Implicit Racial Bias Across Ethnoracial Groups in Canada and the United States and Black Mental Health

Public Significance Statement To date, few researchers have explored the impact of implicit biases on the health of people of color outside of a medical setting. Fewer still have considered the relationship between implicit biases held by the general population, both White and non-White, and Black peoples' mental health. This study is among the first to focus on the measurable existence of implicit racial biases within ethnoracial groups toward Black persons in the United States and Canada, as well as the possible impacts of implicit biases on the mental health of Black people in America. Black Canadians and Americans experience disparities in access to quality mental health care and mental health overall. Implicit biases are unconscious, automatically activated attitudes and stereotypes, with the potential to yield racist behaviors. To date, research has focused on health provider bias and resultant consequences in the decision-making/treatment of racialized groups. Little has been done to characterize implicit anti-Black biases within White and non-White members of the general population or examine the relationship between biases and Black people's mental wellness. Black-White Implicit Association Test (BW-IAT; n = 450,185) data were used to detect the presence of implicit biases within 10 ethnoracial groups and compare Bias Scores between Canada and the United States. Mean BW-IAT Bias Scores were also assessed against participant explicit biases using warmth ratings and the Modern Racism Scale (MRS). Finally, state-level BW-IAT scores were used to predict state-based Black American mental health-related mortality using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging ONline Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) data set. Findings indicated: (a) the most ethnoracial groups have anti-Black implicit biases; (b) Canadian and American implicit biases are near identical; (c) explicit and implicit Bias Scores are weakly related, and Canadian and American explicit biases are near identical; and (d) implicit bias predicts poor mental health outcomes for Black Americans, even when controlling for explicit bias and White outcomes. This work underscores the need to dismantle ideologies of White superiority and the resultant oppressive attitudes, stereotypes, and behaviors present in the general population. This work also calls for accessible, province-level, race-based mental health data on underserved groups.