GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — In the minds of many Americans, there's no longer any difference between a black person and a thug. And as long as public officials equate the two, unarmed black lives will be the accepted collateral damage of our biased quest for “protection.”
Michael Brown, 18, is just the latest victim. A St. Louis County, Mo., police officer shot and killed Brown after an altercation in a police car.
John Crawford, 22, was shot dead by police at an Ohio Wal-Mart. The Ohio Attorney General's Office has said the gun Crawford was carrying was also known as a “variable pump air rifle.” In other words, he was carrying a toy.
Eric Garner died on July 17 from “prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” A friend filmed an NYPD officer placing Garner in an illegal chokehold as they tried to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes.
Last year, police killed unarmed Jonathan Farrel while he sought assistance from a car accident. And of course, George Zimmerman killed unarmed Trayvon Martin.
How did blacks and Latinos become suspect simply for being alive?
A new Stanford University study suggests people who perceive the penal system as more black are more distressed about crime and more accepting of biased policing, which in turn exacerbates the racial disparity. Policy affects negative racial attitudes, and our prejudices clearly create biased policies.
Because of the time it takes to create, racially tilted policing and incarceration policy reveals our conscious biases. However, the split-second decisions police make about imminent threats involve intuition and assumptions.
Researcher Alan Lambert, who posits that stereotyping is not just a conscious act, found bias could be thought of as implicit responses that are magnified in certain social settings through a loss of cognitive control. The disproportionate killing of unarmed black and brown people reveals our collective internalized fears. When threatened by the stereotype, police don't give killing black and brown folk a second thought.
In his classic essay “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell writes of a colonial police officer in 20th-century Burma who is pursuing a rampaging elephant that has already ravaged a fragile village and killed a man. He initially intends only to scare the elephant into an unpopulated space and eventually sees it grazing peacefully in the clear. But with thousands of people following, expecting action, he realizes he's committed to killing the elephant, so he shoots it again and again.
In cities and towns across the country, we are killing elephants every day. Black boys and girls are the collateral damage of a society wanting action against the menacing threats to community.
Our rhetoric, policing and policy are forming mobs to eradicate an invisible bully of stereotypes, but it's our fears that literally blind us to the fact we are killing unarmed men and women.
Andre M. Perry, the founding dean of urban education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Mich., is the author of “The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City.”
