A new brain-imaging study led by Columbia University has found racial stereotypes can prompt people to see objects in ways that conform to those stereotypes, such as mistaking an innocuous object held by a Black man as a weapon.
Using MRI technology and neural decoding techniques, the study authors asked a sample of participants to sort images as either a weapon or a tool. These images were immediately followed by a picture of a Black man’s or a White man’s face. The participants showed milliseconds of delay in categorizing tools as tools rather than weapons when the image was followed by a Black man’s face. The more that the participants’ brains shifted toward a weapon reaction when they saw the tool followed by a Black man’s face, the longer the delay they experienced before successfully identifying it as a tool. In some cases, the subjects misidentified the tools as weapons altogether.
“In the real world, police officers routinely encounter stressful and ambiguous scenarios that require rapid decision-making, and samples of police officers often exhibit racial bias in these same tasks,” the authors write. “The disproportionate shooting of Black people by police officers is larger in U.S. cities where implicit anti-Black attitudes and the association between Black people and weapons are stronger, factors predictive of biased responding in the weapon bias task. Thus, it is plausible that the biasing effect of racial context on ventral-visual representations of objects documented here may play a role in police officers’ real-world encounters with racial minorities.”
They continue, “Overall, this work points to additional perceptually driven pathways that may have the power to reduce the biasing effects of one’s preconceived notions and racial stereotypes on object identification.”
The study also included authors from the National University of Singapore and Princeton University.
It’s October 2025, and yet another White academic institution has literally published another haphazard so-called research article trying to rationalize White American racism that’s inculcated in this society’s DNA from the Constitution, local, state and federal laws, music, film, education, literature, medicine, to especially law enforcement.
As a result, the mere physical presence of a Black male in the public or private “White spaces” will be viewed as weapon and let alone an actual one. The facts and record have shown that so-called White Americans has been and will continue to be the most violent people within the US context and abroad.
More importantly, the South Korean author Dong Won Oh and author from India, Henna I. Vartiainen are not even remotely qualified to speak on American racism given the fact they hail from countries where the majority of the population aspire to be White.