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 in a given case, the mere possibility that it could be is enough to generate anxiety, stress, and even real somatic pain for those seen through this lens.
Indeed, research on the health consequences of racism has found that it is precisely in these kinds of cases, in which the racial motivation is less clear, where the negative impact on blacks is most significant. The attributional ambiguity of such cases causes folks of color to expend valuable emotional and cognitive resources trying to analyze each situation anew. Stress from these events heightens what is called the allostatic load for those experiencing it, through the release of stress hormones. This, in turn, is directly related to hypertension, which is then linked to the excess mortality rate of African Americans relative to whites.
If we are to dismantle systems of racial inequity, the way in which folks of color experience white-dominated institutions will have to be understood. This means respecting that incidents can be experienced as racist even if racist intent is lacking on the part of a perpetrator. Between the actor and acted upon, there is a vast territory known as history. And within that territory lay the memories of a thousand terrors, fears, and insecurities. That few whites have ever taken a trip to that place hardly acquits us of the need to understand it and recognize it as a real location, to which our brothers and sisters of color have long been consigned.
HARPOONING THE GREAT WHITE WAIL
REFLECTIONS ON RACISM AND RIGHT-WING BUFFOONERY
FOR A GROUP that regularly critiques people of color and the left for promoting a politics of victimization, white conservatives demonstrate a penchant for the histrionics of victimhood unparalleled in modern times. Facing a nation led by a black man, sullying the hallowed halls of a house they long considered white in more than just name, the far right finds itself in meltdown mode, which would be humorous to observe were it not so toxic in its consequences for the nation.
Most recently, the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has driven conservatives insane, as with Bill O’Reilly, who recently stated with a straight face that Sotomayor’s nomination was just more evidence that the left “sees white men as the problem” in America.
Others across the radio dial have accused Sotomayor of being racist for suggesting that racial, ethnic, and gender identity might affect a judge’s sensibilities (a subject to which we will return). Rush Limbaugh even proclaimed her the equivalent of former Klan leader and lifelong neo-Nazi David Duke. Just to review, Duke has openly praised Adolf Hitler and claimed that Jewish people are akin to cancer. He has blamed integration for the spread of venereal disease and has advocated the sterilization of impoverished black women. In his autobiography, he calls for the rising of “Aryan warriors” to take back the culture, violently if necessary, from the Jews he believes have hijacked it.
So yeah, exactly like Sotomayor.
The full complement of smears against the judge is far too extensive to list. Still, among other choice items, we have G. Gordon Liddy expressing concern about Sotomayor’s menstrual cycle, which Liddy worries might impair her judgment. Concerns about judgment are especially rich coming from Liddy, the Watergate principal who once concocted a scheme to kidnap anti-Nixon protesters and offered to be assassinated if it would help cover up the Nixon gang’s burglary of Democratic headquarters, which he had masterminded. Presumably, Liddy was not in the grips of menses at the time.
