Virginia, where avowed neo-Nazi James Alex Fields pleaded guilty Wednesday to 29 counts of hate crimes in a federal court for plowing his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville in August 2017. As part of the deal, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. Last December, a Virginia jury sentenced Fields to life in prison for his violent act, which killed anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer and injured 28 others at a counterprotest of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally.
Jennifer Eberhardt talking:
this Unite the Right rally was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in a generation. I think it took a lot of people by surprise. They were there to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from the core of the city. And, you know, so they were there to start a race war, according to them.
And there were counterprotesters there who showed up to try to protect the city and protect their values, and lots of clashes during that rally, and a lot of just, I think, concern about the role of the police with that, in just not— standing back and not intervening as people were being beaten and taunted and so forth. And it kind of, I don’t know, led to a lot of people in the city of Charlottesville and on the UVA campus to sort of think about how this happened and why it happened and why was this, you know, the sort of ground zero for that movement.
people think a lot about, you know, sort of bigotry rising up when we have economic insecurity or instability. But there’s research showing that it’s not just that. It’s also the changing racial demographics in this country. And that makes people fearful. That makes them nervous. There’s research by Jennifer Richeson and Maureen Craig showing that just reminding white Americans of that changing racial dynamic or the changing racial landscape can lead them to express more prejudice against people of color, to feel like discrimination against whites is on the rise and that’s the big problem, and to also endorse more politically conservative views and policies. So, it’s not just the economic issue, why we get this move towards more explicit bias or old-fashioned racism; it’s also this concern about, like, losing your presence and your status in society.
leadership matters, in terms of people’s willingness to express a bias. I think also the social norms matter. There’s a lot of research on that, actually. So, when social norms shift so that we’rebecoming sort of less egalitarian, that leads—you know, sort of individuals, it gives them license to express more bias. And so, it’s not just about a choice that we’re making as individuals to be biased or not. It’s also about the social climate. We’re social beings, and so we’re sensitive to what the social climate is. And to the extent that the social climate is moving away from being egalitarian, that can feed our bias. And that can lead implicit biases actually to become explicit, because there is a context for that. There’s a way in which that’s welcomed. And so, those social norms can lead us to actually become more prejudiced and to act on those prejudices.
implicit bias can be defined as the beliefs and the feelings that we have about social groups, that can influence our decision-making and our actions, even when we’re unaware of it. And so, you know, it’s sort of biases that exist despite how we see ourselves as egalitarian, say, or biases that can exist despite our intentions and our motivations to act otherwise.
story of your 5-year-old son. So, we were on a plane together. And he’s 5, and so he’s looking around and just really excited about being on an airplane with mom. And so he’s checking everybody out. And he sees this guy, and he says, “Hey, that guy looks like daddy.” And, you know, I look at the guy. First of all, he doesn’t look anything at all like daddy, and it turns out that he was the only black guy on the plane. And so, I’m thinking, “OK, my son obviously thinks that all black people look alike,” right? So I’m going to try to have a conversation with him about that.
But before I could have that conversation, he looks up at me, and he says, “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.” And I said, “What? What did you say?” And he said it again: “Well, I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.” And I said, “Everett, why would you say that? And you know daddy wouldn’t rob a plane.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, I know.” And I said, “Well, why would you say that?” And he looked at me with this really sad face, and he said, “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I was thinking that.”
so that son, the 5-year-old, is now 17. And so he’s growing into a man, a young man. And so, you know, people sort of experience him with the same kind of, sort of—you know, his presence triggers those same kinds of thoughts. And he’s becoming aware of that, over time, and aware that he could be seen as a threat in the eyes of others.
implicit bias. it’s not something that we can just overcome and get rid of completely. And that’s something that I write about in the book, Biased, that I think we keep thinking we’ll get to the day where we’ll be done with this, we don’t have to worry about it. And the fact is, is that we have to be sort of constantly vigilant around it. So, even when we can push it down with our laws and we can push it down with our social norms and we can be motivated—right?—to work on it, it’s something that we have to be vigilant about all the time, because it could spring up again. Social conditions can allow it to surface again. So there are some situations that really sort of promote bias more than others. And as social scientists, we know a lot about those situations. So, to the extent that we can manage those situations, you know, we can—the better, basically.
I’ve done a lot of work with police departments. A lot of my work, though, focuses more on sort of routine interactions between police and community. And, I mean, these—you know, those routine interactions actually feed into what happens with the officer-involved shootings. And I think, in a way, when we have these encounters with the police, there’s a history there. There’s a history of either trust or mistrust, that can sort of feed into how these interactions unfold. But a lot of that is happening. There’s a background to it of just like regular, sort of routine contact with the public. And even with one of the shootings—right?—it was a traffic stop. And I’ve studied traffic stops a lot, to try to understand how these interactions unfold and how trust can be built or eroded inside, you know, this brief interaction, and looking at that across thousands of these interactions to try to analyze it.
this is work that I’m doing in collaboration with a number of researchers at Stanford. It’s an interdisciplinary collaboration with linguists and computer scientists and social psychologists. And together we’re using this machine learning approach to actually analyze footage from body-worn cameras. Those cameras allow us to see, you know, interactions as they’re unfolding in real time, and so we get a much better handle on what’s going on and how people might leave an interaction feeling either better about the police or worse about the police. It also allows us to see, you know, how police may respond differently to black drivers, say, in traffic stops as opposed to white drivers.
we find that there’s a difference of respect. We call it a respect deficit. And so we see officers speaking in more respectful ways to whites, from the beginning of the stop ’til the end. And so, if you look at how they greet white drivers, they will greet them with “sir” and “ma’am,” and they are more likely to greet black drivers with “bro” and “dude.” So, just at the beginning of the stop, there’s a difference. And then, also, throughout the stop they offer reassurance to white drivers more so than black drivers. So, for white drivers, they’ll kind of walk them through the procedure if they’re getting a ticket, what to do, offer them reassurance, say, you know, “It’ll be OK. Don’t worry.” Black drivers, you know, less so. And then, even towards the end of the stop, they’re expressing concern for the safety of the white driver a lot more than they do for the black driver. So, we’re in really different worlds here—you know, black drivers and white drivers—when they come into contact with the police.
I was driving with a girlfriend. We were pulled over for a minor traffic violation, and the officer spoke to us in a really disrespectful tone, actually. And I ended up being body-slammed on the roof of my car, handcuffed and arrested. this was like 25 years ago, this happened. I was in Boston. I was driving with a friend who lived in a housing complex that was kind of a mixed socioeconomic status, you know, and mixed race. And, you know, I think the location might have played a role there, too, just in how they typically treated people, and especially black people, who live there. So, it was kind of like, I think, the location and then also, I think, the point in time this was in the country. So, this was in the ’90s, where, you know, crime was high, much higher than it is now. And, you know, police departments used these routine traffic stops for minor violations to kind of pull people over and check them out and sort of make sure they weren’t up to any criminal activity. And it’s legal. It’s perfectly legal. But this was the strategy that they used to fight crime.
I refused to get out of the car. So, the officer was just so rude to us, from the beginning to the end. He wouldn’t explain why he pulled us over. He just wouldn’t—you know, wouldn’t sort of speak to us about what was going on or inform us about what was about to happen. But I had expired tags. They were expired by, I think, six weeks, as I was working on my dissertation, to finish, to graduate from Harvard. And he called a tow truck, and we didn’t know what was happening.
And he just appeared at my door and told me to exit the vehicle. The car was being towed. The tags were expired. And so I just said, “No. You know, I’m not getting out.” You know, this was—I was in my twenties. I was having my Rosa Parks moment, right? “I’m going to sit here.” And so, that decision just—you know, I didn’t realize the significance of that decision, I’ll say that, because he called for backup. There ended up being five cruisers surrounding our car, police cruisers. There was a crowd that gathered on the street. And so it went from—you know, for me, from defiance to fear, that that was really— So I think the fear kept me in the car, you know, after I saw all what had—you know, what we were in the center of.
– This reminds of Sandra Bland. She was very fearful. She didn’t want to get out of her car. She got out of her car. He ended up body-slamming her to the ground. And a few days later, after taken to jail she was found dead in her cell.
implicit bias is something that we’re all vulnerable to. It’s not something that is—you know, that police officers are exposed to. but the issue with police officers is just the power that they have in their decision-making and, you know, the consequences of that bias. And so we want to be sort of especially attentive to them.
And so, I was called in to Oakland, California, to work with the police department on their reform efforts. They had some scandals and issues in the past, and I was called in to help them to analyze data that they were collecting on the race of people that they were stopping, either pedestrians or drivers. And I was to sort of analyze that stop data and to see if there were racial disparities in who they were stopping and searching and arresting and so forth. And we found that that was the case. But we also wanted to explore more, and so we used the footage that comes—the body-worn camera footage, that is—you know, that documents the stop. We analyzed that, as well, and found these big differences for traffic stops and how officers are speaking to black versus white drivers. So they’re professional overall, but there’s a respect difference there.
police stations Sometimes in a defensive way, you know, sometimes in a way where they actually sort of acknowledge, you know, that—that, “Well, maybe this is something that we could work on.” And in this particular case, with the analysis of the body-worn camera footage, the department actually invited us to help them, assist them in developing a training on the traffic stop, and it focused on the language use of officers. And so, that was a good response.
it’s everywhere, in every sort of corner of life, really. I mean, I think, you know, there’s evidence for bias whether we’re like in our neighborhoods or in our workplaces or in our schools, in our criminal justice system, and not just with the police but in the courtroom, in the prisons. You know, so there isn’t like a corner that it can’t reach. And it has, like you say—you know, could have pretty negative consequences for the targets of that bias. So, for example, if we just want to look at neighborhoods, I’ve done studies with colleagues where we’ve shown that when a black family is selling their home, you know, that home is worth about $22,000 less than the identical home that’s being sold by a white family. And so there’s a way in which, you know, just living in that home for—
I think it’s especially important for African Americans. I think there’s a way—I mean, we think about bias as something that’s just about people—right?—that we can have—you know, we’re prejudiced against certain people, or we have stereotypes about those people. But it’s more than that. The bias can—the target of bias can actually be—you know, reach beyond people and go to places and things. And so, this is an example of that, where we can have a bias against—you know, we can express a bias against a house, right? Because you’re going to evaluate that house more negatively when a black person has lived in it. It’s as though their presence in that house—I mean, they’re not living in the house with you. I mean, they’re moving out, right? But the fact that they have once lived in that house can—you know, it taints it, and just because they’ve lived there.
implicit bias is something that we’re all vulnerable to. I think when people think about racism or old-fashioned racism, they’re thinking, you know, this is a kind of a select group of people who are sort of hate-filled people, or they’re bad people. But for implicit bias, you don’t have to be a bad person to be affected by that kind of a bias, to hold it, to experience it. So, it’s more pervasive than this old-fashioned racism. But it could have, you know, effects that are just as bad. You could think about it as like old-fashioned racism being sort of this acute form of bias, whereas this implicit bias, being more chronic, it’s something that we live with, that can flare up, that we have to manage, but ultimately, when we don’t manage it, it can inflict a lot of damage.
– black-ape association.
former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld in a 2014 appearance on Fox News when he said a trained ape could do a better job in Afghanistan than President Obama.
In 2016, a West Virginia government worker sparked outrage after calling Michelle Obama, quote, “an ape in heels.”
last year, ABC canceled its hit show Roseanne after its star, Roseanne Barr, fired off a series of racist comments on Twitter. In one tweet, Roseanne wrote, quote, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” unquote. It was a reference to Valerie Jarrett, an African American, who’s a longtime adviser to President Obama.
that black-ape imagery is still with us. It’s interesting, because it brings up another conversation we were having about the role of social norms and the relationship between implicit bias and this more explicit bias.
I did some work, a little while ago now, around 2008 or so, with Phillip Goff, who’s a former graduate student at Stanford, now is a professor here in New York. And we worked together on a series of studies looking at this black-ape association and found, you know, evidence that it’s still present in everyday people. So, again, your clip’s suggesting that maybe it’s the few isolated people who are out there who hold these terrible views, but we were finding evidence for this association with just like everyday students and, you know, everyday sort of people who were out in the world, even though they didn’t know they had that association at the time. I mean, this was before—you know, we were conducting the studies before Barack Obama became president for the first time. And people weren’t—I mean, this was something that was in the past, and a lot of the young students hadn’t thought about it, didn’t know about it, this black-ape association, but they were showing evidence for it in our studies.
And so, if we sat them in front of a computer screen and we flashed African-American faces at them at a really quick rate so they couldn’t sort of consciously pick up what we were flashing at them, and then we showed them images of various animals, blurry images of those animals, they were able to pick out the ape imagery a lot faster, after being exposed to black faces as opposed to white faces. Right? So the black faces facilitated their ability to pick out these apes. And we’ve also shown—we had other studies that we’ve done where we’ve exposed them to words associated with apes—right?—chimpanzees and apes and gorillas and words like that, right?—again, flashed the words on the computer screen, such a rapid rate they can’t consciously read what they’re being exposed to, but this is a way that we can get them to think about this concept of apes. And then we put two faces on the computer screen simultaneously, a black face and a white face, and we simply look at which face they look at. If they’ve been exposed to the ape imagery, their eyes go straight for the black face. So their eyes are directed away from the white face and towards the black face.
We also were showing that this ape imagery can actually matter outside of the laboratory, you know, in police departments, for example. So, what we did was we had people look at a video of a police altercation where they had a suspect on the ground and they were beating the suspect with a baton. But you couldn’t see the suspect. You couldn’t see the suspect’s face. So that allowed us to manipulate what the subjects thought they saw, right? So we gave them a mug shot, and we said, “Hey, this is the suspect.” Either the mug shot was of a white person or the mug shot was of a black person. And what we found was, is when the mug shot was of a black person and we exposed them to this ape imagery beforehand and they looked at this video, they thought that black person deserved what he got, that, you know, he brought that kind of beating onto himself and so forth. And so, the ape imagery served this function of kind of endorsing, you know, police use of force against African Americans.
But in this case, in this particular case, we didn’t see a race difference there without the ape. It was the ape imagery that produced this huge difference in what they thought was appropriate in terms of police behavior. So that’s the other thing. I mean, sometimes we just sort of talk about, you know, the police and that they could have this potential bias and so forth, and there’s something going on with them, but sometimes it’s what’s going on with us. You know, sometimes it’s sort of, you know, them acting on what they sort of think the people want and what role they think that people want them to serve in the community.
it’s showing us that things that we think we’ve dealt with, we have not. And again, this work was done before Barack Obama became president. Once he became president, all of that lifted—I mean, that was brought to the surface, and we were seeing things and hearing things, comments about black people looking like apes and so forth, that we didn’t hear before.
knowing this, as a social scientist, and dealing with the data and, you know, writing up the studies is— that’s what I do, and I kind of remove myself in order to be able to observe that and to document it and so forth and think about it and theorize about it. But this, it’s different. I mean, there’s a visceral—there was a visceral reaction to hearing that comment.
But the beauty of science is that we can actually create studies where we can isolate those different factors. We can present people with the same situation, the same case, where we vary the race of the actor, or we can vary the phenotype of a black person, who looks more stereotypically black or less stereotypically black, and look at the impact of that on the decisions that get made about that person, or we can change the location, too. And, you know, so we’ve done all of these things. We have the capacity to actually look for answers, to explore that scientifically, so that we can see whether—you know, the extent to which race is playing a causal role in all of these cases.
when we’ve done studies, we’ve asked people to rate faces, say, on how stereotypically black they are. And people can do this, even when you don’t give them any instruction. We tell them, “Use whatever features you want. We want you to rate these faces from sort of low to high in stereotypicality.” And there’s huge agreement on that. And I think what people are using is the skin shade, the darkness of the skin, the broadness of the nose, the thickness of the lips. They’re looking at the hair texture. So people have, you know, high agreement on what it means to be stereotypically black or less so.
And it matters a lot. It matters for assumptions of criminality. So we’ve done studies before with police officers, where we just showed them a series of faces of black people that varied on how stereotypically black they were, and found that they judged more of the faces that were highly stereotypically black to be criminal than those that were less stereotypical. We’ve also looked at this in the courtroom with death-sentencing cases, and we found that the more black you looked, the more likely you were to get a death sentence, at least if your victim was white. And for that study, we used an archival database of, you know, many different cases of crimes that were committed in Philadelphia over a 20-year period, and so these were actual cases that had actual verdicts with actual jury members. And we were able to get the photographs of the people in that database who committed or were accused of, found guilty of committing those crimes. And so, we gave those faces to raters to have them judge them on how stereotypically black the faces were. And these raters had no idea who these people were, where we got the faces, what the study was about. They just looked at the face and rated it. And we were able to use their ratings to predict whether someone got a death sentence or a life sentence. And, in fact, you know, looking more black more than doubled the defendant’s chance of getting a death sentence.
One was the study we did about the death penalty and looking at the role that the stereotypicality of a defendant’s face can play, you know, in the outcome, or at least there’s an association there: The more black you are, the more likely you are to be sentenced to death, at least if your victims are white. I mean, the fact that that seemed—that doubled your chances of getting a death penalty was—you know, just the magnitude of the effect was big for us, and I didn’t expect that.
I think the work that we’ve done on the ape imagery was also surprising—not surprising in a sense that, you know, I was surprised to find it there. I mean, we thought there would be something like it there, but what we weren’t prepared for was just how strong it was. You know, that association, that black-ape association, is even stronger than the black-crime association, even though when we were conducting the studies, people weren’t talking about this, people never never said anything about black people looking like apes. But, you know, so that was surprising.
And then, with the election of Barack Obama for the first time to the presidency, you know, people—you know, I think that did bring things to the surface. So, by the time we finished the studies and the studies were out and we would talk about the studies at scientific conferences and so forth, what surprised me was people’s reactions. So, I thought that we would have to do lots of studies to be able to really, like, show that this was the case, that there still was this black-ape association and that it was a strong association.
And what I found instead was that people were—it was almost as though they thought that was a given, that blacks were associated with apes. And I would get questions about, “Well, what else would you expect?” and that, you know, black people just look more similar to apes than whites. And I just—yeah, I didn’t expect that. So that reaction was probably—it was surprising, but also—yeah, it was shocking, actually, for scientists to sit in a room and just feel like those associations are natural and normal, that there’s nothing to even study there, because there’s such a connection, an obvious visual connection, between blackness and this ape image.
________
Jennifer Eberhardt
social psychologist at Stanford University and recipient of the 2014 MacArthur “genius” grant, author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do.
— source democracynow.org | Mar 28, 2019