President Obama and Trayvon Martin, Part II

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Earlier, I posted a reaction to President Obama’s remarkable press conference about Trayvon Martin. I noted that he personalized the issue, disclosing how he had personally experienced racial profiling. But he did not leave it at the personal level, as he then attempted to play the role of a psychologist and explain how these sorts of experiences affect African Americans and shapes how they might see particular situations. He noted:

And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.  And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.  The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.  And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

Here he is saying that both personal and collective experiences shape individual perspectives and interpretations of ambiguous events. There is a considerable social psychology literature on this topic (see Kenneth Dodge and the hostile attributional bias), and I am reminded of a story recounted to me by one of my graduate students, Tamara Nelson. For her master’s thesis, Tamara has been investigating the concept of the Strong Black Woman among African American women, and so she had to recruit a number of African American women to participate in her interview-based study. What I found interesting was the number of participants who, of their own accord, engaged with her in a discussion of the Tuskegee experiments, in which African American medical volunteers were subjected to a number of remarkable violations of human rights and ethical principles. Some of these participants had likely heard about these experiments in their schooling, but many of them had heard about it from their families and communities. I would be surprised if similar numbers of non-African Americans would be able to explain what happened in the Tuskegee case and/or spontaneously mention it prior to participating in some research. Clear example of how cultural experience becomes cultural knowledge and then is translated into individual beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

 

President Obama and Trayvon Martin, Part I

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On Friday, July 19th, President Obama gave a remarkable press conference in which he appeared to speak somewhat extemporaneously on the subject of Trayvon Martin and race. It is hard to think of any other president who has given a similar speech in such an open, self-disclosing fashion. What was particularly elegant was how President Obama integrated the personal with the societal — he tried to explain how prevalent the experience of racial profiling is among African American men, and how it affects one’s sense of self and identity. Beginning with his personal experiences, he said:

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.  There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me — at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often.

Here he personalizes the experiences of many African Americans that remains out of view of many European Americans because it conflicts with the world view that the U.S. is a “good” country, and that “bad things” don’t happen to “good people.” The logic extends: if something bad happens to you it is because you did something to deserve it, or perhaps a bit more distally, others of your group did something for you to deserve it.

These experiences are invisible to people from the majority world because of the concept of privilege. Groups that have power and privilege have difficulty seeing and understanding that their world experiences are not universally shared.

A recent CNN panel hosted by Don Lemon made this point so beautifully, I am sharing it here. Note how starkly the example given by the anti-racism activist, Tim Wise, contrasts with the story told by the actor LeVar Burton.

 

 

 

 

Race and the justice system

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Unsurprisingly, reactions to the recent verdict in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman trial have been omnipresent in the media. Sadly, the reactions have been rather predictable and divided along the usual political divide: those on the left see the verdict as yet another miscarriage of justice involving African Americans, while those on the right have lauded the verdict as evidence of a jury unswayed by political correctness and able to follow carefully the law in deciding the case.

In reading through numerous blogs and reactions, I found myself most in agreement with Andrew Sullivan’s take. In particular, while believing strongly that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled during the initial pursuit, it is harder to disentangle what happened next, given the contradictory testimony of the various witnesses and forensic evidence presented.

What seems clear to me, however, is the absurdity of a legal system that (a) allows somebody to initiate an aggressive confrontation with another person, (b) to suddenly find him/herself on the losing end of this confrontation, (c) to then claim to be in fear for one’s life, and (d) to then shoot and kill the other person in justifiable self-defense. Given the power of the NRA and the inability of Congress to get anything substantive done, it is unfortunately easy to predict that we will see many more of these cases.

What is also clear to me, and especially sad, is the way that some writers on the right have used the particulars of this case to express their own prejudicial biases and fears. For example, Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, writes that because young, black males are disproportionately convicted of violent crimes, it is acceptable to then assume that any young, black male is dangerous (and especially if dressed in a way that offends the sensibilities of Mr. Cohen). Many have already responded eloquently to this poorly informed opinion piece, and so I won’t repeat their arguments here. I do wonder, however, whether Mr. Cohen ascribes to this “justified stereotype” approach to other stereotypes about individuals from other groups?

Tying these two pieces together: a legal system that has dangerously empowered the use of guns plus an all-too-common view that certain individuals are dangerous and so worthy of profiling, and you get an explosive concoction with which this country will continue to struggle.