The Interaction between Implicit Bias and Racism in Our Everyday Lives and in the News

It’s no secret that Ye Olde Blogge is on vacay in the heart of Tuscany in a 19th century villa that sleeps the small army of family members that we’ve assembled here. It’s good times with the extended in-laws with good food and very good wine. And, as it goes when adult siblings gather with their families, stories get exchanged. Since Ma Belle Femme’s family is Canadian, some, okay, many, all right, most of those stories feature hockey at all levels of play.

I LOVE to see the hand-of-god in my life or synchronicity, whether you believe in god or not. It is far more entertaining than just plain old coincidence, and this post is the result of god putting several examples of overt racism and implicit bias in my face. Obviously, the only response that a vacationing full-time citizen and part-time blogger can have is to write a post about it. Otherwise, you risk the wrath of god or Carl Jung, and, quite honestly, I don’t know which is worse.

This particular story concerns racism and the reaction of very average white people to it. It illustrates the difference between explicit racism and implicit bias and how difficult it is to combat that inner bias that we all carry to some degree. After the anecdote and discussion, we’ll push on to all of the racism and implicit bias in the news of late to, you know, help sort out how implicit bias makes all of the authoritarianism in the country worse.

A Story of Implicit Bias, Overt Racism, and Collusion by the Well-Meaning

Ma Belle Femme’s sister has three daughters. They all play or played hockey. The oldest one wasn’t a very high achieving player, but she was okay. The middle one captained a national championship team, but no longer plays. And the youngest one plays on a high school team. My brother-in-law has coached all of their teams and was one of the coaches during this incident. They showed us a video of a foul that happened during one of their recent games.

During the middle of the opening period, the opposing team is set up in front of the net. Their center is fixing to receive the puck and, probably, take a shot, when a defensive player comes in and checks her hard. Nothing illegal, the ref is right there. The shot goes wildly off target and is cleared by the defense and play begins to turn down the ice.

The star center skates up behind the defensive player — skates over a meter to get to her — and stick checks her — lifts her stick horizontally to the ice with both hands — and strikes the girl in the back of her neck level just under the helmet while saying loudly, “Fucking n***.” The girl falls to the ice. The play is called for being unnecessary roughness or whatever it is called in hockey. Sorry, I didn’t catch that part.

The girl could’ve been ejected from the game, especially for the use of a racial epithet. The practice of the league is to suspend players for multiple games for such language. My brother-in-law says he complained to the league, they instituted an investigation. The ref claims not to have heard her say anything despite clearly being next to the play in the video. The opposing team claims none of them heard anything, and, of course, the offending player denies saying anything. However, all of the girls on my niece’s team swear they heard her say it.

The head of the league calls my brother-in-law to say that they investigated and found no grounds to suspend the girl despite it being one of the most vicious checks in the history of hockey. As my brother-in-law says, in twenty years of coaching, he had never seen anything like it, and none of his players had ever accused anyone of ever using a racial epithet, but suddenly they do now out of the blue and this incredibly viscous check just happened because passions are high in a game?

The Race Issues Presented in the Story

In our resulting discussion, I bring up implicit bias and the role it played in the ref not calling it on the spot. My brother-in-law’s remark was, I don’t know what was in his mind. He was defending the ref from accusations of racism because that’s what white people do. Here are the issues:

• IMPLICIT BIAS is not racism. It is internal and held outside of your conscious awareness, while racism is explicit and conscious. Most white people don’t understand the distinction.
• RACISM is rarely explicitly expressed in such settings. The use of racial epithets slip out because our brains are otherwise occupied and the filter that stops us from using them is inaccessible.
• I DON’T SEE COLOR is a disingenuous defense against racism because we all have associative networks of ideas that are activated to help us navigate the world. When we see a person, especially a person of color, the associative network that includes their particular ethnicity is activated. Part of all of our networks concerning Black people is the n-word. The only question is how strong is the connection to our Black associative network. If it is weak, it is less likely to “slip” out. Simple as that.
• OBVIOUSLY, the connection to the n-word for the player in question was strong enough for it to get used over other choice epithets that frequently get used in that situation, say if the offending player were white.
• WAS IT REALLY RACIST? is the question that the ref was asking themselves in the heat of the moment. That sense of doubt is what most white people experience when we experience racially-tinged or adjacent or explicit events. It’s the question the league commissioner asked themselves. It is the question my brother-in-law asked himself.

The White Fear of Being Labeled a Racist

The fear of the racist label is a universal fear of all white people. Since we cannot distinguish between the actions and behaviors that are the result of implicit bias and those that are overtly racist, we choose to ignore them all. Instead of acknowledging our national past of racism and the systemic racism that is still clearly present and active, we collude with racism. We make excuses. We look for caveats. We blame the victim. We contort ourselves into a Gordian knot rather than accept the possibility that we might could just possibly harbor a bit of bias against Black people somewhere in the dark corners and recesses of our unconscious.

If we would acknowledge that very human probability and accept that we too can in the right circumstances be racially insensitive, we could actually go along way to eliminating systemic racism and reduce the harm that our micro-aggressions cause to those they are directed at.

But, white people as a group, as a whole, as a vast majority, don’t. Instead, we put our heads in the proverbial sand, stick our fingers in our ears, sing la-la-la-la, and are seduced by racist dog whistles.

Implicit Bias and Overt Racism in the News

Let’s now turn our attention to the news and the implicit bias and overt racism that we are witnessing there.

Jason Aldean and Try That in a Small Town

Apparently, there is a person named Jason Aldean who is a C & W music star who did a song he called, Try That in a Small Town that promotes murder and mayhem against those with which he disagree:

Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
‘Round here we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they’re gonna round up
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck

Try That in a Small Town by Jason Aldean

His granddad’s gun was going to remedy, among other things, committing such free speech statements as stomping on or burning a flag or committing a crime lie car jacking or robbing a liquor store because the Second Amendment really means armed white citizens are judge, jury, and executioners of us big city folk. Basically, he’s saying that American small towns are to woke liberals what sundown towns were to Black Americans… or Barack Obama.

Just in case you didn’t get the message, he filmed part of the music video at the Maury County Courthouse that was the site of the lynching of a Trayvon Martin-type in 1927 kinda like Reagan using the Mississippi Burning Murders as a backdrop for a states rights speech in the run-up to his presidential campaign.

There is nothing overtly racist in the song or video, but the anger, hatred, and violence are explicit and the racism is left to barely muted dog whistles. Dog whistles appeal to implicit bias. I doubt Jason Aldean is overtly racist. I’m sure he lets Black people not only buy tickets to his concerts, but also attend.

Now that people are exercising their free speech rights by criticizing his violent rhetoric and racially inflammatory symbolism, he’s been defending himself by that conservative standby, lying out of his ass! He claims that all of the footage in the music video is from the US, but, of course, it wasn’t. And, when he was called on that, we go to the other great conservative standby, the flying monkey squad descending en masse on critics with death threats and threats of violence because freedom.

Call me old fashioned, but I always thought that we were innocent until proven guilty and that justice came at the end of a court trai and not at the end of a gOoD gUy WiTh A gUn’S bArReL.

Emmett Till National Monument

Speaking of the rank and vile citizenry being judge, jury, and executioner, we have the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument being designated by President Handsome Joe Biden this week.

In case you didn’t know Emmett Till was the 14 year-old boy who was visiting family in Money, Mississippi in August of 1955 when a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, inexplicably lied and accused him of “whistling” at her and talking lewdly to her. This so enraged the “Try That in a Small Town” crowd that they took Emmett Till beat him, tortured him, gouged out an eye, and then killed him, and then, just for good measure, killed him again by throwing him in a river.

Rachel Maddow has a great retelling of the story, as she always does, and the explanation for why creating an Emmett Till national monument is so important.

One of the big points in Maddow’s story was that starting in 2008, there were signs put up along the river bank where the murder is thought to have taken place. The signs were systematically destroyed and desecrated until a sign was made from the same armored steel plating that tanks and other armored vehicles use. People were so proud of their abuse of a sign that three good old boys from Ol’ Miss drove down to it just to shoot it up with their guns — presumably — they posed for a picture next to it. I’m sure they sent it to their mothers for framing.

When Southerners talk about preserving their heritage by conserving their monuments to the Confederacy, this is what they’re talking about, overt racism and the desire to cause real harm to real people physically, mentally, and economically.

Alabama’s SCOTUS Defying Moment

Alabama decided to follow its gutting the Voting Rights Act with blatantly radically racially gerrymandered congressional district maps that were so bad, even the radically racially biased SCOTUS struck them down and ordered them to redraw them so that there were two minority-majority districts.

Alabama went all Andrew Jackson on the Court and redrew its maps so that the ONE minority-majority district was reduced from 55% Black to 50% and another district’s Black population was increased to 39% because you and what army, amirite?

This is blatant racism and absolute defiance of the rule of law. Remember, states rights is euphemism for slavery. They’re hoping for a further eroding of voting rights and greater freedom to disenfranchise those who won’t vote for them.

What do we conclude from all of this?

• All of us know to condemn overt racism.
• When condemning overt racism means that we have to be the lone voice speaking directly to the racist or a crowd of onlookers whose views are ambiguous — the bystander effect — we’re much less likely to speak up.
• When exposed to racist dog whistles, ambiguity once again enters the picture, and we’re much less likely to speak up and our inner racist is likely to be appealed to.
• And when racism is blatantly expressed and goes unchallenged, we’re far more likely to respond to racist dog whistles with racist behaviors and atttudes.