Bias in our veins
by Tom Sullivan
Jennifer Eberhardt studies implicit bias at Stanford University, how even unconscious racial attitudes affect our interactions with others. Eberhardt works with police departments tech companies in their training. NPR interviewed the MacArthur grant recipient this week about her new book, “Biased.” One story she told has stuck with me all week.
While visiting Charlottesville, VA during her research, a middle-aged Uber driver spoke of a black woman, recently deceased, who had helped raise him. Yet, after explaining how important she had been in his life and his affection for her, she recounts, he admitted there was still “bigotry in my veins“:
EBERHARDT: OK. So I’m getting a little nervous, and I can only see the back of his baseball cap – right? – ’cause I’m in the back seat. I couldn’t see his expression or anything. And so I just asked him – I said, well, what did you mean? He says, well, I can feel it rising up. And I said, well, when can you feel it rising up? He said, when I’m outnumbered. You know, he said he lived in Florida, and he said he felt it there when he was outnumbered by Latinos. I just thought it was so honest.
Bias can be triggered by stress, she explains. Situations police face requiring split-second decisions are prone to unconscious bias surfacing:
“I think typically when people think about bias, they’re thinking about burning crosses and people filled with hate,” Eberhardt said on “CBS This Morning” Monday. “But you don’t have to be a bigot to have bias. Bias is affecting all of us. You don’t have to be a bad person.”
[…]
She said the foundations are wired into our brains from infancy. “Babies as young as three months of age already are showing a preference for faces of their own race,” she said. “This starts early. I mean, it has to do with who we’re surrounded by, and our brains get conditioned to looking at those faces and being able to distinguish among them.”
When I’m outnumbered
Throughout the nation’s history, the dominant culture — the dominant white population — has to a certain degree tolerated immigrants, the presence of people of non-Christian faiths, even the presence of large numbers of slaves, so long as they are perceived as small in number and/or not a threat to that dominance. Beyond some undefined trigger point, that perception shifts. For persons who are not overt racists, bias lies below the surface so long as the Others are in (and know) their place.
The politically motivated hype surrounding the arrival of immigrants at the U.S. southern border, plus the new visibility of previously closeted Americans has fellow citizens in Pennsylvania and elsewhere remote to the border convinced they are about to be outnumbered.
Alvin Toffler examined the health effects of rapid change in “Future Shock” (1970). Perhaps we suffer the cognitive effects of feeling overwhelmed by news and information, both good and bad, in quantities no human can process. What we used to know, we now half-know, think we know, and cannot agree on. So, why bother trying? Could bias against objective facts as a basis for making collective decisions about the world be “rising up” because we feel outnumbered by them? So long as facts know their place, we tolerate them. But when they become so many we perceive them as a threat to our control?
I once wrote about a similar overload phenomenon described in a book from the same period:
It seems people still reference Tom Wolfe’s essay, “O Rotten Gotham—Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink,” published as the last chapter of “The Pump House Gang” in 1968. Touring the city with anthropologist Edward T. Hall of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Wolfe examined how New York affects people, referencing the work of ethologist John B. Calhoun. From Wikipedia:
The ethologist John B. Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe the collapse in behavior which resulted from overcrowding. Over a number of years, Calhoun conducted over-population experiments on rats which culminated in 1962 with the publication of an article in the Scientific American of a study of behavior under conditions of overcrowding. In it, Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink”. Calhoun’s work became used, rightly or wrongly, as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general.
[…]
In everyday life in New York– just the usual, getting to work, working in massively congested areas like 42nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Lexington, especially now that the Pan-Am Building is set there, working in cubicles such as those in the editorial offices at Time-Life, Inc., which Dr. Hall cites as typical of New York’s poor handling of space, working in cubicles with low ceilings and, often, no access to a window, while construction crews all over Manhattan drive everybody up the Masonite wall with air-pressure generators with noises up to the boil-a-brain decibel levels, then rushing to get home, piling into subways and trains, fighting for time and space, the usual day in New York– the whole now-normal thing keeps shooting jolts of adrenaline into the body, breaking down the body’s defenses and winding up with the work-a-daddy human animal stroked out at the breakfast table with his head apoplexed like a cauliflower out of his $6.95 semispread Pima-cotton shirt and nosed over into a plate of No-Kloresto egg substitute, signing off with the black thrombosis, cancer, kidney, liver, or stomach failure, and the adrenals ooze to a halt, the size of eggplants in July.
Consumers of news in Punxsutawney and Provo can now share the experience. Their fight-or-flight responses stay dialed up to 11 by the tightly wound knot of personality disorders in the Oval Office and by an infotainment complex with advertising revenues driven by viewer outrage. Facts are no longer material to people’s truth claims when they feel stressed and outnumbered.
“Someday, when we’re sitting around the electronic campfires we’ve lit to pretend-warm the huts in our Mars colonies,” Dahlia Lithwick writes, “we will tell our grandchildren about whatever vestigial memories we have of facts.”
We’ll remember them fondly with bigotry in our veins.