Suspicion Nation Read online

  And yet evidence of racial bias is all around us, though a yawning perception gap divides whites and blacks on our understanding of it. About three times as many101 blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly than whites at work, in stores or restaurants, in public schools, and by the health care system. And even when looking at the criminal justice system, where injustices against African Americans have been long known and well documented, mainly it is blacks who see racial discrimination and whites who do not. According to a Pew Research Center poll,102 twice as many blacks as whites say that African Americans are treated less fairly by the police. More than twice as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly by the courts.

  In fact, astonishingly, a 2011 study103 by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School found that “Whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America.”

  Some accuse African Americans of “playing the race card,” of seeing bias where none exists. So how can we get to the truth as to the extent of racial bias that still remains in America? To measure it today, researchers can’t bring in a bunch of subjects and straightforwardly ask them whether they are bigots, because everyone will simply deny it. So like Richard LaPiere before them, social scientists have gotten creative. For example, in a 2012 poll that was ostensibly about the presidential election, after a long list of political questions, the Associated Press snuck in some questions about the characteristics of people of color. When asked to associate adjectives with different racial groups, the majority called African Americans violent, lazy, and irresponsible104—the worst stereotypes about blacks that have lingered since the days of slavery, when the system required degradation and dehumanization to justify enslavement. Yet surely these very same people, if contacted individually and not anonymously, would strongly deny harboring any racial biases.

  This disturbing poll result is consistent with the results of clever, cheat-proof tests of our subconscious attitudes developed and refined by social scientists over the last fifteen years and administered internationally. For instance, when contemporary Germans are asked, “Do you like Turks?” they invariably respond, “yes,” because they consider themselves modern, unprejudiced citizens. They are then asked to rapidly click computer keys next to positive words such as “love” or “laughter” when German faces flash onscreen, and then they’re instructed to try again with Turkish faces. Another round has them quickly click on negative words next to German and then Turkish faces as they appear on the monitor. Surprise! They can much more easily and speedily connect happy terms with people who look like themselves. When the Turkish faces appear before them, they must pause and then push themselves to click on words like “joy” or “wonderful.” They can much more quickly connect negative words like “terrible,” “horrible,” or “nasty” with the foreign, darker faces. The very same Germans who report no ethnic bias against Turkish people have automatic negative associations with them, biases that they are either unable or unwilling to reveal.

  And so it is with domestic attitudes about African Americans in the twenty-first century. Presented with this “Implicit Bias Test” developed by Harvard University researchers, three-quarters of white Americans show significant racial bias against blacks. The majority of Asian Americans do too.105 And 50 percent of African Americans display racial bias against their own group. That is, the majority of both white and Asian Americans more readily connect “evil” with black faces and “glorious” with white faces, and so do half of African Americans.106

  In a sense, the Implicit Bias Test is a grownup version of the famous doll study. In 1950, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark interviewed sixteen black children from South Carolina, ages six to nine. Each child was shown two baby dolls that were identical in every way, except that one had a darker complexion. They asked the children questions like, “Which is the nice doll?” and “Which is the pretty doll?” Over and over again, the children associated the positive attributes with the white doll and negative attributes with the black doll. Most heartbreaking was the response to the final question, “Which doll looks most like you?” as each child pointed to the doll they had consistently identified as being ugly and bad. In less than ten years on earth, these youngsters absorbed the message that their skin color marked them as unattractive, undesirable, even evil.

  The Clark doll study was cited in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education as proof that segregated schools conveyed the message that African-American children were second-class citizens, branding them with the stigma of inferiority. Relying on the doll study and other evidence, the high court ruled that legalized separation of the races was unconstitutional, ordering schools to integrate “with all deliberate speed.” Desegregation had a slow start, but it picked up in the late 1960s through the 1980s as school districts used various means, including forced bussing, to achieve racial diversity in their student bodies. Then a series of court cases dismantling enforcement of Brown v. Board led to resegregation nationwide, resulting in nearly all of the early gains being erased. Today most students do not attend racially diverse schools. Black and Hispanic kids attend the most segregated schools of all.107

  Although the battle to desegregate schools was mostly lost, American society has changed in many ways since 1950. One would expect the Clark doll study, if administered to twenty-first-century children, to show better results, right? A few years ago, a Harlem, New York, day care center set out to answer that question and repeated the study108 with twenty-one children. Fifteen of the African-American youngsters responded like this:

  ADULT FEMALE QUESTIONER: “Can you show me the doll that looks bad?”

  A preschool-aged black girl quickly picks up and shows the black doll.

  “And why does that doll look bad?”

  “Because she’s black,” the little girl answers emphatically.

  “And why is this the nice doll?”

  “Because she’s white.”

  The outcome was the same, unchanged since 1950. Most black preschoolers linked negative attributes to the doll that looked more like them. Sixty years had passed, but little African-American kids still struggled under the stigma of inferiority.

  Why are the results the same? Because children pick up the cultural cues all around them, and those messages remain overwhelmingly negative about African Americans. In the area of physical beauty, for example, magazines at supermarket checkout counters, eye level for kids, feature gleaming, alluring celebrity faces—white faces, almost always. Blacks continue to be routinely shut out of “beauty” positions, such as modeling in New York City fashion shows.109 Many in the fashion industry believe discrimination against dark-skinned models is getting worse, not better, and their numbers have declined in the last few decades. African-American models are often told, “We already have our black girl.” Their representation is only about 6 percent, less than half their numbers in the population at large, and for some fashion lines, it’s zero.

  Popular culture’s message: if you want to be desired, be white. People magazine’s annual honor should be called Sexiest White Man Alive, since twenty-seven of the last twenty-eight stars to grace its “Sexiest Man” cover have been white. (We’ll always have Denzel, back in 1996.) Reality shows popular with young people have few dark-skinned cast members who aren’t the walking embodiment of a demeaning racial stereotype, like the Ghetto Ho or the Angry Black Woman. The attractive, eligible star of every episode of ABC’s hugely popular shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette have been white, every season (seventeen for the former, nine for the latter), every time. A few token minority contestants appear on those shows initially, to be voted off and disposed of early.

  And in that sense, the reality shows reflect reality. Because while most single people insist that they are open to dating people of different races, in online dating sites, blacks are often overlooked and whites are preferred. A report110 from the p
opular online dating site OKCupid.com found that African-American women received fewer responses than any other group, even though they sent the most messages111 seeking dates on the site. The study points out that its website users are younger and more progressive than the rest of the population, and that nearly everyone in the study said that interracial marriage was a fine idea. But when it came to responding to messages, white, Asian, and Hispanic women all preferred white men. And everyone shunned black women. The study concluded: “Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.”112

  Each decision maker who chooses the white model for his fashion show, the white “Sexiest Man” winner for her magazine cover, the white cast member for his reality show, or the white woman on a dating site would surely say that she is not racist—oh, absolutely not, I have black friends!—and that it “just happened” that the white person was chosen this time, and last time, and the time before that, and, well, all the other times too. As defense attorney O’Mara said of Zimmerman’s racial profiling, “It’s just happenstance.” But each of these choices reinforces all the others, snowballing to produce a powerful cultural message that white is “wonderful” (Implicit Bias Test results) and black is “bad” (doll studies)—a message so prevalent and powerful that preschoolers can be counted upon to repeat it back, to the point of self-humiliation.

  Implicit bias against those with darker skin goes beyond children’s assessments of good and bad and adult decisions on physical allure and dating. More perniciously, we are quicker to see aggressiveness and violence in African Americans even when whites engage in identical behavior. For example, in one study,113 75 percent of whites observing a black person shoving a white person called the behavior violent, but only 17 percent characterized the identical act performed by a white person (shoving a black person) as violent. Many called the latter simply “playing around.” Both black and white subjects are more likely to rate computer-generated African-American faces as hostile compared to identical (except for skin color) white faces.114

  The stereotype that blacks are criminals—dangerous, violent—runs deep. We are so quick to assume that African-American men are suspicious that many of us see weapons in their hands when there are none, for example. In another study,115 participants were shown a face, then an object. They were more likely to misidentify a nonthreatening object as threatening when a black face preceded it, and they were more likely to mistake a dangerous item as safe when a white face preceded it. “He’s got his hand in his waistband,” Zimmerman said to the police dispatcher of Trayvon Martin. “And he’s a black male.” A moment later he added, “He’s got something in his hands.” What Zimmerman saw as suspicious was probably a cell phone. Many Americans, including police officers, make the same mistake Zimmerman did, magically “seeing” a weapon in the hands of an unarmed black male.

  Social psychologists at the University of Colorado asked subjects to watch a video and then make a split-second decision to shoot when they perceived that the character who flashed on screen threatened them. In experiment after experiment—subjects were undergraduates, DMV customers, mall food-court patrons, and police officers—mistakes followed a pattern: they shot more unarmed blacks than unarmed whites, and they failed to shoot more whites than blacks who were holding weapons. Recounting the results of four separate studies, researchers wrote, “In the case of African-American targets, participants simply set a lower threshold for the decision to shoot.” That trend held true even when the participants themselves were African-American.116

  The association of dark skin with violence includes assumptions made about darker and lighter-skinned African Americans. Decision makers become increasingly harsh when the accused has a darker complexion and is “more stereotypically black”; they are more lenient when the accused is lighter-skinned and has more “white” features. Thus judges and jurors impose more punitive sentences on more “Afrocentric” defendants.117

  All of these subconscious conclusions that African Americans are violent, or armed, or worthy of more severe treatment have profound implications for a criminal justice system in which deciding who was aggressive in a high-pressure confrontation is a monumental determination. So many decisions of police and prosecutors, judges and juries turn on gut assessments of who provoked a street fight, who pulled a weapon first, who verbally threatened the other, whether a victim appeared to be reaching in his waistband for a gun—or was it just Skittles? And all those players in the criminal justice system have the same unacknowledged racial biases as the rest of twenty-first-century Americans, affecting their perceptions; while at the same time most would strongly reject the idea that prejudice had any role at all in their judgments.

  Most of us think that one is either racist or one is not, and certainly that we are not. An accusation of racism is a serious charge and is often hotly denied. And yet the field of testing for implicit biases opens up a third option: that while we would like to think of ourselves as open-minded and egalitarian, most of us have subliminally absorbed longstanding and widespread cultural messages that affect our decision-making processes when it comes to sizing up African Americans.

  And so racial bias festers, perniciously, under the smooth surface where no one admits to prejudice at all. Three-quarters118 of blacks say they have personally experienced race discrimination.119 And evidence of extensive differential treatment confirms that our unacknowledged stereotypes continue to mar the lives of African Americans.

  Some voice the frustration that in discussions about race, America’s gains are ignored. And certainly some advances are real and worth celebrating. Slavery and the explicit, legally enforced racism of the Jim Crow era are over. (Though surely the brutality of those years was an exceedingly low bar to surpass.) Under federal, state, and local laws, overt racial discrimination in jobs and housing is illegal everywhere in the United States. Explicit racists, like Keith Bardwell, the Louisiana Justice of the Peace who recently refused to marry interracial couples120 on the grounds he was concerned for their future children, are widely reviled. (Bardwell was forced to resign shortly after the story became public.)

  Some extraordinary African Americans have achieved greatness that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. Bardwell need only have looked to our highest office to see how off the mark he was about the limited futures of children of biracial marriages. President Obama, elected and then re-elected by majorities of Americans of every race, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is also a bestselling author whose first book is largely about his struggles with and pride in his racial identity. His presence in the Oval Office carries enormous symbolism for the gains America has made toward racial equality. No European nation has ever elected a member of a racial minority as head of state. In the prior administration of George W. Bush, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were appointed to the President’s cabinet as back-to-back Secretaries of State. Actors like Will Smith or Jamie Foxx and musicians like Michael Jackson, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Rihanna are beloved as crossover performers. Oprah Winfrey ranked number one on Forbes’s list of most powerful people, known and admired worldwide. Prominent black CEOs include Ursula Burns, who runs Xerox, a $22 billion company, and Kenneth Chenault, chief executive of American Express, with annual revenues of $33 billion.

  Young people today study African-American history in school, read literature written by great black authors, and annually commemorate a holiday honoring one of the bravest and most brilliant leaders in our nation’s history, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (None of this happened when I was in school in the 1970s.) Thurgood Marshall was one of the primary dismantlers of school segregation, and since his ascension to the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s now understood that the Court will forever-more include at least one African-American justice.

  And so on. Search nearly any field, and promin
ent African Americans will emerge. It’s far more difficult to be the first black something in America today than it was a generation ago.

  Many stories of individual achievement are out there, inspiring, magnificent, well worth telling. A few African Americans have risen to stratospheric levels of achievement. But as they’ve cracked the glass ceiling, by nearly any measure, as a group the vast majority of blacks remain trapped on the “sticky floor” of subpar schools, housing, jobs, and income. Disappointingly, many of these indicators have barely budged in a half century. At the same time, the illusion of modern-day racial equality allows these vestiges of racial inequality to fester, mostly unchallenged.

  In 1962 and 1963, at the height of Jim Crow–era racial segregation, a majority of whites believed that blacks and whites had equal opportunities in employment and education. This was before the existence of legal protections against race discrimination in America, as African Americans were barred in much of the country from all but the worst schools, jobs, living conditions, and most anything that would have been a step toward a middle-class life, as African Americans in the Deep South were being fire-hosed and set upon by police dogs and imprisoned and killed for sitting at lunch counters, participating in peaceful demonstrations, or attempting to vote. Most whites at that time said that there was equal treatment for blacks. As far as they were concerned, everything was just fine, and the civil rights agitators were just stirring up trouble. (As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s daughter, Dr. Bernice King, reminds us, her father was the most hated man in America at the time of his death.121)

  Just about the same number of white Americans today, 54 percent, say they believe there is equal treatment for minority groups under the law. We are still walking around in mass denial.