The Daily Warning

So I’d guess most people have heard something about this, but for those who haven’t, I’ll summarize the basics.  Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor and one of the foremost academic voices on race was recently arrested on his own porch for disorderly conduct by a police officer who was there investigating whether Gates was in fact a burglar.

Sounds pretty racist, right?

Well, yes, but it wasn’t the cop.

Here is the reality from the police officer’s position.  He was told to go check out a house because someone called in about a potential break in (Gates had just returned from overseas, and apparently had misplaced his keys).  He comes up to the door, met Gates, and asked for ID.  At this point the officer, James M. Crowley, claims Gates got belligerent, a claim Gates denies.  What I bet is that Gates got really pissed off (which obviously wouldn’t be unreasonable, after working your entire life and becoming a damn Harvard professor, and then someone seriously asking you if you were burglarizing your own house, something that would not have happened if you were white), and attempted to express his discontent to the officer.  Anyone who has ever been accused of racism by an angry academic can tell you that it wouldn’t be outside of the realm of possibility that it could be perceived as belligerence.  So here’s this cop, for all he knows he’s talking to a guy in the process of burglarizing this house, a guy who won’t produce ID and who’s probably yelling at him, he did what police officers do in such a situation.  If someone called the cops suggesting I was breaking into my apartment and then I started screaming at the cop and not producing ID, the same thing would happen to me.The racism comes in the fact that the cop would never be called to my place in the first place.  I’ve been locked out of many different places, and found many creative ways of getting inside, no one walking by has ever assumed that I was breaking into the house.  I’ve set up ladders and climbed in through windows, but people see me and they assume I’m just a guy who’s locked out.  I’m young, I have certain additions to my body which wouldn’t make it outside the realm of possibility for someone to assume I’m a criminal, and yet no one has ever assumed that I was a burglar, or even that the chances of me being a burglar are great enough that the police should be notified.

So what the hell made them think Gates was a burglar?  It’s very hard to suggest race wasn’t a primary factor.  He’s an older man, I imagine he dresses in a mature academic manner, there’s nothing about this guy trying to wedge open a door that suggests he’s not just a dude locked out of his house.  Unless you think, or have an established cognitive heuristic that associates being black with being a criminal.

Which gets us back to what the actual problems are.  People are racists because of the way human brains work.  The reason a deer runs when you step on a twig nearby is not because of analysis, it is hard wired in their brain that there is a threat and that they should get away from it.  It might not be a threat, but the cost of running away from something that’s not a risk is much much lower than not running away from something that is a risk.  To a large extent the human brain functions in the same way, there are mechanisms that identify patterns, and then generalize upon those patterns.  So when someone isn’t regularly exposed to black people, and only sees the gangstas who are WAY disproportionately represented on TV, the human brain’s default response is to associate being black with being a gangsta, to the point that one would see a senior Harvard professor trying to get into his own house as being a potential burglar.

And that’s the problem.  As human beings our brains allow for much higher levels of analysis in our deliberate cognitive capacities, and so to a certain extent, if we think about it enough, we can make some progress towards making our heuristics more accurate, but ultimately the subconscious responds to patterns regardless of what we choose to think when our thoughts are deliberate.

And so each problem is intertwined with any number of problems.  Gangs exist primarily because of the drug war and the lack of quality education, gangsta culture exists because of the gangs, and gangsta culture gets a disproportionate amount of attention because Americans have always loved outlaws, and once the media attention is there it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.  Along with this we have an extended history of segregation which facilitates the formation of monstrously overgeneralized heuristics about people of different races.  As long as white people live around white people, black people live around black people, and hispanics live around hispanics, white people will project an absurd generalization on all blacks and hispanics, blacks will project an absurd generalization on all whites and hispanics, and hispanics will project an absurd generalization on all whites and blacks.

And that’s before we get into the cognitive response to in group out group dynamics.

What happened to Gates is unfair and racist.  That said, it is frankly unfair to blame any individual for this, and especially not the police officer.  If there were any individual to blame, I’d blame the person who called the cops in the first place, but even with that person he was responding in the way that the human brain responds when subjected to the stimuli s/he has experienced in his/her life.

The reason police officers are so frequently the lightning rods for issues of racism is because they don’t have the luxury of ignoring their cognitive heuristics.  Most people with cognitive heuristics that could be considered racist can ignore them, come up with some rationalization and then convince themselves that they’re not racist.  Police officers don’t have this luxury.  They have to trust their instincts, and the question is a matter of life or death.  On top of this, they have a job to do, in this case someone reported a potential burglary.  What the hell should he have done?  Show up to the door and say “Well, obviously this is your house, considering I haven’t seen any ID or evidence that this is your house”?  Do we really think our law enforcement would better serve our needs if they are worried that in answering a report and doing so according to protocol they’re going to essentially be called stupid racists by the President of the United States during a nationally televised press conference?

It’s really easy to blame cops, but they didn’t make the system so conducive to racial bias.  They don’t have the authority or ability to fix the problem, or really even to mitigate it.  If you’re offended by this situation, move into a neighborhood that is primarily of a race that isn’t your own.  Fight for school vouchers.  Either end the drug war or start treating drug users the same way you treat drug dealers (the black market for drugs only exists because the punishment for possession is much smaller than the punishment for possession with intent to distribute, if you punished the white girl from the suburbs for buying coke as much as you punished the black guy from the inner city who sold it to her, her equilibrium level of consumption of cocaine will plummet, removing the economic incentive for impoverished people to get into selling drugs, undermining the economic base for the gangs and the massive incentive gangs provide for leaving school and pursuing legal careers which require much higher levels of initial investment in the development of personal capital).

Screaming indignantly in response to racism only makes it harder to deal with the issues pertaining to race.  The shrillness of our national dialectic on race is the reason why no one who is racist (everyone) is willing to recognize that they are racist.  Everyone’s brain works in essentially the same way, it is inherent that absolutely everyone is racist to some extent, and yet no one can say what they actually think because if anyone were actually honest they would reveal something that would probably lead to complete social isolation.  So we have a major problem that we can’t talk about beyond the most obvious platitudes.  The solution seems clear enough to me, it’s just an issue of being around the people we don’t understand, recognize that we’re all naturally racist and that this natural predisposition towards racism can only be mitigated through exposure and non-hyperbolic conversation.  It’s not easy, and even if we could talk about it it would probably take decades, if not centuries to get where we should be, but the answer is clear.

I don’t think Gates responded unreasonably.  I don’t think Crowley did anything wrong.  I can only imagine how pissed off I would be if I was in Gates’ situation, but the way this is playing out is playing into the dynamic where these problems are not only never solved, but never even substantively addressed.