Alumna Barbara-Shae Jackson’s social science career is about using art as a vehicle to help people to perceive their implicit biases.
Cognitive psychologist and Mary Baldwin University alumna Barbara-Shae Jackson ’08 delivers a TEDx Talk on “The Color Line: Black and White Aesthetic Values” in 2017.
Cognitive psychologist and Mary Baldwin University alumna Barbara-Shae Jackson ’08 is an accomplished scholar, activist, and writer.
Not only is she the co-author of a chapter on aesthetic preference and racial bias in the recently published book Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures, she has also been featured in Essence magazine’s 2000 essay compilation, Souls of My Young Sisters, and was invited to perform as a guest poet at the Mississippi Freedom 50th return of the Freedom Riders National Celebration in 2011.
In fact, Jackson is somewhat of a Renaissance woman — which is no surprise, given where she spent her formative years as a military child.
“I was afforded the opportunity that not many get the chance to experience,” Jackson says in her 2017 TEDx Talk. “I grew up in Naples, Italy.”
The title of her talk was “The Color Line: Black and White Aesthetic Values,” which is an overview of her doctoral research at the University of Alabama that examined how racism, personality, and cognitive ability influence people’s perception of art.
“My most favorite thing to do was to spend time in Rome at the Sistine Chapel,” Jackson continues, “surrounded by people of all different nationalities, all different races, all different ages, all looking at the frescoes that Michelangelo painted in the early 1500s in admiration.”
“But what does it mean to internalize something that centuries of people have exalted as extremely beautiful,” she says, “but you don’t look like anything that’s represented in it?”
That question has been a driving force throughout Jackson’s life and scholarly work — from Italy to Staunton, and beyond.
While in high school in Naples, Jackson decided to attend MBU partly on the advice of her father, who had come to the states to tour the universities she was considering, so that he and her mother would feel comfortable with their daughter attending college thousands of miles away from home.
“My dad went to Mary Baldwin and met Reverend [Andrea] Cornett-Scott,” Jackson said, speaking from her home in Alabama, “and when he came back he said, ‘You need to meet this woman!’”
Since 1996, Cornett-Scott, now the Chief Diversity Officer at MBU, has served in several positions at MBU, including director of African American affairs and associate provost of inclusive excellence.
“She helped cultivate a lot in me in terms of understanding the importance of who I am,” Jackson said.
For Jackson, that meant participating in programs like the Kuumba Players Theatre Troupe, the Anointed Voices of Praise Gospel Choir, the Ida B. Wells Society, and the Black Student Alliance — and other programs from Cornett-Scott’s office.
“Working with Barbara-Shae gave me the opportunity to reaffirm for her that her stories, her experience, and her presence had value not just at Mary Baldwin but also in the world,” Cornett-Scott said. “The truth is that Mary Baldwin will never be the same because Barbara-Shae Jackson walked across our campus in her Italian leather pumps with her head held high.”
“What does it mean to internalize something that centuries of people have exalted as extremely beautiful, but you don’t look like anything that’s represented in it?”
After graduating from MBU with her bachelor’s in English and African American studies, Jackson’s first professional work was research conducted at Eastern Mennonite University for Coming to The Table, a national organization that addresses the systematic and social impact of slavery.
Jackson also designed a youth program called “Writing a New History” (WANH), which was a civil rights pilgrimage and immersive educational experience in which 20 young people from Philadelphia, Mississippi, journeyed to six southern cities to learn civil rights history through cultural institutions and civil rights leaders.
The success of WANH is what led to the opportunity for Jackson to serve on the planning committee for Mississippi Freedom 50th the return of the Freedom Riders — as well as participate in the inaugural youth program for the congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage led by the late Congressman John Lewis.
When the grant that funded Coming to The Table ended, Jackson took a beat to ponder her next step, and taught English for a year in Angola, Africa, through SIAC, a public services center. It was there that Jackson decided to return to academia to study cognitive psychology at the University of Alabama, where she earned her PhD in May 2023.
For her doctoral thesis, Jackson drew on her cultural experiences of Italy, focusing on the idea of implicit bias as a function of aesthetic experience.
“I created a research agenda that looks at how people’s experiences with art products is connected to their preference,” Jackson said, “and how your art preference can tell you something about your societal views, especially those concerning racism or other people who don’t look like you.”
Jackson’s research examined the perceptions and responses of Black and white viewers to art created by Black and white artists.
“I wanted to see if they responded more positively to works that were representative of their cultural or racial background, and more negatively to those that were not representative,” Jackson said.
“I created a research agenda that looks at how people’s experiences with art products is connected to their preference, and how your art preference can tell you something about your societal views, especially those concerning racism or other people who don’t look like you.”
Today, Jackson continues to work on the theme she intuited as a teenager as a senior research associate at Slover Linett at NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center), a social science research organization associated with the University of Chicago.
The bulk of Jackson’s work at Slover Linett has to do with arts and culture research with an equity framing, seeking to understand what audiences need from cultural institutions like museums and other community arts-based organizations.
“My career is really about helping people to see their biases, by using art as a vehicle to do that,” Jackson said. “I think that art gives folks the space and the accessibility to have these difficult conversations in a way that other research hasn’t necessarily done.”