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vincentML -> RE: Does Multiculturalism work? (7/25/2017 6:24:23 AM)
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Fair enough, Butch. I am willing to have a discussion with you on this issue. Let's take a look at some of your points.
quote:
To me most whites... even in mixed neighborhoods don't even think about black problems one way or the other.
Of course they don't. Understandably, they have their own daily-living problems. But when a crisis arises and their attention is aroused mostly they condemn the blacks for protesting. Not because they are being called racists. They respond negatively to the ugliness they see which reaffirms the thug image, the dangerous black man image that prevails in white culture, a remnant of the days when slave owners lived in fear of a slave rebellion.
Here is an article about some experiments that demonstrated white attitudes toward harsh justice laws were modified by manipulating their exposure to blacks via mug shots and statistics. I won't go into details but the result is that whites have an implicit fear of blacks and would tighten judicial laws even agreeing they are too harsh. Stop and frisk laws and three strikes laws were primary examples.
Some comments from the study:
Taken together, the conclusion was that “exposing people to extreme racial disparities in the prison population” led to a greater fear of crime and—at best—an unwillingness to support reform. For as much as you might be outraged by the vast racial disparities in marijuana arrests, for example, the general public might see the image of a young black man and hunker down in its support for marijuana prohibition.
It’s disheartening. But, if I can indulge my cynicism for a moment, it’s also not too surprising. From previous research, we know that—among white Americans—there’s a strong cognitive connection between “blackness” and criminality. “The mere presence of a black man,” note Eberhardt and other researchers in a 2004 paper, “can trigger thoughts that he is violent and criminal.”
Indeed, they continue, simply thinking about black Americans can lead people to see ambiguous actions as aggressive and to see harmless objects as weapons. When Michael Dunn saw 17-year-old Jordan Davis and his friends, he perceived a threat, imagined a gun, and opened fire, killing Davis. “I was the one who was victimized,” said Dunn in a phone call to his fiancée before his trial. It’s ludicrous, but it’s not dishonest. Like many other Americans, Dunn sees black people—and black men in particular—as a criminal threat.
What’s striking is this goes both ways. “In a crime-obsessed culture,” says the study, “simply thinking of crime can lead perceivers to conjure up images of Black Americans that ‘ready’ these perceivers to register and selectively attend to Black people who may be present in the actual physical environment.” In other words, the connection between blacks and crime is so tight that just thinking about crime—irrespective of the environment—triggers thoughts of black people in the same way that thinking of black people triggers thoughts of crime. And if you want a more disturbing thought, consider this: In one of the 2004 experiments, researchers found that exposing police officers to crime-related words followed by photos of black inmates “increases the likelihood that they will misremember a black face as more stereotypically black than it actually was.”
On top of this, there’s the stubborn persistence of false or faulty ideas. “Misperceptions, like zombies, are difficult to kill,” writes political scientist Brendan Nyhan, citing the health care reform “death panel” myth, which persists five years after Sarah Palin pushed it into the mainstream. In fact, they’re so durable that giving counterinformation can strengthen the original misperception. Confront vaccine-skeptics with evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism, and they may respond with greater skepticism.
The dynamic between race, crime, and criminal justice reform is similar. Tell people that blacks are overpoliced and over-represented in prison, and it triggers thoughts of crime, which leads to fear, which causes a backfire effect as people follow their fear and embrace the status quo of unfair, overly punitive punishments.
The immediate takeaway is that advocates might want to try different language (or a different approach) in their campaign to reform the criminal justice system. Racial injustice might be the main problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s the problem the broader public wants to solve.
To go a little deeper, however, I think this study further underscores the extent to which “blackness” retains its racial stigma, even as we move far away from the time of explicit anti-black attitudes. The dramatic progress of the past 50 years hasn’t dismantled America’s racial hierarchy or reshaped its form. The mythical “war on whites” notwithstanding, black Americans remain a disfavored class, subject to negative stereotypes, residential segregation, and rampant police violence.
Not that there aren’t bright spots. Large communities of black Americans succeed and thrive in ways that weren’t possible a few decades ago. But ask yourself, during downturns and recessions, why are blacks the worst off? Why do they fall furthest? Is it some unique pathology? Or is the racial caste system—and our subconscious racial attitudes—more durable than we want to believe?
So yes, most white people are not overtly racists, they do not even think of race, but they link race to criminality when confronted with a social stressor. When judging criminality there is an implicit racism, a long historical stigma that persists along with a fear of black men in the media and in our psyches. That's why reform of racial injustice is delayed. Politicians demagogue the race card. You need only recall the ugliness of Trumps descriptions of black neighborhoods which he cynically claimed he would fix during the campaign. Can you doubt that Trump was pushing the "fear" button?
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