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The Science of Contempt— What the Brain Reveals
Before we talk about politics or the media, let’ s start with what happens in the human brain. In 2011, psychologist Lasana Harris, then at Princeton, published a study that would become an uncomfortable benchmark: When subjected to functional MRI scans, non-Black subjects showed significantly reduced activation in the medial prefrontal cortex— an area linked to mentalization, that is, the ability to attribute mental states to others— when shown photographs of Black homeless people, compared to white homeless people. In other words: a partial, automatic, and often unconscious dehumanization.
That same year, Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt published her work on the phenomenon of“ racial deindividuation”: police officers, subjected to subliminal tests, associated Black faces with images of weapons more quickly than white faces. The association was not the product of conscious hatred; it was the result of years of cultural, media, and institutional conditioning.
«“ Black people are perceived as suffering less and needing less care— and that perception kills.”— Dr. Kelly Hoffman, University of Virginia, PNAS, 2016
Flashmag! Edition 172 Mai 2026
The study by Hoffman and his colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was even more striking: medical students mistakenly believed that Black patients had thicker skin, less sensitive nerve endings, and blood that clotted more quickly. These myths were directly inherited from the pseudoscience of 18th-century slavery— and were influencing their pain medication prescriptions in the 21st century.
Key Point: Race as an Economic Tool The concept of the“ Black race” as an inferior category is neither universal nor eternal. It was constructed between the 15th and 17th centuries to justify the mass enslavement of human beings on plantations in the New World.
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