There are substantial gaps in educational outcomes between black and white students in the United States. Recently, increased attention has focused on differences in the rates at which black and white students are disciplined, finding that black students are more likely to be seen as problematic and more likely to be punished than white students are for the same offense. Although these disparities suggest that racial biases are a contributor, no previous research has shown associations with psychological measurements of bias and disciplinary outcomes. We show that county-level estimates of racial bias, as measured using data from approximately 1.6 million visitors to the Project Implicit website, are associated with racial disciplinary disparities across approximately 96,000 schools in the United States, covering around 32 million white and black students. These associations do not extend to sexuality biases, showing the specificity of the effect. These findings suggest that acknowledging that racial biases and racial disparities in education go hand-in-hand may be an important step in resolving both of these social ills.

Schools are heralded by some as unique sites for promoting racial equity. Central to this characterization is the presumption that teachers embrace racial equity and teaching about this topic. In contrast, others have documented the ongoing role of teachers in perpetuating racial inequality in schools. In this article, we employ data from two national data sets to investigate teachers’ explicit and implicit racial bias, comparing them to adults with similar characteristics. We find that both teachers and nonteachers hold pro-White explicit and implicit racial biases. Furthermore, differences between teachers and nonteachers were negligible or insignificant. The findings suggest that if schools are to effectively promote racial equity, teachers should be provided with training to either shift or mitigate the effects of their own racial biases.

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Public reactions to protests are often divided, with some viewing the protest as a legitimate response to injustice and others perceiving the protest as illegitimate. We examine how online news sources oriented to different audiences frame protest, potentially encouraging these divergent reactions. We focus on online news coverage following the 2014 police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown. Preregistered analyses of headlines and images and their captions showed that sources oriented toward African Americans were more likely to include content conveying racial injustice and legitimacy of the subsequent protests than sources oriented toward a general audience. In contrast, general audience sources emphasized conflict between protesters and police, making fewer references to the protesters’ cause. Whereas much work on media segregation addresses the propensity of audiences to consume different sources, our work suggests that news sources may also contribute to information fragmentation by differentially framing the same events.