Can dogs be racist?
A story went viral in August, 2019, as it involved the Catholic church, a black woman and the priest’s German Shepherd dog known as Caesar.
LaShundra Allen arrived with her co-worker Emily Weaver (who is white) for what was supposed to be her first day of cleaning Reverand Kowal’s rectory.
Weaver was quitting and was showing Allen around as her replacement, when Allen was barred from entering the rectory by the church secretary.
She explained that “Father Jacek’s dog is kinda racist”.
Allen made a racial discrimination complaint to the Diocese of Memphis, and after several weeks, they responded that it wasn’t discrimination as it was done for her safety as the church believed the dog was specifically hostile towards black people.
A question was asked by researchers: Is it possible that dogs can develop prejudice towards a specific racial group?
Carlee Beth Hawkins of the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois, Springfield and her co-author Alexia Jo Vandiver set out to answer whether or not dogs could be racist.
According to Psychology Today, the research involved two internet-based studies on the matter, which asked 2,349 dog owners who reported their races as White and 201 Black/African American dog owners how strongly they preferred white people over black people or vice versa.
The basic hypothesis for the research was that dogs are not born with any innate predispositions to disliking any particular race, as the problem rests with their caregivers who have unconscious or conscious bias that the dogs respond to.
The second measure was that they asked the dog owners how frequently their dogs showed positive or negative behaviours towards black or white people during the past six months.
The findings showed that white people reported that their dogs showed more positive behaviours towards white people and more negative behaviours towards black people.
The effects were stronger in people whose implicit behaviour and attitudes were negative towards black people.
However, as the authors point out, part of this effect could be due to the fact that if a person has biases against a group of individuals, they will be less inclined to socialise with them.
This means that the dog’s negative behaviour towards people of colour or vice versa could be to unfamiliarity on the dog’s behalf.
It’s been well known that dogs are able to read emotions from their caregiver, but it also appears that dogs are modelling their behaviour after what they see in the actions of their owners.
So yes, dogs are able to be racist, but they are only modelling the behaviour of their owners. Racist owner, racist dog.