Review: *Are We Born Racist? New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology*

This book is a few years old and a quick read.  It has three parts, finely diced (I guess) for easier incorporation as supplementary reading into a not-too-demanding freshman seminar.

The book broadly accepts that people are hard-wired to notice race and counsels multiculturalism over colorblindness.  None of the claims seemed very controversial and I don't have any expertise or reason to disbelieve the conclusions.  However, the book was written before Brian Nosek et al blew open the replication crisis in social psychology and over relies on too many of the types of small-sample studies of college grads that have been unreliable to really back up its claims.

Some nuggets:

• "Affluent and educated African Americans were more likely to report discrimination, while the reverse was true for whites."
• In a simulation, white college students playing the role of police were more likely to shoot unarmed black men than unarmed white men, and were less likely to shoot armed white men than armed black men.  Actual police participating in the same simulation did not shoot unarmed black men at a higher rate, but did take longer to decide not to fire.