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.