by Paul Butler
It’s true that there are some benefits to the whole “menace to society” thing. I often take Amtrak between Washington, D.C., and New York City. The train cars have two seats on each side of the aisle. I like it when people don’t sit next to me because I prefer having both seats to myself. When Wideman’s op-ed was published, it received a lot of attention in the media, and for the next month or so, white folks on the train made a beeline to sit next to me. One time there were rows of empty seats and this white dude in a suit plopped down right next to me. Big smile on his face. I appreciated the gesture but I wanted to move to another row.
Believe it or not, that white guy provides some limited hope that we can overcome the Chokehold. Before he read the Times article, he probably didn’t realize that he was avoiding sitting next to African American men. When he became aware of his discrimination, he checked it. He made an effort to remedy it. Like the elders say, “When you know better, you do better.”
People can actually unlearn bias the same way. One experiment had people look on a computer at a photo of a black person’s face that was paired with a stereotypical image like a gun or a watermelon. They had to click “no” every time they saw an image like that. After forty-five minutes of doing so, they registered less prejudice against African Americans.9 Other studies have demonstrated that if white people are exposed to photos or stories about successful African Americans, it reduces their bias.10
My optimism is limited, however, because it didn’t cost that white man anything to sit next to me on the train. I’m cute, for an old guy, and I smell pretty good. Remedying discrimination in criminal justice, however, might actually require white people to give up some benefits. Some folks may not be willing to bear those costs. I’ll discuss this more in the next chapter. For now, let’s ask a more basic question.
ARE BLACK MEN ACTUALLY DANGEROUS?
The most common explanation for fear of African American men is that they commit more crime. For young black men, this stereotype is so deeply entrenched that unless they affirmatively demonstrate they are not criminals, people assume that they are. That’s why “Ban the Box” (BTB) policies, often touted as reforms designed to help formerly incarcerated people, have had the perverse consequence of hurting black men. BTB policies prohibit employers from conducting criminal background checks until late in the application process. The hope was this would give people coming home from prison a better chance at landing an interview, but studies have shown that BTB policies have actually done more harm than good for black men. When employers don’t have actual information about whether people have a criminal background, they tend to assume that young African American men do.11 One estimate found that BTB policies reduced employment for young black men without a high school diploma or GED by 15 percent.12 Another study from New York and New Jersey found that before BTB, white applicants were called back slightly more often than black applicants. After BTB, however, the gap became six times larger.13
So clearly there is a pervasive stereotype that African American men are prone to crime. But stereotypes don’t come out of nowhere. Why do so many people think this about black men? Is it based on data about who commits crime?
As Table 1 demonstrates, African Americans commit more than their share of violent offenses (and about 90 percent of all violent offenders are male).14 Chapter 4 is about why this is, and how we as a society should respond. For now, let’s focus on whether statistics like this justify the anxiety about black men and the harsh police response that follows. How should you use the information that black men are responsible for a larger proportion of certain kinds of crimes than other men? How should knowing that impact the way you live your life?
TABLE 1: VICTIMS AND OFFENDERS IN THE 75 LARGEST COUNTIES, BY DEMOGRAPHIC GROUP, 1980–2008
In America’s seventy-five largest counties, a plurality of people charged with violent crimes are black.
Note: Latinos were not broken out as a separate group in the data on which this table is based.
Source: Alexa Cooper and Erica L. Smith, United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980–2008,” November 2011, 3, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf.
Here’s one way: If the only thing you know about someone is that he is black and male, and the only thing you care about is avoiding being the victim of a crime, then you should be wary of African American men. If one is walking behind you, you should cross to the other side of the street. If you are in an elevator with one, you should clutch your pearls. If you are a police officer, when you approach a car to give an African American man a ticket for speeding, you should put your hand on your gun. Shoot him if he seems like he might be a threat. If you are a Supreme Court justice, you should provide the police with the power to stop black men at will.
This is, in fact, the African American male experience. Almost everywhere we go we have to engage in some performance that pushes back against the presumption that we are violent criminals. The truth is that the vast majority of black men have never committed a violent crime. It’s a stereotype that, like other stereotypes, can be supported by a selective view of the evidence.
My sister was a flight attendant for an airline that specialized in international charter flights—taking tourists or soldiers from one country to another country. She says her colleagues made group-based assumptions about different ethnicities and religions all the time.
People on flights from Ireland were strictly limited to two drinks. When there were a lot of French passengers, the flight attendants put cans of deodorant in the bathroom. On flights to Israel they said no to everyone who wanted the full can of soda because if you gave it to one, you would have to give it to everyone. I still don’t get what would be so bad about that, but apparently it is absolute flight attendant hell.
Sociologists explain that stereotypes are based on selective perceptions that become self-reinforcing.15 What this means is that even if most Irish people remained sober, and most French people did not have body odor, the people who don’t conform to the stereotype would not have registered with my sister’s crew. At the same time, the Irish lush and the French guy with the smelly underarms make an impact, which leads to an overgeneralization.
Stereotypes have even more salience when we have less exposure to the group, and when the stereotypes implicate our personal safety and well-being. Here is an amazing fact that goes a long way toward explaining the construction of the thug: Most white people have only one black friend.16 If the primary way you get to know African American men is the local evening news, I don’t blame you for being scared of us. Several studies have demonstrated that news programs overrepresent African American men as criminals and white people as victims.17 This is also true on other television programs.18 So it’s no wonder that, in an extensive survey by the Associated Press, 66 percent of white people said that the word “violent” was a good description of most blacks.19
But don’t the crime statistics prove that black men really are violent? Some people say that being suspicious of African American men is “rational discrimination.” Here are two reasons why they are wrong. First, the vast majority of African American men have never been convicted of a violent crime. Second, while it is true that black men do disproportionately commit some violent crimes, they are only about 6.5 percent of the population. White men commit violent crimes, as well, and they are 31 percent of the population.20 Even though a larger proportion of black men commit violent crimes, there are so many more white men in the population that white male violence is a bigger problem. In fact, white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States.21 In any event, the turn to metrics about victimization to explain our treatment of African American men seems dubious when we consider how we employ statistics in other areas of our lives, including our chances of being victimized by a criminal.
A white person’s lifetime chance of being the victim of homicide, assault, or robbery by a black p
erson: 1 in 480.22
A black person’s lifetime chance of being the victim of homicide, assault, or robbery by a black person: 1 in 115.23
A woman’s lifetime chance of being raped by a man: 1 in 5.24
IRRATIONAL DISCRIMINATION
The bottom line is that it is not crazy or racist for a person to think she is more likely to be the victim of a street crime perpetrated by an African American man than a man of another race. It is just that it is unlikely that either event will occur. The person who is at most risk from a black man is another black man, and even this risk is relatively low. For the most serious crimes—homicide and rape—whites are much more likely to be victimized by white people they know than by black strangers.
Keep two thoughts in mind. First, a very small group of black men is responsible for a significant amount of street crime. Their most likely victims are other African American men. Second, if you see a black man behind you in the street, your rational, evidence-based assumption should be that he presents no threat. He is literally hundreds of times more likely to be on his way to work, school, or the movies than he is to rob, rape, or murder you.
In the end, it is not smart to treat African American men differently because you think one of us is going to harm you. It’s true that people act irrationally in many areas of life. We buy lottery tickets in spite of prohibitive mathematical odds.25 We wear lucky shirts on game day even though it has no effect on whether our favorite team wins or loses. We buy things that we don’t need because we think we’re getting a good deal.26 But this kind of response to black men has wretched consequences for them and for our democracy.
In any event, when people choose not to sit next to an African American man on a train or airplane, it is probably not because they think they are going to be robbed or raped. The stigmatization of black men cannot be explained simply as fear of crime.
THE APE THESIS
In fact the anxiety about African American men has origins more sinister than data about victimization. A surprisingly large number of Americans don’t actually think of blacks as human beings. They think of us as apes, to be exact. Psychologists call this “the dehumanization thesis.”
Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt received a MacArthur genius award for her groundbreaking work in this area. She, along with several other researchers, has consistently found that people unconsciously associate blacks with apes. In one experiment subjects were quicker to recognize an ape if they had been exposed to a black face than a white face. In another experiment people were asked to categorize names as stereotypically black or white, and to categorize species of animals as either “great apes” or “big cats.” People were faster to recognize words like “monkey,” “gorilla,” and “chimpanzee” as “great apes” if the word were paired with a stereotypically black name. It took them longer to categorize if black names appeared with “big cat” words like “lion,” “tiger,” or “cheetah.”27
Phillip Atiba Goff, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, looked at media coverage of capital cases in a Philadelphia newspaper from 1977 to 1999. He found that phrases like “urban jungle” or “aping the suspect’s behavior” were more likely to be used for African American than white defendants, and that blacks who were described as apelike were more likely to be executed. In another study, Goff primed subjects to think about apes and then showed them videos of police using force against blacks and whites. People exposed to images of apes were more likely to think the police were justified in using force against blacks, but not whites.
Sometimes the association between black men and primates is explicit. Los Angeles police officers referred to cases of “black-on-black” crime as “N.H.I.”—no human involved.28 Along the same lines, Officer Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, described Brown in nonhuman terms. Testifying before the grand jury, Wilson called Brown “it,” saying, “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” Of his physical altercation with Brown, Wilson said, “I felt like a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.”29 Officer Wilson is six foot four, which was also the height of Michael Brown. Though Brown weighed eighty pounds more than Wilson, the police officer’s description of himself as “like a five-year-old” seems hyperbolic. It conveys Wilson’s perception of Brown as having brute-like strength.
This imagery is even more pronounced when Wilson described firing his gun at Brown. He told the grand jury, “At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”
Even the most respected or popular African Americans are depicted as apelike. Former president Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have frequently been caricatured as apes. The basketball player LeBron James appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine clutching a blonde white model in a manner that invited comparison to King Kong, as shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1: LEBRON JAMES DEPICTED BY VOGUE MAGAZINE
The image of professional basketball player LeBron James clutching the model Gisele Bündchen invites comparison to King Kong.
Source: Vogue magazine.
The Chokehold’s construction of the black man as a thug didn’t come out of nowhere. The association of African American men with criminality was calculated as a way to preserve white privilege after slavery ended. In The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, the Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad examined the anxiety that many white people felt after emancipation about how to handle the “Negro problem.” New social scientist “experts” about race used data about arrest rates to make the case that the recently freed blacks were, essentially, a criminal class. Other groups, including Irish and Italian immigrants, also had high levels of arrests but, different from African Americans, this was seen as a sign of poverty. The response was to deliver social services to the white ethnic groups to lift them from poverty. African Americans, on the other hand, were thought to be inherently inferior, with the criminal process and private violence being the necessary ways to regulate them.30 The twisted logic was, in the words of the historian David Levering Lewis, “whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals.”31
DO BLACK MEN CHOKEHOLD EACH OTHER?
A great sketch by the comics Key and Peele demonstrates how insidious the Chokehold is. Two black men, strangers to each other, are on a corner, waiting for a streetlight to change. Each is talking on his cell phone, aware that the other man is listening to him. Key and Peele stare each other down and, as they talk on the phone, make their voices deeper and use hip-hop slang, which they hadn’t been doing before. Key had been surprising his wife with theater tickets for her birthday “because you’re my wife and I love you.” He’d said there were no tickets available in the orchestra section but they could sit in the dress circle. When Peele walks up, Key’s tone abruptly changes and he says to his wife, “All the seats are good, and I’m going to pick your ass up at 6:30.” Peele says to his friend on the phone, “Dog, I’m five minutes away.” When the light changes, Peele walks quickly away. When he is out of earshot of Key, Peele says to his friend on the phone, “Oh my God, I almost totally just got mugged right now.”
Recall the studies of bias that I mentioned earlier, in which people associate negative words with blacks and positive words with whites. Black people do that too—not to the same extent as whites, but a large number of African Americans still unconsciously believe that white people are in some fundamental sense better than black people. On the one hand, African American men should know better. On the other hand, we actually have more cause to be afraid because we are our most likely victims. This double consciousness may explain a weird effect in polls of black men. We tend to think highly of ourselves as individuals but negatively of ourselves as a group.32 Who would you expect to be more critical o
f African American men—white men or African American men? The answer will be surprising to many. We black men can be our biggest haters. Here are the results of a survey of black and white men, conducted by the Opportunity Agenda, a public interest research organization.33
Black men put too little emphasis on:
•Education—white men (56 percent); black men (69 percent)
•Their health—white men (43 percent); black men (66 percent)
•Their families—white men (37 percent); black men (48 percent)
•Getting ahead at work—white men (29 percent); black men (43 percent)
Black men put too much emphasis on:
•Maintaining a tough image—white men (43 percent); black men (41 percent)
•Sex—white men (34 percent); black men (54 percent)
•Sports—white men (47 percent); black men (49 percent)
At the same time, African American men were more optimistic about the future than white men.34
•Optimistic about future—white men (72 percent); black men (85 percent)
•My child’s standard of living will be better than mine—white men (36 percent); black men (60 percent)
We have a perfect storm. The Chokehold constructs African American men as thugs, and, in some ways, African American men concur—except not as applied to our individual selves. And then we pay for the price for our concurrence. I know because it happened to me. All of it.