Racism in America: Same Bat Time, Same Bat Place — Location Influences Bias

Why does white America have such a hard time quitting racism? Why are white people so easily seduced by Republican racist dog whistles disguised as culture war? Why are white people so willing to live in misery and hardship inflicted upon them by the Republican politicians they elect in order to be as racist and misogynistic as they wanna be?

The answer to these seemingly mystifying questions is that the biases of those around you not only influence your behavior and beliefs, but also the way the institutions of the area function. You can take someone like my mother who was fired from her job as a department store clerk in sleepy Appalachian Tennessee small town for having the temerity of offering a delivery driver a hot cup of coffee in the staff lounge on a cold snowy day while his truck was being unloaded. It was 1963 and he was Black. My mother is from very rural western Pennsylvania. She claims it never occurred to her that it could be a problem.

Fast forward twenty years to central Texas where we’ve lived for most of that, and she’s cussing the Mexicans as being lazy thieves that you can’t trust no way no how. What gives? How could she lose her sense of racial equity?

Given the geographical migration that has taken place in the US over the past fifty odd years, you might could think that the racial attitudes were being evened out, but they’re not. We’ll use findings from studies using data from Harvard Implicit Association test to explain.

Data from 1860 Predicts Racism Today

Let’s start with this finding revealed on the essential podcast, Hidden Brain. Amazingly, the effects of the Civil War still linger, almost as if it never really ended. The Deep South still correlates highly with intense racism. Just look at the mishegas coming out fo Mississippi with their giving all of the federal income support moneys to rich white people like Brett Farve and the capitol police getting to do all of the murders to all of the Black people they can find.

In a recent episode on implicit bias, I was struck by a finding that Shankar Vedantam pointed out that used Civil War data on proportions of free and enslaved people in the counties of the Confederacy to illuminate racial attitudes of today. Lincoln, in a move that is still paying big dividends, commissioned a study that produced a county-level map of the Confederacy showing the percent of enslaved people, read that Blacks. He found that the higher the percentage, the harder the county fought to preserve the right of white folks to own and mistreat Black people. And, wouldn’t you know it, it predicts the depth of racism today in those eHarxact same counties even though we have such a large reshuffling of our population so that many of the people who live in those counties aren’t direct decedents of the slave owning traitorous confederates and the direct decedents aren’t the racist bigots that their forebears were wherever it is that they live.

Think about that. It suggests that those racist attitudes hold on in the very infrastructure of the county and get passed from person to person, generation to generation almost like a virus or bad gene. Perfectly non-racist people move to those counties and find themselves with hardening biases.

County Anti-Black Bias Predicts Police Anti-Black Violence

Lest you think this is so much hot gas being blown out of a motivated reasoning ass, the good folks over at the Harvard Implicit Association Test now have decades of data reflecting millions of people from around the globe. Now, with all this data out there, wouldn’t you know it those pesky social scientists have started looking at geographically aggregated data to see if the aggregate of biases of individuals living in a specific place reflect the amount of discrimination in that place.

What do you think they found? Sure ’nuff, they found when a whole bunch of people with implicit anti-Black bias get together in a specific place like a county in the Deep American former Confederacy South, you get high degrees of racial prejudice and bias.

Here’s a fascinating and very sobering finding from a meta-analysis of studies looking at disparities in policing as evidenced by the lethality of traffic stops. I know, we whitey white meats don’t need even think they go together, “proving” that you can find a correlation between any two randomly chosen things no matter how little they actually have to do with each other. However, for everybody else in the country, it makes perfect sense because police murder non-whites. Tessa Charlesworth and Mahzarin Banaji report in their paper on the relationship on socially significant outcomes and their relationship with regional implicit bias:

• Black folks make up from twelve percent of the population, but 23 percent of all the people killed by police, like double what any reasonable person would expect. Of course, racists will say that Black folks are committing all of the crimes, so duh. But, that’s racism for you. It doesn’t stand up to statistical analysis.
• The meta-analysis reveals:
  • the greater the implicit antiBlack and pro-White attitudes of a region, and
  • the greater the implicit Black-weapon stereotypes in a region
  • the greater the likelihood of lethal use of force by police toward Black Americans.

The relationship is much more insidious than police catching Black and white criminals in action and feeling like they are fearing for their lives more often when confronted by a Black criminal than with a white one because Blacks is criminals, of course. It goes to the greater percentage likelihood that Black people in areas with higher implicit bias against Blacks of having a police encounter, meaning that police stop Blacks in far greater numbers than their make up of the population would warrant. The likelihood of being on the receiving end of police violence starts there.

These findings are so strong and so pervasive that it is unsurprising that a white Kansas City police officer is suing the department for racist practices. He alleges that they were explicitly instructed to do the following:

• A police captain ordered them to only answer calls in predominately white neighborhoods and ignore calls in predominately Black neighborhoods because white folks “are actually paying for the police.”
• They were explicitly told to target CoC of color and racially inflammatory language was consistently used.
• Ticket quotas were demanded and to meet them, they were encouraged to seek out PoC because they were more likely to have multiple infractions.
• A captain with the force told him to “approach every car with the mindset to be ready to kill everybody in the car.”

But, it is only a few bad apples in our police departments doing all the civil rights violations and murders to all of the Black citizens.

We’ve long known that the situation we find ourself in counts for about 75% of our behavior. We evolved to fit into the groups we identify with. We unconsciously adopt the views of those around us. We hunt for clues to those views whether those are in statues of traitorous racist slave-owning Confederate officers or tirades against Critical Race Theory at school board meetings, they have an effect on the attitudes that everyone who is exposed to them. And, just like the changes in racial attitudes my mother exhibited over her lifetime, we will all change unless we actively, consciously fight against it.

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