Surely You Jest! Study Finds That Whites on a Psychological Level Perceive Blacks to Be Superhuman! Really?

OK...this can't be real but it certainly explains the awkwardness and fetishization.   According to a recent study found in Social Psychological and Personality Science, some Whites on a psychologically associative level, perceive Blacks as having superhuman abilities.  Here's an excerpt from New York Magazine pertaining to this phenomenon:

These are weird findings, to be sure, and they run contrary to what we think of when we think of racism. While most people are familiar with the idea of seeing different ethnic or religious groups as subhuman, the researchers write that "the phenomenon of superhumanization has received virtually no empirical attention in psychology." So what should we make of the fact that white people appear to "implicitly and explicitly superhumanize" black people? The authors state that more work is needed, but they suggest that superhumanization bias could help explain why black patients are undertreated for pain, for example, or why "people consider Black juveniles to be more 'adult' than White juveniles when judging culpability."


To read the New York piece in its entirety, click on the link below (again...really though?):

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/11/white-people-think-black-people-are-magical.html