Leading the Charge: A Look Inside the Behavior Analysis in Practice Emergency Series of Publications on Systemic Racism and Police Brutality

Abstract

This article introduces the “ Behavior Analysis in Practice Emergency Series of Publications on Systemic Racism and Police Brutality.” After the murder of George Floyd, the behavior analytic community was charged to respond in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King’s challenge to social scientists. The charge of Dr. King was to explain real life phenomena negatively affecting the Black community. This series covered a wide range of topics with the intent of creating solutions that may be used to address remnants of the overarching impact of systemic racism and anti-Blackness. In this editorial, we provide an overview of the major themes of the accepted articles, some personal accounts of the editorial team, context for the special issue, discuss the contributions of the included articles, and a discussion of the areas in need of further work.

Training healthcare professionals to discriminate between examples and non‐examples of racial microaggressions

“…Unfortunately, these types of analyses have not been applied to the issue of microaggressions. A recent review of the behavior analysis literature highlights a growing but still relatively small number of studies examining the prevalence of racism and ways to intervene to decrease the intensity of racist views and actions (Gingles et al., 2022; Jimenez‐Gomez & Beaulieu, 2022; Levy et al., 2022; Matsuda et al., 2020). As the field of Applied Behavior Analysis works toward establishing cultural competencies, research is needed to examine effective teaching procedures to support this work (Beaulieu & Jimenez‐Gomez, 2022; Jimenez‐Gomez & Beaulieu, 2022.…”