You’re at a house party off-campus—perhaps you’re coming out of the bathroom after finally breaking the seal or you’re walking out of the kitchen, drink in hand—and you notice a black woman who looks much more wasted than you do, being led into a bedroom by a relatively sober guy. Being the good feminist you are, you register that the situation looks suspect. What do you do?
According to a new study, white women aren’t likely to intervene and help. The study, published in The Psychology Of Women Quarterly, posed a similar scenario to 160 white female undergraduates. The students were randomly assigned whether the intoxicated woman in the story had a “distinctively black name"—LaToya—or an ambiguous name—Laura, as a control.
When asked to report on their intent to intervene and how they viewed the situation and the potential victim, the white undergrads said they would be less likely to help when they perceived the woman who was at risk of being sexually assaulted was black, because they felt “less personal responsibility.” Secondarily, they also “perceived that [the black victim] experienced more pleasure in the pre-assault situation” at a slightly higher rate than the control group. (The control group given the scenario with the non-racialized name uniformly perceived the victim to be white.)
“We found that although white students correctly perceived that black women were at risk in a pre-assault situation, they tended not to feel as personally involved in the situation,” the researchers at SUNY Geneseo, Jennifer Katz and Christine Merrilees, said in an interview with PsyPost. In other words, “despite their shared status as women, white female bystanders in the current study may have felt that a Black woman’s plight was not as personally relevant because race has a more powerful effect than gender on intent to intervene and feelings of responsibility to intervene,” they write in the study.
Previous research has found that white people, in general, are less likely to help black victims. A 2008 study on racial bias in helping behavior troublingly found that “as [a situation’s] level of emergency increased, the speed and quality of help white participants offered to black victims relative to white victims decreased.” When the victim was black, the white participants also viewed the situation as less severe.
“So what can we learn from this study? On the data side, we see that everything is proceeding as planned. Nobody’s paying $50 for a burger at McDonald’s, or $16 for a can of tuna at Safeway. Employers wish their profits were higher, and workers are glad they got a raise, but they wish they made more money. Three years after Seattle started down the road to $15, everything is as it should be. Those apocalyptic claims of destruction and business closures haven’t been proven true. One thing the study didn’t explain was why the sky didn’t fall as promised. Why weren’t workers laid off in droves, or replaced with robots? Why didn’t prices skyrocket? Why does Seattle have more restaurants now than at any point in its history? It’s because those workers who saw a raise now have more money to spend in the city around them. Those restaurant workers are eating in more restaurants. They’re buying more groceries. They’re buying more clothes and cars. That increased consumer demand is creating jobs, and more than paying for the increased minimum wage. The $15 minimum wage established a positive feedback loop that created growth in Seattle by including more people in the economy. In other words, it worked exactly as intended.”
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