Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism. Jody David Armour
newspaper, The Pittsburgh Gazette, in which I described the third degree of Blacks by suburban cops and the special attention I receive from store security personnel when I doff my business suit and don some sweats and sneakers.
Dear Mr. Armour:
Re your ramblings in yesterday’s Post-Gazette, let me help you to understand.
If I saw blacks in my neighborhood I would be on the lookout, and for a good reason. In case your t.v. is broken, let me tell you what has been happening in western Pa., as well as the rest of the nation. Blacks, who represent about ten or eleven percent of the population are committing about seventy-five percent of the crime. And, they are committing about ninety five percent of the street crimes. Just turn on the tube at night and see where the crimes are being carried out and by who.
When was the last time you heard about a drive-by shooting in Upper St. Clair [a predominantly White Pittsburgh suburb]? When is the last time you heard of a gang related killing in Fox Chapel [a predominantly White Pittsburgh suburb]? I think you got my point.
Of course sales people are going to watch blacks in a store more closely than whites. … Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of shop lifting. Hell, why do you think the large grocery stores have all but abandoned the inner cities where the population is mostly black?
I heard Jesse Jackson say that if he hears foot steps behind him and turns around to see a white face instead of a black one, he is relieved. Does that make him a racist? Does that make me a racist if I say the same thing? No, what it does is make a statement of fact.
Once, I would like to hear a black say he understands why whites feel the way we do. Please clean up your own home before you try to tell us how to think.
Without mincing words, the author of this letter bluntly states the case for the Black Tax from the standpoint of many White tax collectors. Especially telling is the authority the author cites for his statistics on Black criminality—television. Were television my sole source of information on violent crime, I might share the author’s grim reckoning of relative racial crime rates. Thus I will investigate the role of the mass media in the perpetuation of the Black Tax. Sticking my head directly into the lion’s mouth, I will also assume that—despite demonstrable biases in police enforcement—Blacks do commit a disproportionate number of street crimes and ask whether such a statistic justifies acceptance of the Black Tax either in the administration of justice or in the everyday interactions of ordinary citizens.
Further, I will focus on the most insidious and seemingly intractable source of the Black Tax: unconscious discrimination. Unlike the purportedly rational discrimination rooted in statistics, this variant resides in the inner recesses of the human psyche. Drawing on empirical studies, we will see that unconscious racial discrimination influences the social judgments of all Americans and lies at the heart of “Negrophobia,” a posttraumatic stress disorder about Blacks that courts have actually permitted to play a role in formal legal proceedings.
Finally, not content to curse the gloom, I hope to light a candle. Specifically, I will frame a proactive strategy for helping individuals avoid imposing the Black Tax on African Americans. Using recent research in social and cognitive psychology, we will see how racially liberal people can combat unconscious discrimination by inhibiting their automatic negative responses to Blacks and replacing them with controlled, nonprejudiced ones. For this prejudice reduction strategy to work, individuals must consciously confront their own racial stereotypes. This is not easy. Courts, for example, are reluctant to allow attorneys to bring the issue of prejudice into the open at trial. Judges have barred attorneys who represent Blacks, gays, and other socially marginalized clients from encouraging jurors to confront their unconscious biases on the ground that such confrontations “play to the prejudices of the jury.” Without proactive efforts, however, this most cruelly regressive of America’s taxes will continue deepening this nation’s racial rift; with such efforts, there is hope of healing.
I must add one caveat. I am no Pollyanna about the prospects for promoting social justice through the courts and other state institutions; the predations of the Leviathan state are too well known for such unqualified optimism. Unless one is possessed by an irresistible urge to assume the shape of a pancake, only a quixotic fool would charge head-on into an oncoming juggernaut—take it from a reformed flapjack. Yet I maintain that this juridic juggernaut called the American justice system can be gainfully wielded in the service of justice—but only by grasping its inner logic and, as in judo, using its own momentum against it. On this point, I share the sentiments of the influential nineteenth-century activist who exhorted,“We must force the frozen circumstances to dance by playing to them their own melody.”
Chapter One
THE “REASONABLE RACIST”: A SLIPPERY OXYMORON
The “Reasonable Racist” asserts that, even if his belief that Blacks are “prone to violence” stems primarily from racism—that is, from a belief in the genetic predisposition of Blacks toward greater violence, from uncritical acceptance of the Black cultural stereotype, or from personal racial animus—he should be excused for considering the victim’s race before using force because most similarly situated Americans would have done so as well. In our criminal justice system, “blame is reserved for the (statistically) deviant,”1 asserts the Reasonable Racist. “Therefore,” he concludes, “an individual racist in a racist society cannot be condemned for an expression of human frailty as ubiquitous as racism.”
The Reasonable Racist’s position, though ultimately specious, can muster more factual and legal support than one might think. With regard to his claim that average Americans share his fear of Black violence, the Reasonable Racist can point to evidence such as a 1990 University of Chicago study which found that more than one out of two Americans endorses the proposition that Blacks tend to be “violence prone.”2 Moreover, numerous recent news stories chronicle the widespread exclusion of Blacks from shops and taxicabs by anxious storekeepers and cabdrivers, many of whom openly admit to making race-based assessments of the danger posed by prospective patrons.3 Thus, it is unrealistic to dispute the Reasonable Racist’s depressing contention that Americans tend to associate violence with Black people.
That most Americans share the Reasonable Racist’s discriminatory reactions to Blacks does not necessarily mean that they also share his racial prejudice. Many may claim to have completely nonracist grounds for their fear of Blacks. Specifically, many may insist that their racial fears are born of a sober analysis, or at least of rough intuition, of crime statistics that suggest Blacks commit a disproportionate number of violent street crimes. We shall consider such “rational racial fears” in the next chapter. Here we focus on irrational racial fears for two reasons. First, as we shall see in the discussion of unconscious mental reflexes in chapter 6, irrational factors figure to some extent in the racial fears of all Americans. Thus, just as he can prove that most Americans share his belief that Blacks are “prone to violence,” the Reasonable Racist can also prove that, like him, most Americans harbor irrational responses to Blacks. Thus, his most controversial contention is that most Americans’ heightened fear of Blacks is based primarily on conscious racial animus. This is equivalent to saying that most Americans are racist. I vigorously dispute this contention throughout this book.
The most apt description of the motivations that drive racial fears is “scrambled eggs.” That is, racial fears rest on mixed motives, with the yolks of the rational impulses completely and seemingly inextricably commingled with the irrational whites. To probe the legal relevance of racial fears, these motives must be temporarily unscrambled and separately evaluated. If neither the irrational nor the rational motives can justify racial discrimination standing alone, there is no reason to recognize such discrimination when its underlying motives revert to their naturally scrambled state. Therefore, let us provisionally accept the Reasonable Racist’s disquieting assumption that, like him, most Americans base their heightened fear of Black violence primarily on racism.
From the standpoint of legal doctrine, the Reasonable Racist also seems