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1-Page Summary of Biased
Once your brain creates categories to sort impressions, it’s hard to change. Racial categories influence your perceptions.
Eberhardt’s research shows that humans have a built-in bias for the same race. She uses an example of black teens who steal from Asian women in Oakland. The Chinese women couldn’t identify them because they all looked alike to them, and so those women developed a generalization about black men being dangerous. People rely on categories to make sense of information, but over time, these categories fill with sensory perceptions and knowledge that informs feelings and actions. Confirmation bias leads people to look for information that supports their beliefs instead of seeing facts that contradict what they think or challenge their sense of self. This reinforces stereotypes and leads to “implicit bias.”
The author notes that white people often interpret black people’s facial expressions incorrectly. This is because parents teach their children negative stereotypes about African-Americans, and children believe those things. For example, if a kid sees someone being treated poorly or without respect, he assumes the person must be bad and deserves to be treated badly.
A study showed participants silent clips from TV shows in which a white character interacted with another character who was out of the frame. Participants had to decide whether the character they could see liked the character they couldn’t see, based on nonverbal cues. The majority of participants perceived unseen African-American characters as less likable. People’s anti-black bias rose after they viewed these clips. They unconsciously absorbed bias and were influenced by it when making decisions about people that weren’t present at all times or even visible to them at all times, such as job candidates or employees for whom they have no direct evidence of their performance and competence yet still need to make an assessment about hiring or promoting those individuals into more senior roles within their organization based solely on what little information is available to them via resumes, interviews and references provided by third parties (e.g., former managers).
While 99% of police interactions with civilians are nonviolent, police disproportionately target black people. Those encounters are more likely to end in a show of force.
Eberhardt details how police officers in the United States killed almost 1,000 people in 2016. In Minnesota, a policeman shot Philando Castile seven times for a traffic stop violation while his four-year-old daughter watched. The Cleveland Police Department officer who shot Tamir Rice also failed to follow protocol and did not apply first aid immediately after shooting him. These incidents sparked movements to raise awareness of racial bias in law enforcement and to spotlight police militarization.
Eberhardt developed a training program that helped police officers overcome their implicit bias. She showed participants images of black people and white people, and she found that the black faces were viewed as bigger threats than the white faces. However, when crime-related objects came into focus on a computer screen, subjects who had been shown black faces accurately saw those items come into focus. This suggests that training can override our natural tendency to notice racial differences in society.
Police killings of unarmed people damage law enforcement’s relationship with black communities.
California requires police officers to keep track of demographic data for every interaction. This is due to the fact that there were a number of cases where innocent people were framed by rogue cops and arrested.
