Breathing While Black

Beginning ten years ago, social psychologists did a series of studies looking at the consequences of our cultural stereotypes about African-American men and violence. A study by Joshua Corell and others called “The Police Officer's Dilemma” is typical. White participants were shown slides of young men standing in public places, such as a park or a city sidewalk. Half of the pictures were of black men and half of white men. Within each racial group, half of the men were holding handguns and the others were holding some innocuous object, such as a cell phone or a soda can. The participants had a half-second to press one of two keys labeled “shoot” or “don't shoot.” The researchers counted the number of errors—either not shooting an armed man or shooting an unarmed man.

The results showed evidence of bias. When the men in the photos were white, the participants made the same number of errors regardless of whether the men were armed or not. However, when the men were black, they made fewer errors when they were holding a gun, and more errors when they were not. In other words, they were more likely to “shoot” a black man than a white man, both when he was armed and when he was not.

This is an example of automatic or fast thinking, which Kahneman calls “a machine for jumping to conclusions.” Subsequent research showed that the results did not vary with personal prejudice. However, the participants showed a greater “shooter bias” when they were more aware of the cultural stereotype, that is, when they gave higher estimates of the percentage of Americans who saw black men as aggressive, dangerous and violent. Exposure to newspaper articles about black criminals also increases the size of the shooter bias.

The fact that this response tendency is automatic doesn't mean it can't be controlled. The shooter bias can be reduced through practice and with certain kinds of training, such as instructing participants to ignore the race of the person in the photo and to concentrate on the presence or absence of a gun.

This series of three videos (about 35 minutes total) featuring social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt deals with primarily unconscious racial biases. The study on weapons stereotypes is in the second segment, but I recommend them all. (You Tube will guide you through them.) Some of them are shocking, and will make it clear why social psychologists are unwilling to accept mass media assurances that prejudice is a thing of the past.

I think these studies are relevant to the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman says he felt threatened by Martin, and so far, the Sanford, FL police have accepted his claim that he acted in self defense. This defense is made possible by Florida's 2005 “stand your ground” law, which was written by the National Rifle Association. Variants of which have been enacted in 20 other states. The relevant section of the law reads as follows:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

This law does away with the longstanding legal doctrine that, when outside your home, there is a “duty to retreat” when confronted with a dangerous situation. It creates ambiguity about when a person is acting in self-defense. How can it be objectively determined that a person “reasonably believes” he or she is threatened? The studies of shooter bias suggest that people might sincerely believe themselves to be in danger when confronted with an unarmed black man. Even if the perpetrator is wrong, he or she may escape punishment if the mistake is “reasonable.”

The difficulty is compounded when there are no witnesses or the witnesses are friendly to the perpetrator. Who is able to contradict the shooter's self-report of his or her emotional state? Not the victim. He's dead. As a result, police and prosecutors may assume that they have little chance of obtaining a conviction in a jury trial.

From reading the accounts or this incident and listening to the 911 tape (see below), I doubt whether Zimmerman sincerely felt himself to be threatened. He pursued Martin even after the police told him not to. However, the reference in the law to “prevent(ing) the commission of a forcible felony” seems to encourage this type of vigilantism. When combined with Florida's lax gun laws, the “stand your ground” law allows armed, aggressive, and possibly paranoid people to pursue their fantasies of law enforcement and justify their behavior with after-the-fact claims of self-defense.

Justifiable homicides in Florida have tripled since the law went into effect. In 93 cases in which the defendant claimed self-defense under the new law, charges were dropped in 57 of them, and 7 others were acquitted by a jury. This law is irresponsible and should be repealed. If the shooter bias studies are to be taken seriously, the equal protection claise of the Fourteenth Amendment would seem to provide a basis for overturning them.