Tamir Rice and the man with no knife

Lately there’s been this drip-drip-drip of posts in my newsfeed that are — let’s be honest — rooted in racism.

The slanted news articles, you know the ones.

This one time a black person benefited at the expense of a white person, evidence of widespread “reverse racism!” Drip.

This one black cop shot an unarmed white man but nobody cares because white people are discriminated against! Drip.

A black person somewhere did something bad therefore it’s reasonable to fear all black people everywhere! Drip.

Or the memes about black rioting. Drip.

Or the absurdly emotional defenses of all police officer actions, even the ones that are demonstrably inexcusable. Drip.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

They aren’t posted by people who think of themselves as racists or who condone explicit racism, but they do reveal an inexcusable myopia about the biases we all have and a disturbing lack of empathy for people of color. Although I have never been one to unfriend people who disagree with my world view, I admit that those posts are pushing me closer to that point than any political disagreement ever did. It shocks me, frankly, that anyone could think that anti-black racism is a thing of the past.

So here’s the thing. I have no respect for anyone who claims s/he isn’t a racist. Yes, you are a racist. I am a racist. Everyone is. All white people are racist; all black people are racist; all Latinos, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, American Indians, Indian Americans are racist. Every single human being. Everyone has biases and prejudices, including racial biases. That’s simply how our brains are hardwired. You can start to see the evidence in infants as young as 3 months old.

Sometimes our racism expresses itself as a preference towards and preferential treatment of members of our own race, white to white, black to black, and so on. Sometimes we absorb, like environmental toxins, the broader prejudices of our society (look no further than the classic, heartbreaking study of little black girls who told researchers that black dolls were “ugly,” “dirty,” “dumb”). We can get offended at the very notion that we’re less than perfect beings and pretend that we’re “color blind” when we’re not, or we can work to gain insights into our own biases and prevent them from controlling our behavior.

So here’s my evidence that, yes, racism is a thing. And yes, it overwhelmingly harms people of color. And I would ask you to think really, really hard about this first example because it is pretty shocking. People -- regular, good people -- were so influenced by their biases that it actually changed what they saw. Via CNN:

In a classic study on race, psychologists staged an experiment with two photographs that produced a surprising result. They showed people a photograph of two white men fighting, one unarmed and another holding a knife. Then they showed another photograph, this one of a white man with a knife fighting an unarmed African-American man. When they asked people to identify the man who was armed in the first picture, most people picked the correct one. Yet when they were asked the same question about the second photo, most people -- black and white -- incorrectly said the black man had the knife. … "The overwhelming number of people will actually experience the black man as having the knife because we're more open to the notion of the black man having a knife than a white man," Ross says. "This is one of the most insidious things about bias. People may absorb these things without knowing them."

Have you ever seen this video about what we “see” when we concentrate on players tossing a basketball around? That same kind of thing is at play in how we respond to race too. It’s amusing in the YouTube video, but it should make us question lots of things we’re “sure” about.  Via CNN:

Another famous experiment shows how racial bias can shape a person's economic prospects. Professors at the University of Chicago and MIT sent 5,000 fictitious resumes in response to 1,300 help wanted ads. Each resume listed identical qualifications except for one variation -- some applicants had Anglo-sounding names such as "Brendan," while others had black-sounding names such as "Jamal." Applicants with Anglo-sounding names were 50% more likely to get calls for interviews than their black-sounding counterparts. Most of the people who didn't call "Jamal" were probably unaware that their decision was motivated by racial bias, says Daniel L. Ames, a UCLA researcher who has studied and written about bias. "If you ask someone on the hiring committee, none of them are going to say they're racially biased," Ames says. "They're not lying. They're just wrong." 

Then there’s the study that asked law partners to review legal memos:

Nextions recruited five lawyers at five different law firms to co-write a research memo. Then they inserted several errors into the memos — errors in spelling, grammar, legal terminology, fact, and analysis. Last, they created two different headers for the memo. Both identified the author as "Thomas Meyer," a third-year associate with a degree from the New York University School of Law, a top-ranked school. Yet in one version of the header, Thomas Meyer was identified as "Caucasian;" in another, he was identified as "African American." They sent these otherwise-identical memos to 60 different partners at law firms who had agreed to review the pieces and identify errors. The reviewers, though, weren't told that the experiment was about race — they were just asked for their opinion on the quality of the memo.

The reviewers judged the memo far more harshly when they were told the author was black than when they were told the author was white. On a scale of one to five, reviewers gave the black Thomas Meyer a 3.2 and the white Thomas Meyer a 4.1. More troublingly, not only was the overall score lower, but reviewers seemed to find more errors when they believed the author was black. Out of seven spelling and grammar errors in the text, they found 2.9 of them on average in white Thomas Meyer's memo and 5.8 of them on average in black Thomas Meyer's memo. … When the author is supposed to be white, reviewers excused errors as out of haste or inexperience. They commented that the author "has potential" and was "generally a good writer but needs to work on" some skills. When the author is supposed to be black, those same errors became evidence of incompetence. A reviewer said he "can't believe he [the author] went to NYU," and others said he "needs lots of work" and was "average at best."

And more evidence of how we are poisoned by broad social prejudices and how it affects academic success: “Professor Claude Steele found that simply asking African American students to report their race before taking their SAT tests significantly lowered their scores. Being reminded of being black seemed to internalize a negative performance bias."

The deck is similarly stacked against people of color when they go to see a doctor. Via Psychology Today:

Dr. David Williams, professor at Harvard University, cited studies documenting that when Latinos and African Americans were treated by physicians for a broken bone in their leg, they received pain medication significantly less often than white patients with the same injury. … The data came from a 2002 Institute of Medicine report on racial and ethnic disparities in health care, which stressed that "a large body of research underscores the existence of disparities." As examples, the report stated minorities are less likely to be given appropriate cardiac medications or to undergo bypass surgery, and are less likely to receive kidney dialysis or transplants. By contrast, they are more likely to receive certain less-desirable procedures, such as lower limb amputations for diabetes and other conditions.

There are similar studies that find a wage disparity for black and white workers doing equal work, a tip disparity between black and white waiters providing similar service, a police response time for black and white victims, and so on. And on. And on.

This is what people mean when they talk about “white privilege.” “White privilege” doesn’t mean that white people have easy lives. Since the 1980s, the white middle class has been crippled by stagnant wages, stagnant economic mobility, lost jobs, broken family units, encroaching poverty, higher costs, and all of the other social ills that come from a society cleaving into an ultra-wealthy camp with the rest of us left behind. “White privilege” doesn’t mean that there are never instances of blacks treating whites poorly. And so on.

“White privilege” just means that there are thousands upon thousands of situations like those discussed above where being white provides certain undeniable social advantages in a country where implicit, unconscious racism still impacts everything from how employers perceive your job resume and professional writing, to how doctors perceive the severity of the pain you’re in, to whether law enforcement officers believe you’re armed and threatening even when you aren’t.

I want, then, in closing to go back to that very first example where people sincerely thought they saw the black man holding the knife, even when he wasn’t.

Tamir Rice was 12 years old. He had a baby face.

He was shot and killed by police within 2 seconds of less than a second after their arriving at the pavilion where he was sitting. I ask you to watch the video.

The officers did NOT administer any life-saving medical assistance until after the FBI showed up.

Tamir died the next day.

He was carrying a toy gun. He did NOT point it at police. Watch the video.

The policeman’s defense is that he thought Tamir was 21, not 12. Ohio is an open-carry state. If Tamir had really been 21, he could have legally carried a real gun. The policeman did not stop to question if Tamir had a license. The policeman did not give Tamir time to put his hands up. The policeman shot him in the chest 2 seconds less than one second after arriving.

Now think about Tamir's death in the context of that study I quoted above wherein people are so blinded by their racial biases that they actually see the black man as holding the knife even though the picture shows a white man holding the knife. Then watch the video a third time. Then think about what it's like for a mother who no longer has her baby boy. Then tell me that we don't have a problem with racism.

So yes, you are a racist. I am a racist. We can either take a deliberative, self-critical look at our own unconscious biases and how they affect our thoughts and actions, or we can bury our heads in the sand. There’s no moral failing in being a racist, only in refusing to do something about it.

Updated July 15, 2016 to reflect additional evidence presented in "The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear" by Sean Flynn in GQ.