"Ironic Effects of Antiprejudice Messages: How Motivational Interventions Can Reduce (but Also Increase) Prejudice"

"motivating people to reduce prejudice by emphasizing external control produced more explicit and implicit prejudice than did not intervening at all. Conversely, participants in whom autonomous motivation to regulate prejudice was induced displayed less explicit and implicit prejudice compared with no-treatment control participants. We outline strategies for effectively reducing prejudice and discuss the detrimental consequences of enforcing antiprejudice standards...

Policymakers in North America spend billions of dollars annually on prejudice interventions (Hansen, 2003), yet very few of these are actually based on sound evidence ( Paluck & Green, 2009)...

Research on prejudice reduction is plentiful. Critics suggest, however, that this work is rarely translational, and the interventions that have been developed on the basis of such research have typically been impractical (Cameron & Turner, 2010)...

one’s motivation to regulate prejudice can stem from personal, self-endorsed reasons, or it can satisfy external controls or incentives. Individuals with a controlled motivation to regulate prejudice are motivated to reduce prejudice for external reasons (e.g., pressure, fear). They might suppress racism because they seek approval from others or because social norms require that prejudice be avoided. Conversely, individuals with a self-determined motivation to regulate prejudice are motivated by internal factors, such as the personal relevance and importance of striving to be nonprejudiced. For such individuals, the pursuit of nonprejudice is valuable and enjoyable, and energized by the satisfaction gleaned from intergroup relations."

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/12/1472.full#sec-3

I have definitely observed this hostility toward the external motivators, in conversations where someone is trying to explain to me how hard it is to be perceived as racist (or as a potential date rapist, or whatever it is...) and I feel like I have to apologize for being a member of a secret cabal of black people/evil feminists tryna make all the nice people feel guilty and anxious as revenge for slavery or something.

And I am very with these findings also in terms of what is says about communicating non-racism. A lot of people get the sense that not being racist is about avoiding making black people mad. And I can easily see how that can feel abusive. But, obviously, that's not the point of not being racist and it's super, deeply frustrating that this is the set up that we have.