Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, The Good News Guy

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, The Good News Guy

Let’s be honest. Even here in the East Bay—where enlightened, egalitarian liberals practically grow on well-protected, ancient redwood trees—we fear that somewhere deep down lurks a pocket of deep-seated, unconscious prejudice. Maybe we crossed the street that time we saw the Naked Guy ambling toward us, even though we proudly support the rights of the unclothed. Or maybe we secretly wish there were a few less nose rings and dreadlocks elbowing us in the aisles at Berkeley Bowl.

But what if we were put to the test and our hidden biases were exposed? God forbid we be placed in a room with, say, a stranger of a different race and made to answer questions designed to unmask our prejudices. Yikes! For sure, we would start to sweat.

Such was the presumption that psychology professor Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton sought to examine in a study about cross-race relations he conducted in 2008. Putting two strangers of different races in a room together for three one-hour sessions, he had them ask each other a series of increasingly personal questions. Before and after each meeting, Mendoza-Denton measured their levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, to see whether these interactions caused an increase in anxiety.

Although there was initial evidence of anxiety, to Mendoza-Denton’s surprise, what he found was just the opposite. After each meeting, in which questions escalated from “What’s your favorite color?” and “Where’s the best place you’ve gone on vacation?” to “If you were to die tomorrow, what would be the thing you would most regret not doing and why?”, the subjects’ cortisol levels started to drop. Significantly.

“The study starts out with the premise that cross-race interaction is difficult and can be awkward and tense both for discriminated groups and groups that think they may be prone to prejudice,” explains Mendoza-Denton, an associate professor of psychology and director of the university’s Relationships and Social Cognition Lab. “People have automatic associations that translate to physiological responses. Like a sombrero can be associated with laziness. People worry that even if they don’t believe this, it will pop up with their cross-race partner. But we found that by manipulating these friendships with focused tasks, the barriers broke down very quickly. It was very surprising and encouraging.”

Mendoza-Denton, who was born in Mexico City and has lived in the Ivory Coast and Thailand, has forged his career on debunking theories about race relations and inborn prejudice ranging from presumptions about ethnicity and academic performance to the negative health implications of social class stereotyping. In 2002, after receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under famed personality theory psychologist Walter Mischel, he came to Cal and began exploring the concept that prejudice is not a fixed concept but a relative one. In other words, he says, people can learn how not to be bigoted.

“There’s an emphasis in American society that what’s in your DNA is who you are,” says Mendoza-Denton. “‘I’m like this because I’m born racist or because that’s how I was trained.’ I opt to think that’s not true. I don’t believe that we have a gene or allele [an alternate or mutated gene] that translates to a certain outcome.”

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Mendoza-Denton went on to test his theories both on paper and in the classroom. In 2010, he collaborated with Greater Good magazine editor Jason Marsh, writer Jeremy Adam Smith, and Cal’s Greater Good Science Center on the book, Are We Born Racist? The provocatively titled anthology delves into the nature of prejudice and what we can do and are doing to overcome it, with essays and insights from writers, scientists, psychologists, and even Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“We got a lot of people reading the title and saying, ‘How can you say that people are born racist?’ People assume that the answer to the question posed by the book is either one way or the other. And it’s not. The answer is very complicated. It’s a beginning of a conversation about cross-differences and perceptions.”

Positive response to the book led to a blog on Psychology Today, in which Mendoza-Denton tackles hot-button topics ranging from “Does Rap Belong in the White House’s Celebration of American Poetry?” to “Racism Against Whites: What’s the Problem?”

His biggest incubator, however, has been the classroom, where for the past eight years he has taught an undergraduate class, Stigma and Prejudice, for which he received the American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award in 2009. Students often come into the class with the idea that bias and prejudice are immutable, he says, but usually leave with very different views. Combining scientific research, statistical studies, and activities that promote cross-race friendships, Mendoza-Denton takes to task accepted notions of things like test achievement gaps and intellectual performance among different racial groups, both of which he contends are malleable given the right circumstances.

The differences in math test scores between men and women, for instance, can be overcome by simply reframing the perceived purpose of the test. In a study where subjects were told that the test was designed to show gender differences, women did not perform as well as men. But framed as simply a measure of math skills, the differences were erased.

This year he introduced a final class project in which students conducted seminars and dialogues in 30 different classrooms on a range of topics related to class, gender, sexual orientation, race, and religion. He considers this unusual final exam the highlight of his career so far.

“We had full attendance, despite the fact that no one was monitoring. I loved the idea that 225 people came out of this much more comfortable with people’s differences, a little less reticent,” says Mendoza-Denton. “I feel like we’re a long way from being a post-racial society even in places like Berkeley. But the motivation is changing. We want to be better than that. People come to my class because they’re interested in addressing this very difficult issue. I feel like maybe we aren’t changing the world, but we’re changing the campus one person at a time.”

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San Francisco journalist Bonnie Wach’s writing has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. She last wrote for The East Bay Monthly on vegetarian food pioneer Mollie Katzen.

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