Dispatches from the Race War. Tim Wise
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DENIAL IS A RIVER WIDER THAN THE CHARLES
IMPLICIT BIAS AND THE BURDEN OF BLACKNESS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA
IF YOU’RE CURIOUS as to the breadth of America’s racial divide, recent events from the hallowed environs surrounding Harvard University will provide you with all the insight you could desire. The incident, involving Professor of African American Studies Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cambridge police officer James Crowley, and now, President Obama, reflects the magnitude of that divide almost perfectly.
To recap for those who might have missed it: Tipped off by a neighbor as to the presence of a possible burglar at a Cambridge home, Crowley arrived to find Gates, who lives there, inside. Angered at being considered a criminal, Gates yelled at Crowley, who then arrested him for disorderly conduct, even though yelling at a cop does not meet the definition of that offense, according to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Then Obama, asked for his take on the matter, offered that the police had acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates: a reaction that has set off a flood of hostility aimed at a president still learning the dangers of governing while black in the United States. In this case, as with so many news stories that touch on race, from the O.J. Simpson trial to Hurricane Katrina, white people and black people see things in largely different ways.
To hear most white folks tell it, Gates was to blame. Yes, he was only trying to enter his own home when a white woman saw him and his driver, assumed they were burglars, and convinced another woman to call police. And yes, he produced identification when asked, indicating that he was the resident of the house. But because he became belligerent with Sgt. Crowley, and because he called Crowley a racist, he is presumed blameworthy for escalating the situation. Meanwhile, Crowley, according to the dominant white narrative, is a thoughtful cop and hardly racist. After all, we’ve been informed, he teaches a diversity training class and once gave mouth-to-mouth-resuscitation to a dying black athlete. As a side note, if this is the only thing one must do to not be a racist—not let a dying black person die—the threshold for minimal human decency has been lowered to a degree almost too depressing to contemplate. In any event, having been willing to save a black person’s life, Crowley has therefore been smeared, first by Gates, who accused him of bias, and then by the president, who questioned the intelligence of the decision to arrest the professor, whom he considers a friend.
Such a perception on the part of white people makes sense, given the white racial frame, as sociologist Joe Feagin calls it. It’s a frame that says, among other things, that so long as you are respectful to police, nothing terrible will happen to you. If something bad does happen to you, it was likely your fault. Additionally, there can be no racism in an incident unless the person accused of such a thing acted with bigoted intent. In this case, since Gates mouthed off and Crowley is, from all accounts, hardly a bigot, the case is closed, as far as the dominant white narrative is concerned.
But for most black folks, the lens is different, and not because they are irrational or hypersensitive, but because their experiences with law enforcement are different from those typically enjoyed by whites. The first policing blacks experienced on our shores was that of the slave patrol, followed by those who would arrest, jail, and then release black men into the hands of white mobs for alleged crimes or just for questioning white authority. This was then followed by cops who were the enforcers of segregation, the ones who pulled sit-in protesters off lunch-counter stools and set dogs and water cannons on children in Birmingham. It has been police, since then, who have enforced the so-called war on drugs, the damage of which has fallen mostly on their communities, despite equal rates of drug use and possession by whites.
So for African Americans, the possibility that racism was involved in the Gates incident is more than idle suspicion. And not only regarding the actions of Officer Crowley. They wonder, understandably, whether or not the white woman who expressed alarm about the two men on Gates’s porch would have done so had they been white. Especially since one was in a suit (the driver) and the other, Gates, was dressed nicely in a casual polo-type shirt, with gray hair, in his late 50s, walking with the assistance of a cane. There is no way to know for sure. But it’s not a stupid question, especially given years of research suggesting that whites are more likely to perceive ambiguous behavior by blacks as criminal or aggressive than when the same behavior is manifested by other whites.
Ultimately, the issue isn’t whether Sgt. Crowley is a racist or Dr. Gates was belligerent. The real issue is how a white officer may have perceived Gates’s belligerence, and how that perception may have been skewed by racial biases that, although not consciously held, can still prove influential. The good news for us is that there are over thirty years of evidence from social science to which we can turn to evaluate this matter.
For instance, one famous study showed a video to members of a white focus group in which a black actor and a white actor engaged in an argument. On the tape shown to one group of whites, the black actor shoves the white actor out of the way. On the tape shown to a second group, it is the white actor who does the shoving. In all other respects, the recordings were the same, and the white viewers were demographically similar and had been randomly assigned to each group. In other words, the white folks viewing the videos were functionally interchangeable. Afterward, the white respondents were asked a series of questions about what they had seen. One question asked if they perceived the shove to have been aggressive or violent. Three out of four whites who had seen the black actor do the shoving, answered yes. But only 17 percent of whites who had seen the white actor administer the shove felt the act had been aggressive or violent.
More recently, “shoot or hold fire” studies have determined that when shown videos of blacks and whites engaged in ambiguous activities, participants are quicker to shoot unarmed blacks and to hold fire on whites, even when the latter are armed and dangerous. These tendencies bear no relationship to the degree of overt racial bias expressed by participants in pre-interviews. Instead, they seem tied to subconscious biases, which research shows can be easily triggered in situations where stereotypes of racial groups are made salient.
Other research has hooked up participants to brain imaging machines, then flashed pictures on computer screens in front of them, too quickly for the conscious mind to process what it had seen. Yet, when shown a black face in this rapid, subliminal manner, the part of the brain that processes fear lights up to a far greater degree than when shown a subliminal image of a white face or other random objects.
As for the event that brought Gates to the attention of police, it seems logical to ask if he and his driver would have been assumed criminal had they been white. And it is this question, made reasonable by the social science about which Gates is surely aware, that would likely lead him to express anger at the thought of being presumed a burglar. All of which means that when Crowley arrived, he found himself in the middle of a drama not of his own making, but from which he could hardly extricate himself. Angered by the potential implication of the witness’s suspicions, Gates became enraged and let the officer know it. The officer, despite his supposed depth of knowledge on matters of race and diversity, failed to appreciate the background narrative that was surely running through Gates’s mind, and instead took the anger personally: something that is unprofessional for a diversity trainer, and doubly so for a cop.
Folks of color logically wonder if Crowley would have arrested a white man who exhibited the same “belligerence” as was claimed from Dr. Gates. Again, we can’t know for sure, but the question is not irrational, especially when the charge for which Gates was arrested was such an inherently subjective one. Disorderly conduct, unlike armed robbery or drug possession, has no clear-cut, objective definition. Police judgments are intrinsically in play in situations involving such charges. And given the research, it is reasonable to wonder whether Crowley may have overreacted to Gates’s behavior in a way that escalated the situation from perceived obnoxiousness, which is not illegal in any event, to disorderly conduct, which is.
Bottom line: This incident and white America’s reaction to it demonstrate a profound obliviousness to the black experience. We cannot understand what it feels like to be thought of as a criminal solely because of our race. We have no comparable social context that would allow us to process the depth of the injury that flows from such a thing. And even if race is not the reason for such suspicion