Friday, June 19, 2020

How a cell phone made me finally confront my racial bias

One day when I was living in the D.C. area I took a wrong turn leaving a metro stop and ended up in an unfamiliar neighborhood. It was a pretty unremarkable residential area — streets lined with blocks of rowhouses, some well-maintained and some not-so-much. As I walked down the street, trying to get my bearings and not look too obviously lost, I gradually became aware that there weren’t a lot of other white faces around. I knew this shouldn’t bother me. Still, I could feel myself tensing up. 
A few young Black guys were standing around in a circle talking in the front yard of one of the houses up ahead. As I passed by them on the sidewalk, the one closest to me reached into his pocket. I saw a flash of silver and my heart jumped as he pulled out… a cell phone. I kept walking, feeling a sense of relief, followed almost immediately by a deep sense of shame. 
Of course it was a phone, I thought to myself. What the hell did you think it was?
There was no way to hide from the truth, though: For a split-second, I thought it was a gun. I thought that that young man, who was just standing around talking to his friends, was going to pull a gun on me. Because I am a racist. Or at least I was in that moment. And what is life, but a series of moments in which we must constantly decide how we are going to see each other and treat each other?
In the weeks that followed, my thoughts often returned to that moment. I kept trying to figure out why I had that prejudiced, completely unfair reaction. As a kid, I had grown up in a mostly-white neighborhood in a mostly-white town. But by the time I walked down that street in DC, I had had classmates, friends and coworkers who were Black. My parents taught me to respect everyone, regardless of skin color. My faith taught me that we are all members of one body, made in the image of God. No Black person had ever done anything to hurt me.
So where did that prejudice come from? 
I started doing some research. And what I found was that I had gradually absorbed the notion that Black men are a threat, through a thousand movies and TV shows, newspaper mug shots, and conversations overheard in all-white spaces about “thugs” who live in “ghettos.” 
All of that had built up over years in my amygdala, a small area near the base of my brain that processes basic emotional responses, including fear. As unconsciously as breathing air, I had learned the hateful, destructive prejudice that Black men are to be feared. According to one analysis of studies that I read: 
There is overwhelming evidence that young Black men are stereotyped as violent, criminal, and dangerous. Indeed, research suggests that Black men are associated with threat both implicitly (Maner et al., 2005; Payne, 2001) as well as explicitly (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005). Because they are so readily appraised as threatening, furthermore, Black men are more likely to be shot erroneously (i.e., when holding benign objects rather than weapons; Correll, Urland, & Ito, 2006), and are often (mis)perceived, suspected, automatically evaluated, and misremembered as aggressors (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004; Graham & Lowery, 2004).
Subsequent scientific studies have found that tall Black men are perceived as particularly threatening (while tall white men are perceived as being more competent than shorter men) and that Black men are perceived as larger than they truly are. 
Mix all of those stereotypes together, combine them with legal precedents that allow police to use deadly force based on their perception of how threatening a suspect is (versus how threatening he or she actually is), and there’s little wonder that, per capita, Black men in the USA are more likely to be killed by police than white men (in raw numbers police kill more white men, but the U.S. population is roughly 60% white and only 12% black).
I am not anti-police. I spent a solid two years of my life writing a book about an exemplary officer who died in the line of duty. I believe that as a society we have given police a nearly impossible job by underfunding social work, mental health, substance abuse treatment, etc. and then dropping all of the resulting societal problems in the laps of police and saying “here, you take care of this.”
But it would be naive to believe that there is not racial bias in policing, given that there is evidence of bias throughout the criminal justice system. Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be stopped by police, but less likely to have illegal items (guns, drugs) in their cars than white people who are stopped. When arrested for the same crimes, black and Hispanic people are more likely to be prosecuted, and face harsher sentences than white people, up to and including the death penalty. 
Think about that for a second. Prosecutors and judges, who have extensive legal education and plenty of time to weigh their decisions, still treat black and brown people more harshly. It would be frankly remarkable if police officers didn’t exhibit some of the same biases when making quick decisions in the field. 
That’s not to say that all individual police officers are racist. But there is ample evidence that the criminal justice system as a whole is racist. 
And it’s not unusual in that regard. 
There is systemic racism in health care: 
There is systemic racism in journalism:
There is systemic racism in banking:
There is systemic racism in education.
There is systemic racism in science.
There is systemic racism in basically every institution in the U.S., whether it’s one that you hold dear or one that I hold dear, and that’s because racial stereotypes are pervasive in American society. They are baked into our amygdalas. And the protests going on around the world suggest that this is not just a U.S. problem either. 
I don’t pretend to know how to fix all of these injustices. But I think it’s well past time that white people, including myself, acknowledge them and try to understand how our own personal biases — conscious and unconscious — are both caused by systemic racism and feed back into it. 
The lives of people of color depend on it.
About eight years after I walked down that street in D.C., Sacramento police officers killed a Black man named Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard.
The officers were looking for a suspect who had been breaking into cars in the neighborhood. They later said they thought Clark pointed a gun at them when they entered the yard. They shot Clark seven or eight times (autopsy reports differed), including at least three times in the back. An exhaustive search of the yard turned up no gun. 
The only object found anywhere near Clark’s bullet-ridden body was his cell phone. 

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