem or to fix it. We can do all of that with pen and paper.
Todd Beanlands:
Do you think having more of a human touch and using storytelling is more important than those hard facts and figures?
Professor Keon West:
I actually don’t know. I think there’s a space for both. I think one of the things I set out to do was to write a book without that human touch, without that storytelling. And I hope I have succeeded to some extent in that I hope people can read the book and still have no idea who I plan to vote for. They can read the book and have no idea what my emotional feelings about all sorts of things are. People can read it and have no idea about my political orientations or my sexual history or any of that stuff, I don’t think that’s interesting. I mean, maybe some people want to know that, but I can’t imagine why.
I wrote it much like, it’s going to be a ridiculous comparison because I’m nothing like this person’s level of greatness, but you know, you don’t read Stephen Hawking’s books about the universe, about black holes, and ask yourself, oh, I wonder who he was sleeping with, or I wonder what he thinks about this politician, but that’s not the point. It’s a scientific book. The book is about the facts, and I think that’s important. I do recognize, however, that stories hook people in, that it’s hard to connect with just a graph. That is hard.
But I also think that we have done science a disservice by pretending it’s not a story. I think it is a story, and I think it’s an incredibly important one. I think when I tell you, for example, about a study in which people got real teachers, actual teachers, people whose job it was to take care of our children and to guide them, and put them in a science-y booth with eye-tracking glasses, and then either told them just to watch a classroom full of children or to watch out for the challenging children, the children who are probably going to be behaving badly, This is a story, because you want to know what happens at the end of this story. You want to know which children they look at when they’re being told to look out for the bad children. And when I tell you that, even though all the children were behaving exactly the same way, even though all of them were being exactly as good as each other, that the teachers who were told to look out for the bad children hyperfixated on the Black children, and in particular the Black boys, that’s a story. And that’s a story if you, like me, have ever been a Black boy, or if you, like me and my wife, have a Black boy that you need to worry about, or if you care about any of these people, ever. If you’ve been in a classroom with Black children, which almost all of us have, this is a story that matters. And if you’re a teacher or someone who manages teachers, it’s a story that matters a lot.
It tells us about what we can expect from the society we live in, and it tells us the important things we have to worry about and that we have to change. And I don’t think that it has to be a story of, well, I was five once and a teacher told me off. I think that story, to me, is actually less interesting than the story of the experiment with the eye-tracking glasses. Because when I tell you about me, maybe I was just a bad child. And that is a reasonable hypothesis. But that story with the eyeglasses takes that hypothesis away. It shows you that we know what’s happening. And it’s not just that someone was a bad child. When you’re a perfectly good child, if you want your teacher to expect good things from you, it’s still advisable not to be a Black boy.
Todd Beanlands:
Like you said, racism is inherently built into a lot of these systems, like the schooling system. And I was wondering about your thoughts on whether, for example, auditing these systems or having more rigorous investigations into this system are going to be useful in breaking that down?
Professor Keon West:
I think sometimes, absolutely, it would be useful to audit these systems, have more rigorous investigations, have more rigorous controls. And I’d say there’s a lot of research that does it. The only thing I’d want to steer away from, because I hear what you’re saying, I hear the goal is to build a system in which if you do racist stuff, then you’re punished. I’m like, that’s fine. I’m not opposed to that, actually. I’m really quite in favor of it. Please don’t do racist stuff or else you’ll be punished. But I also think this is generally not how we approach problems that we have in life.
So if you lived in a neighborhood where there were loads of burglaries and your only solution was to really punish the burglars? I’d say, yes, sure. Your heart, I guess, is in the right place. But have you considered just locking the doors and improving the security around the houses, that solutions that prevent the burglaries from happening are probably better than solutions that allow them to continue happening and then punish the burglars really horribly? which is not because I’m really in favour of burglars as a societal group, I just don’t think it’s the most efficient way forward. I think if you just lock the doors, then actually on some level I can stop caring about who is a burglar in their heart. I just know the things won’t be stolen. And I do think that we often overlook that as a potential strategy when it comes to dealing with racism. I think sometimes we’re very after the fact, punishment oriented. And I think that’s fine. Some people should be punished because people do bad things. And if they do bad things to you, you could want them to be punished. But I think on many levels, many people would just rather the peaceful, quiet of a life in which the bad things never happened. And that we can do structurally as well.
Todd Beanlands:
Just based off the name of your book, The Science of Racism, I was wondering what other fields could benefit from a scientific study?
Professor Keon West:
Well, I think they all could, although I think more to the point, I think very directly, At the end of the book, I do discuss the fact that there can and should be a book called The Science of Sexism, and I know there are many books that are close to this. So I think Invisible Woman, that’s a good book, comes very close to that. I think there are lots of other books that talk about how we can understand other things like sexism, or I hate the word homophobia because I think it inaccurately portrays something that’s a form of prejudice. I just like prejudice, anti-LGBT prejudice. But there could be books about that, the science of this kind of prejudice or that kind of prejudice, and I think that’s important.
So I think they all could. But what I think would be, for me, even better would be if people could understand the more umbrella idea, which is that even if these books never get written, The science is already there. We have been studying for decades what happens when two people have exactly the same CV, but one is a man and one is a woman. We know what happens. We know that the man gets offered more money and we know how much more money and we know how much more depending on the job he’s in. And we know how much more depending on what level of management he’s in. We know these things, and we have known them for a really long time. We know what happens when two people who are otherwise exactly the same teach the same clas, but one is supposed to be heterosexual and one is supposed to be gay. We know how the students respond differently, and it’s not good. We’ve seen it. And so you can wait for someone to write the book. I probably won’t. I’m a black man, so I get to write the science of racism, I suppose, but I don’t get to write the science of sexism. or the science of anti-gay prejudice.
I’m a heterosexual black man, as much as heterosexuality is a coherent term, which I’m not going to get into. But if it is, sure, that’s what I am. So I don’t get to write those books. But if someone does, read them, of course. But if no one does, you don’t have to wait for them. The papers exist. Just get them. They exist there. Go find them, read them. The knowledge has existed for decades. And I think if we can break out of the idea that the knowledge is inaccessible or impossible, or these kinds of things could never be investigated scientifically, I think if we can get away from that fallacious idea, we will do ourselves such a great service.
Todd Beanlands:
Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Professor Keon West:
Thank you.
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