Multi-disciplinary Workshop on Race and Police

Professor Goff is a nationally recognized expert in contemporary forms of racial bias and discrimination, as well as identity-based inequality across multiple domains including gender, sexuality, class, and ableness.   He is a prolific researcher investigating the dynamics of stereotype threat, stigma, interracial conflict, and mental representations related to prejudice.  In his recent work, he has sought to understand the role of race in relations between police officers and the communities they serve, and this interest led him to co-found the Consortium of Police Leadership in Equity, By facilitating innovative research collaborations between law enforcement agencies and world-class social scientists, the Consortium “seeks to improve issues of equity–particularly racial and gender equity–in policing both within law enforcement agencies and between agencies and the communities they serve.”
 
Professor Goff’s workshop will examine how one explains and addresses persistent racial disparities in light of the perceived  strides in reducing explicit racial prejudice.  Common social psychological wisdom explains this disconnect by insisting that racial prejudice has merely "gone underground," that prejudice is still responsible for inequality but is now more subtly expressed.  Yet this formulation seems hollow to Professor Goff--and worse, misleading.  In this presentation, he will discuss his research on racial bias in law enforcement and how it might reveal a competing approach to the common wisdom.   His hope is that the framework of this research might reveal how social science can be used not just as a tool to understand inequality but as a tool for remedying it.

Our library features three papers written by Professor Goff:

• “Ain’t I a Woman?”: Towards an Intersectional Approach to Person Perception and Group-based Harms
• Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences
• The Space Between Us: Stereotype Threat and Distance in Interracial Contexts

This workshop is part of a series sponsored by the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School.  The Center responds to the urgent need for new frameworks and approaches to address structural inequalities and advance new models of citizenship within social institutions. The Center brings together researchers and practitioners to jointly build capacity to reduce inequalities and barriers to participation, and develop conditions to enable individuals and institutions to realize their potential by examining and scaling innovation.