It’s time for dangerous talk.
The killing of Trayvon Martin has sparked a national debate about racism and guns. Plenty of us had rather not have this conversation and lots would like to do so but are afraid, because talking about either topic is like playing soccer in a minefield. It’s risky. But this is a conversation we must have.
Some have warned against a rush to judgment about the guilt or innocence of George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon. They’re right. In America, thank God, the accused are innocent until a jury of peers is convinced beyond reasonable doubt that they’re guilty. We should all be grateful that public pressure has led to a reexamination of the case and an arrest. At last, George Zimmerman will have his day in court.
The competence of prosecutor Angela Corey gives me hope that the case will be pursued with integrity and vigor. The skill of Zimmerman’s attorney Mark O’Mara and his deep compassion for the victim’s family has been moving to watch.
But whether George Zimmerman finally is found innocent or guilty, this tragic event calls for reflection. We need to talk about racism, and we need to talk about guns.
Unfortunately, these discussions usually stumble at the gate because we can’t agree on how to frame the issue. Should we think of racism as an individual problem or a social problem? Is this about bad people or flawed culture?
Many white people hear critique of cultural racism as an accusation against them as individuals or against “white people” as a group. Because most of us today are properly appalled by racism, the automatic response is to throw up the defenses: “I’m not a racist!” Or “you’re playing the race card! How racist of you!”
But the point is not to accuse individuals or groups. To use biblical language, the question here is not “who sinned, this man or his parents?” The question is “who is this demonic power that possesses us,” this force greater than any individual or group that causes us unconsciously to do things we wouldn’t normally do, to think things we don’t really want to think? The point is to understand the forces that continue to warp our life together, so we can work together to overcome them, to “cast the demon out.”
Many white Americans honestly have no idea that many black Americans are very much aware that the color of their skin often affects the way they’re treated. They notice when clerks in stores subtly keep an eye on them while they shop or never quite get around to serving them. They’ve had teachers who expected them to perform poorly. They’ve sometimes suspected that some of their white colleagues don’t think they really deserve the promotion they got. They notice when white people cross the street or lock their car doors when they approach. If they’re young and male, they expect to be stopped by police. They know always to carry ID, never to run, always to keep their hands in plain sight and to avoid sudden movements, never to question, object, or “talk back,” however outrageous the treatment they receive.
In part, this is just the reality of being a visible minority. But it’s also the case that American culture has a long history of “white racism,” of associating black skin with inferiority and danger.
There’s nothing “natural” about white racism. It was designed to justify the morally unjustifiable institution of African slavery, the cornerstone of American economic enterprise from the beginning of European colonial expansion in the Americas till the end of the Civil War. Without slaves, there would have been no tobacco industry, no sugar, no coffee, no rum, no cotton, no garment industry, no trans-Atlantic shipping, no international trade, no 17th, 18th, and 19th Century American economy. It served the interests of those who benefited from the slave economy to convince themselves and everybody else that slavery was “good for the slaves” because they were “naturally inferior,” a danger to society and to themselves if they were not controlled, “disciplined,” and “cared for.”
After the first Republican president ended legal slavery and was killed for doing so, white racism survived because it justified the ongoing social-economic legacy of slavery, the end of Reconstruction, the new colonial expansion, and the enforcement of segregation. It survives today as a comforting rationale for the striking disparities of wealth, incarceration, education, employment, and access to health care and quality housing that still are undeniable facts of life in America.
Slavery is outlawed and legal segregation has ended, but the vestiges of racist culture linger and shape the everyday experiences of Americans today.
White Americans normally don’t have to think about their skin color. I, for example, occasionally find myself in a situation where I’m very conscious of being white -- maybe I’m worshipping in a black church or I’ve ridden my bike into a neighborhood where I’m the only white person around or I’m in a village on the Congo River where all the children look at me with a mixture of fear and fascination. But this is not my normal experience. Most of the time, I’m “just a person,” unselfconscious about my skin color. For all practical purposes, I am a person of “non-color” -- which of course is absurd as a literal statement. My people are Irish. My skin is always one of two colors: a kind of freckled, glow-in-the-dark light beige or beet red, depending on the time of year and whether I thought to soak my skin with sun screen. But as a cultural statement, it makes perfect sense to say that I’m not a “person of color.” In my day-to-day dealings with store clerks or police officers, loan officers or people sitting on their front porches or meeting me on the sidewalk, my skin color makes no discernible difference whatsoever -- at least it has no negative consequences for me.
My behavior might. My dress might. But my skin color, for the most part, doesn’t matter at all. If anything, it’s usually a plus for me.
My wife and I had a friend in seminary, one of the least threatening, most easy-going people I’ve ever known. He dressed basically like I did -- though he was less of a slob. I had long hair -- those were the days! -- a long beard, and usually wore a flannel shirt and grubby jeans. In six years at Yale, I never once was stopped by a cop or asked by another student or spouse to show my ID when I walked across campus -- even when I did so, all hippy-looking, late at night. But our friend was stopped and questioned a lot.
I’m white. He’s black. I was innocent until I did something that made people wonder. He was suspicious until he proved otherwise. On campus in this bastion of liberalism, I “belonged.” He was treated as if he did not. Time after time, he literally had to prove his right to be there. I think that in bastions of American liberalism, conservatism, and neither-of-the-above moderation, our stories are fairly common.
This difference of experience complicates our conversations about racism.
Black people tend to experience racism as a relentless, pervasive, systemic reality. White people tend to experience it as a series of isolated events -- a racist joke from an embarrassing uncle, a shocking comment, a blatant act of discrimination. It’s not surprising then that when black people talk about racism as a systemic problem, many white people either don’t get it or else hear it as a personal attack.
It’s important, however, that white Americans understand that white racism is in fact systemic. It’s something that burrows its way into the hearts and minds of us all. It warps our interactions and colors our understandings, whatever our skin color or ethnic background.
This is not about who is good and who’s bad. It’s about repairing a culture and building a better future for us all.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, gives important insight into the depth and seriousness of the problem. Gladwell got the idea for the book from a personal experience. He’s the very light-skinned child of a white father and black Jamaican mother. He fits the census category, “mixed race.” When I first saw his picture, I thought of him as “white.” His life changed when, as an adult, he decided to grow his hair out. The result was kind of a classic “Afro.” Suddenly people treated him differently. He started getting more speeding tickets. He got pulled out of airport security lines. One day, he was walking down a familiar street and a police van pulled up on the sidewalk in front of him. Three officers hopped out and began to interrogate him because he fit the profile of a rapist. They showed him the sketch and description of a man who was in fact much taller and heavier, about fifteen years younger than Gladwell. Other than the Afro, the man looked nothing at all like him! When he pointed this out to the cops, they took a closer look and finally agreed.
His question was this: what is it about my appearance now that made the police associate me with a criminal suspect who really looks nothing like me, when they’ve never before paid any attention to me at all? The only change he could think of was the Afro.
Gladwell didn’t accuse the cops who stopped him of being hard-core racists. But something about the way they responded to his changed appearance made them associate him with a criminal who looked almost completely different than he did.
Something much deeper was at work here than conscious racism.
In his research, Gladwell found that for reasons of survival, the human brain has evolved to respond instantly to danger by recognizing stereotypical patterns. Psychologists call this “adaptive unconscious.” When faced with a dangerous situation, we need to move fast, to react without thinking about it. Though we often describe it as “intuition” and contrast it with “reason,” it’s actually not “irrational” at all. It’s super rational. It’s the brain’s highly evolved ability to quickly categorize behavior or movement or facial cues by comparing them to patterns, stereotypes that are hard-wired into the brain by genetic and cultural transmission and by personal experience. In situations of heightened danger, the brain instantly matches those expressions, movements, and behaviors to stored patterns and sends your body a message to react immediately, before the danger even has a chance to rise to the level of conscious thought. It’s an amazingly useful ability, essential to our survival as a species. And that same “adaptive unconscious” functions in situations that don’t pose immediate danger. Before we even think about it, we often “just have a feeling” -- something that “just seems right” or is “not quite right.” And those “gut reactions,” more often than not, turn out to be accurate.
The problem we face in America is that our “gut reactions” are shaped in part by a culture that is still marked by the legacy of racism. Whatever we’re told by the better angels of our nature, our brains are structured at a deep level by some of the racist stereotypes we’ve inherited from our collective past and from our continued discomfort at the inequalities that obviously still exist.
Whatever we believe is right and however we ultimately choose to act, our instantaneous first reaction is often still tinged with racism. In an important sense, we just can’t help it.
Gladwell describes research that uses an “Implicit Association Test” (IAT) to measure unconscious associations regarding race.The IAT is built on the assumption that we make connections more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs that are unfamiliar. Participants’ answers are recorded by a computer program that tracks response times down to a fragment of a second. So researchers measure not only how participants answer but how quickly they answer. The longer the hesitation, the less established the mental association. The test pairs two different concepts in one column and two other concepts in the other. In the Work and Career IAT, for example, “male or career” is in column one and “female or family” is in column two. A video monitor flashes words and images, and the participant taps one of two keys to put each word or image that appears in the appropriate column. The test then reshuffles the categories. Now in part 2 of the test, it’s “male or family” in column one and “female or career” in column two. The finely calibrated measurement of how fast test subjects reply shows which pairings are more established in the mind of the test-taker. So, for example, a word like “entrepreneur” would go in the “career” category. If it takes you less time to put words like “entrepreneur” in the “career” category when “career” is paired with “male” than it does when “career” is paired with “female,” then it’s reasonable to conclude that you have a stronger mental association between “male” and “career” than you do between “female” and “career.”
The point here is not that you are “sexist” if, for a split-second, you have to stop and think to put “entrepreneur” in the “female or career” column or “child care” in the “male or family” category. You may well believe that our careers and family roles should not be rigidly fixed by our gender, that men and women should be free to choose what they want to do. That’s your conscious decision, your moral commitment. What the IAT tests is your instant, unconscious associations, your “gut reactions,” which may or may not be consistent with your conscious commitments.
There is a Race IAT https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ that has been taken online by millions of people. The results are stunning. Response times show that, by large majorities, test-takers are much more likely to have negative implicit associations for black people and positive associations for whites. The figure is more than 80-percent overall. But what’s really surprising is that, of more than 50,000 African Americans who had taken the test by the time Gladwell wrote his book, about half showed pro-white, anti-black associations! Gladwell himself, appalled at his own response times, took the test over and over, but they didn’t change. His “blink” responses showed a pro-white bias.
This says nothing about his conscious moral commitments. It says a lot about the cultural air he breathes.
White racism is not a “white problem” or a “black problem.” It’s a systemic problem. It affects us all.
There are plenty of good people in America who want to resist racism, but our minds are shaped by it. Racist stereotypes are, for many of us, our “blink,” our “intuitive” instant response -- not because we as individuals are bad people, but because we as a people, whatever our skin color, live and breathe a culture that is shaped in significant ways by centuries of white racism.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that, if we are aware of this cultural reality, we can actively work to overcome it. Perhaps someday we can even erase it from our cultural memory.
This is not a battle between black people and white people, between good people and bad. It’s the common struggle of Americans who want to live up to the greatness of our promise, who want to do the right thing and fight the racism that perniciously persists in our culture and affects the “gut reactions” of most of us, whether we like it or not.
This leads finally to the other risky conversation: guns. There’s plenty to say about the complex politics of race and guns in America. But I’ll just say this: guns dramatically escalate the sense of danger in a situation of conflict. And increased danger dramatically heightens the likelihood that someone will act on impulse.
This is precisely why police officers and soldiers get extensive, intensive, repeated training to overcome their instant “gut reactions,” their “blink” responses in dangerous situations. With guns in the equation, split-second actions are much more likely to have fatal consequences.
What worries me about this 20-year tidal wave of state laws that encourage private citizens to bring concealed weapons into public spaces, to “stand their ground” when they sense a threat rather than looking for a safe retreat -- what bothers me about this legally encouraged armed confrontation is that these folks aren’t given the extensive training soldiers and police must have before they can carry a weapon. Even with the training, police and soldiers sometimes make disastrous decisions under duress. But without training, gun-toting Americans and the people who frighten them are at enormous risk. It's not at all surprising that in states that have passed these laws, the number of "justifiable homicides" has risen substantially.
Some states don’t require gun safety training, and a few don’t even require a permit at all to carry a concealed weapon in public. As far as I can tell, in the vast majority of states that do require some kind of training, the certification course lasts less than a day, usually 4-5 hours. And most of that half-day deals with basic gun safety, how to clean and maintain a weapon, and -- as is often highlighted in the ads -- how to avoid legal liability if you shoot somebody.
It appears from the ads that these courses don’t spend much time at all training students how to think before they shoot, how to resist racist stereotypes, how to overcome “gut reactions” in intense situations that are made much more intense and dangerous by the presence of a gun.
Florida’s “stand your ground” law and laws across the nation that encourage private citizens to carry concealed weapons in public spaces and to use them when they feel threatened are not inherently racist, but they dramatically increase the likelihood of race-tinged tragedies. Guns up the ante. They heighten the sense of danger. They increase the likelihood that someone will act by reflex. And in America, our reflex responses to danger are shaped at a fundamental level by racist stereotypes, not because we’re bad people, but because we just can’t help it. It’s the lingering legacy of African slavery and Jim Crow. It’s the cultural air we breathe.
What was in the heart of George Zimmerman the night he ignored police advice, left his truck, followed, then lost, then found, then pulled a gun and killed an unarmed teenager who looked “suspicious” to him, whose hoodie on his head and hands in his pockets made Zimmerman wonder what this guy’s “deal” was? What was in the mind of Trayvon Martin when this grown man who had followed him now pulled and pointed a pistol at him? Did he think at all? Or did he simply react? Did Zimmerman think at all? Or did he just react? We may never know. But we do know that the gun dramatically upped the ante.
I honestly believe we’re getting better as a society, but white racism lingers. Our brains are still molded by it. Our instant responses are still shaped by it. Our “blinks” are still conditioned by it. And with more and more people packing heat, we can expect more and more tragedies like Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
I’m not surprised to read that Mr. Zimmerman “couldn’t stop crying,” as one of his friends said, when he thought about what he’d done. I do not believe that he wanted or expected anyone to die. I’m sure he’s devastated that he took a human life. I certainly would be, even if I pulled the trigger because I feared for my own life.
I also have no doubt that, whether or not George Zimmerman is a “racist,” his actions that night and Trayvon’s reactions were shaped at a deep level by the realities of white racism in American culture.
George Zimmerman really does bear responsibility for what finally happened. He had no business ignoring police advice. He was foolish to get out of his truck and follow this “suspicious” young man. It was dangerous to take a gun and than point it. At times like these, it’s hard to think clearly. Instincts kick in. George Zimmerman should have known better.
I weep for Trayvon, for his parents, his family, and his friends. But I also grieve for George Zimmerman, for the guilt he must feel, for the split-second decision he may wish he never made.
And I’m angry at the politicians who exploit our fears, who pass laws that encourage people like George Zimmerman to put themselves in risky, dangerous situations, and to endanger others, to “stand their ground” with lethal force, not when intruders cross their thresholds and invade their homes, but out in public spaces, in situations where we’d all be better off if everybody sought to lower the heat, not raise it.
The tragedy of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman is, in an important sense, the failure of American political culture. It’s cynical, it’s dangerous, it wrong, and we’ve got to change it.
