ATL Redline, Justice, Racism

Yes, Mike Pence, Black People Can Have Implicit Bias Against Other Black People Too

Black people can be just as biased or prejudiced or downright racist towards other black people as any other people.

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Black people racist

There was a moment in the Vice Presidential Debate (you probably didn’t watch it), where you could see Mike Pence chomping at the bit to say something horrible. Granted, had Pence attempted to give voice to thought, Tim Kaine would have just interrupted him anyway. But during the discussion of officer involved shootings, Pence criticized Clinton and Kaine for implying that police (and everybody) had “implicit bias.” Pence kept bringing up the officer who shot Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte. That officer was black. Pence was trying to suggest that the officer didn’t have implicit bias against Scott, since they were both black. But he didn’t want to say it quite that way, so he kept shaking his head and saying “come on.” As if the implication that the black officer who shot the black guy could have been motivated by racial prejudice was flatly ridiculous.

Then I think Kaine interjected with Donald Trump’s own words about Mexicans — Pence would later call hearing his own running-mate’s words repeated back to him again and again as “That Mexican Thing” — and Pence was saved from actually exhibiting his own bias on the subject.

But it’s not just Pence. As police shoot more people on camera, some of those officers are invariably black. And some people seem to think that the mere appearance of black faces doing the shooting or justifying the shooting removes bias from the proceedings.

That is false. Black people can be just as biased or prejudiced or downright racist towards other black people as any other people.

It’s not hard to understand why. First of all, while we might all look the same to you, “black people” compromise a diverse mix of people from all different countries, regions, and backgrounds. We are not all “kin.” I’m part Haitian, which means I’ve got even less in common with David Ortiz than you might think. Not understanding how a Dominican officer might be biased against me is like not understanding how an Irish officer could be biased towards Jews.

Even beyond that, you have to understand that American-born blacks are subjected to the same projection of negative stereotypes about black people as American-born whites. The television, more or less, beams the same crap into all of our homes. An African-American police officer is trained (or not trained, as it were), in the same way as a white police officer. Whatever makes white cops feel threatened by black people makes black cops feel threatened too.

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Every person has to work to overcome their own implicit biases, regardless of the color of their skin. I don’t say that from atop a glass soapbox. I struggle to get over my biases against black people. I don’t want to look like I’m speaking for all black people, so I’ll explain one of my own prejudices that I struggle with.

The Loud Brother On The Train

Just by dint of where I’ve lived, I’ve taken the train with significantly more white people than black people. I have therefore seen more white people exhibit poor train etiquette than black folks. I can’t catch the 1:15 a.m. back to the sticks without some loud banker-type blathering on about his “deal” or his “hot date” or his allegedly awesome car.

It annoys me. But usually I just read something on Deadspin or do something else to ignore it.

But don’t let it be a black person inconsiderately talking above the din. Don’t let it be a black guy cackling on the phone about “what he done told that n*gga.” Don’t… DON’T let it be a brother who couldn’t find his headphones but really needed to hear some Nas on the goddamn subway. I HATE THAT GUY. I roll my eyes ALL THE WAY BACK on that guy. I have (in the past, when I was less good at checking myself) spoken out against that guy. I think differently of that black guy than I do of the white person who does the exact same thing.

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That’s bias, plain and simple. Part of it is race, part of it is “class,” and part of it is embarrassment.

I’ve been conditioned to think that respectable white people don’t talk too loudly on the phone… unless it’s super important. The same false narrative tells me that black people talk loudly because they don’t give a f**k. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Empirically and experientially, I KNOW this is not true. But when the black guy is talking loudly, I feel like he’s playing into a stereotype that works against me. I see the white people looking at him, and think “well, they’re probably looking at me that way too,” and I get pissed (entirely unfairly) AT HIM. I react as if the loud guy on the train is ruining it for all black people. And I judge him harshly for it.

This… makes me a bad person. And I don’t want to be a bad person. And so when I feel it, when I feel the actual anger welling up inside me, I recognize the sh***y place it comes from, and I go through the intellectual process of trying to be less freaking biased. I think about it. I remind myself why I feel this way. I remind myself who my true enemy is — it’s not the loud guy on the train, it’s the a-hole who thinks they know something about me because I’m also black and on a train. I, literally, remind myself of what I do when I see white people acting the same way, and modify my reactions accordingly.

I overcome. I get better at being a decent human being. Play your music, annoying brother man. You are just trying to get through your day, same as anybody else. Tolerance is not a static state. We have to wake up every day and re-commit ourselves to the effort.

Do black police officers do that? Are they trained to do that? On my worst day, I don’t have the authority to do much more than suck my teeth like a salty jerk when my biases creep up on me. Cops have a gun and the authority to shoot to kill.

Police officers, white or black, get into the business (arguably) because they want to help protect and represent their community. How do you think a black officer feels when he sees a person who is maybe not representing the community in the best possible light? Have you considered that a black police officer might be even a little more unfairly reactionary towards a black suspect than a white one? Go ahead, be a black person stopped by a black cop and tell me how awesome that experience was for you.

All of which is to say: No, I don’t give a good goddamn that the officer who shot Keith Lamont Scott is black. I don’t care that the police chief is black. Being black does not help you be a decent cop. BLACK PEOPLE POSSESS NO SPECIAL PROPERTIES: we can’t run faster, we don’t jump higher, we’re not worse at multi-variable calculus, we’re not bullet-proof (Luke Cage excepted). We’re just like everybody else.

Whatever society is doing to make white cops treat African-Americans so violently, they’re doing it to black cops too.

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He is obviously implicitly biased against Republicans. Explicitly too.

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