White people, we’ve been duped.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Philando Castile, a man who worked for 17 years in food service for his local school district. His seat belt was on, his girlfriend was in the passenger seat, her four year old daughter was in the back seat. He disclosed to the officer that he had a firearm. He was a licensed gun owner. He is dead.
Having biases is an evolutionary function so we can quickly assess what is dangerous and what is not. When the brain receives a lot of correlating information about a certain group of people, it processes that information and draws a conclusion about that demographic of people, good or bad.
Here in the States, the media produces a lot of negative images about our black brothers and sisters. The local news, case in point. Every night, we hear little about the money white people stole that day through their jobs, the verbal and physical violence happening in white homes, the sexual assaults committed by white men, the sexual harassment committed by white men at work, the white shark lawyers and lobbyists and spin doctors hired by a business to undermine a well-run competitor, the white people committing insurance fraud, the white lawyer and white client suing a hospital for some BS claim that you and I will end up paying for, the white folks who call elderly folks like my parents to try to dupe them into paying money to some scam, etc.
Negative images about our black brothers and sisters are also rampant in American movies. Years ago, I lived in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. My 12 year old neighbor was a super curious kid who was always popping into my place and asking a ton of questions: did I have a favorite country? What is snow like? How do Americans manage to eat chicken if we don’t kill it ourselves? One time, he came over and asked without a flinch why black Americans are criminals. I was so taken aback, blinking at this black preteen as I asked him to repeat the question. I was sure I had misheard him. I had not. When I began to ask him why he said that, it quickly became apparent that he had developed this idea -completely unknowingly and unwillingly- from American movies. I did the best I could in the moment to dispel the falsehood — I literally went through photos of my black friends from home with him, one by one, talking about who each was and what they’re like. It felt like a clever effort, but it was in vain. I couldn’t break the idea that had solidified in his mind. I was deflated at my failure, but didn’t know what else to do. It felt like such a loss that he thought that way. This is boy, who had met perhaps three Americans in his life (all white), and who could never dream of crossing a border into another country by car, let alone by plane, was convinced he knew what all black Americans were like — and it wasn’t good. Even the American sitting in front of him, who he trusted to impart loads of information about many other things, could not shake what was in his head — about America.
I tell this story to illustrate how bias seeps in — and locks in. The black criminality we see on local news, in movies, etc, makes us perceive black people as threatening across the board. We perceive a threat where it does not actually exist. And yes, we all have it — including white people like me who have very close friends who are black.
On the other side of the coin, I don’t have to look far -at all- to name not one, not two, not three, but four extremely serious crimes committed by white people I know. However, I don’t go around seeing all white people as potentially threatening.
If we don’t acknowledge our biases and work to manage them, black people will continue to die at the hands of the police at five times the rate of white folks. Our learned biases, based on skin color, make black folks appear exponentially more threatening than they actually are. Someone said once they have a dream that their progeny will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Mr Castile was a school cook who the kids really dug.
