Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism. Jody David Armour
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factual judgment that he is under attack), then it is reasonable for him to use deadly force against the Black more quickly than a similarly situated White. Whether a reaction is reasonable, however, hinges not only on the rationality of its underlying factual judgments, but equally on the consequences of error if those factual judgments are mistaken.
Consider one example of the injustices that lurk in the Bayesian’s lopsided attention to rationality. Ira Glasser of the American Civil Liberties Union tells the story of a Black couple who, some years ago, took in a movie in Times Square. It was raining when they came out of the theater about 11 P.M., so the husband went by himself for the car, which was parked in a garage several blocks away. When he returned to pick up his wife, she had disappeared. The man eventually discovered that his wife, who was five months pregnant, had been arrested by the police, put in jail, strip-searched and booked on charges of loitering for the purpose of prostitution.
The arresting officer in this shocking incident may well have viewed himself as an Intelligent Bayesian. Perhaps wrongly, let’s assume that at the time he made the arrest, there was a high incidence of prostitution in Times Square, most of the prostitutes were unescorted women, a disproportionate number of them were Black, and most transactions occurred between 10 P.M. and 2 A.M. The officer might assert that, from his standpoint, there was significant evidence to support his factual judgment that the woman was a prostitute—she was a woman, Black, unescorted, and in Times Square at 11 o’clock at night. Even if we assume that his belief was rational in the sense that there was factual support for it, his decision to act on this belief in the way he did was patently unreasonable, not to mention outrageous and reprehensible. The reason his actions were unreasonable is because the costs of potential mistakes were so grievous. Given the enormous costs of potential mistakes, we rightly condemn him for not doing more to reduce the risk of being mistaken before subjecting this woman to such treatment. Many of us may express our concerns about the terrible costs of being wrong in this situation as doubt about whether the officer’s factual judgments were rational. But, upon careful reflection, we see that we are really saying that given the potential for mistakes and the terrible consequences of his mistake, the actions of the officer were unreasonable, even if his factual judgment was rational in the sense that there were circumstances to support it.
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