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Abstract Explicitly prejudiced attitudes against Black Americans have declined gradually since the 1960s. Yet racial disparities and racial discrimination remain significant problems in the United States. How could discrimination and disparate outcomes remain constant even while racial prejudice decreased? Two prominent explanations have emerged to explain these puzzling trends. Sociologists have proposed that disparities and discrimination are perpetuated by systemic racism, or the policies, practices, and societal structures that disadvantage some racial groups compared with others. Simultaneously, psychologists have proposed that implicit biases may sustain discrimination even in the absence of explicit prejudice. In this essay, we explore newly discovered connections between systemic racism and implicit bias, how they challenge traditional views to reorient our understanding of implicit bias, and how they shed new light on strategies to reduce bias. 

Implicit racial bias remains widespread, even among individuals who explicitly reject prejudice. One reason for the persistence of implicit bias may be that it is maintained through structural and historical inequalities that change slowly. We investigated the historical persistence of implicit bias by comparing modern implicit bias with the proportion of the population enslaved in those counties in 1860. Counties and states more dependent on slavery before the Civil War displayed higher levels of pro-White implicit bias today among White residents and less pro-White bias among Black residents. These associations remained significant after controlling for explicit bias. The association between slave populations and implicit bias was partially explained by measures of structural inequalities. Our results support an interpretation of implicit bias as the cognitive residue of past and present structural inequalities.