This is What Implicit Bias Looks Like

This has been a hell of a week. A terrible week. I’m thinking about a lot of things that I want to say — as a playwright, as a human, as a dad, as a pale-skinned 6'3" privileged dude. I don’t have my thoughts together enough yet, other than to offer this (likely to be bigger) thought, and then some data:

Of the many gifts my wife has given me (and they are innumerable), one of the greatest has been awareness of the implicit biases formed from my upbringing. Anyone who grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois can chime in to attest that I grew up in a segregated small town in the Midwest. There are literal tracks and there is a white side of the tracks and a black side — or at least there was in the 70s.

My wife, who grew up in the South (Nashville, TN) has always been more aware of and more able to talk about segregation and racism than I was. Our way of talking about race in Illinois is to live in different neighborhoods and to NEVER EVER TALK ABOUT IT.

My biases were invisible to me until a woman who grew up in a culture of talking about biases revealed them to me. Doesn’t mean they got any better, but at least I became more aware of them.

Similarly, because of the work she does at the Center for Justice and Accountability, I have had the privilege and honor of meeting people who have survived horrifying human rights violations by their governments. It is rarely the case that everyone in their country was thinking, at the time, “our government is committing horrible human rights violations and we all agree on that fact and we would all like the government to stop it.”

In fact, in their trial of the murderer of Victor Jara last month, one of the defense witnesses made an elaborate display of never even having heard of the atrocities in Chile Stadium until 8 years ago (they happened in 1973). That someone could either believe this — or could believe such a lie would be credible — points to the very real fact: it is possible to live in a country where people are disappeared, executed, tortured and society at large NEVER EVER TALKS ABOUT IT.

So, we need to look at what is happening and we need to talk about it.

We need data. We need fact. We need to listen.

We need, most of all, to DEMAND of ourselves that we ignore the very real and very alluring voice in our heads that tells us “this isn’t happening,” or “it’s impolite to talk about this,” or “I’m not interested in politics.”

There were people in Chile who were not interested in politics when their government rounded up and tortured and killed thousands of students and protesters, and “disappeared” an unknown number more. This isn’t about the daily nonsense we usually call “politics” (though it is intensely political). This is about what kind of country you want to live in and what you will do and say to get it. This isn’t about being comfortable. This isn’t about being polite. We must TALK ABOUT THIS NOW.

Now, some data.

First off, what is your bias? In my line of work in games, I often repeat the phrase, “you can only improve what you measure.” Harvard has a great test to uncover your implicit bias.

It turns out, most of us (black, white, Native American, Hispanic) have a negative bias against black people. Measure yours. Understand it. Think about how to improve it. I have some ideas. Maybe for another time.

Seriously. Take the test. Click on THIS LINK. Do it.

Here’s another important data point. Life expectancy. A black man will, on average, live 5 years less than me.

Look at the chart below:

Whether you accept the premise that policing in this country has anything to do with it or not, this is a fact and (as you can see) the gap is barely getting any better. Does a country that believes black lives matter as much as anyone else’s accept that?

Here’s the CDC’s full article on this.

Another bit of data. The United States is nearly as dangerous for African-Americans as Rwanda is for its citizens.

No, really. Check Nate Silver on the topic.

Is that something we’re willing to tolerate? What is the solution? Well, it might occur to many of us that a solution to such a high murder rate of African-Americans is greater law enforcement. But when law enforcement sometimes results in high profile murders of African-American men, the problem feels intractable. What do you think we, the people, should do about this? Shouldn’t we be talking about that ALL THE TIME rather than arguing with each other about the wording of “Black Lives Matter”?

And some final facts. First from the Washington Times, a conservative shithole of a paper, but I want to use it because this is going around a lot.

More white people are killed in police shootings than black people. But of course the proportions are wildly off. Marginally more white people are killed than black people, but white people are 65% of the population compared to 13%. Okay, even the conservatives admit that, producing this gem:

“Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.” — Washington Times

(This result, that black men are 3.5x more likely to be killed by police than white men, is confirmed by a different methodology here. 3.5x seems small, so let’s say that another way: If you are a black man, you are 350% more likely to be killed by a police officer than I am.)

Conservatives everywhere are eager to remind us, essentially, “maybe if those black folks would stop committing so many more crimes than decent white folks, the police wouldn’t have to keep killing them!”

Their argument is that black people commit more crimes, per capita, than whites, but then they stop in their data analysis, which is pathetic and would get you fired if your job were to analyze data.

The obvious question about this supposed fact is: do they commit more per capita, or does the heavy policing of black people mean only that they get arrested more than white people, prosecuted more than white people and convicted more than white people?

The answer to that is clear. According to Sentencing Project’s report to the UN, which studied our criminal justice system:

“Racial minorities are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences. African-American males are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males and 2.5 times more likely than Hispanic males. If current trends continue, one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino males — compared to one of every seventeen white males.”

Is this the country we want? Are these the lofty ideals we repeat to ourselves every year around this time on July 4 when we re-read the Declaration or the Constitution? If you think these numbers are all fine, that they don’t matter, what are your implicit biases?

Indeed, if you find yourself eager to explain away what is happening to black Americans, maybe the biases aren’t implicit but rather explicit.