Bias, Unseen But Not Unfelt

 [This post is adapted lightly from a Facebook post I just made.]

<tl;dr> The Atlanta crime doesn't need to have been racially or sexually motivated, per se, for race or sex to have been a factor. </tl;dr>

 

So the other day, about a week and a half ago, I was accosted at the drug store where I was picking up some medications for the family. Harassed, really. Some fellow had come in line behind me, rather closer than six feet away. So (as is my wont) I moved forward a bit so I was halfway between him and the person in front of me. Something about that set him off and there followed a fairly dreary 30 to 45 seconds of him pointing in my face and accusing me of racism. He was Black, you see.

 

I'm not in need of any kind of support over this; it didn't last long, and I'm afraid I have too high an opinion of myself to be too upset by it. Mostly, I was anxious that he was breathing at me pretty heavily from close up (12 to 18 inches?). Only now, as the usual incubation period has more or less passed without any symptoms, have I gradually relaxed—about that, anyway. (And yeah, I'm aware the chances of my contracting COVID from him were pretty low—I figure about one in a thousand, something on that order. We were both masked. But I'm the sort to obsess about it a little.)

 

I've been thinking about that episode the last few days, though, in light of recent events in Atlanta. And it's not just about the fact that it happened, or that a police captain characterized the shooter as "having a bad day." These things are bad enough, but I think it's clear that they're bad. Few people are having trouble understanding that.

 

What got to me was a side line after the captain was taken out of his spokesperson role. Officials were quoted as saying that although the shooter denied a racial motive, they weren't ruling one out. And though that's not a bad thing as far as it goes, I'm concerned that it focuses on what is really a small percentage of a very large problem.

 

See, as I say, most people understand that racism is a bad thing, or at the very least, they understand that it's generally viewed as a bad thing. So as far as overt expressions of racism go, they know not to do it, or if they do do it, they keep it among like-minded people. But that's just the tip of the racist (or sexist, or any otherist in general) iceberg. Underneath all of that is a much larger mass of subliminal prejudicial behavior that mostly goes unnoticed.

 

Maybe that fellow would have harassed me anyway, but I think he was just that little bit more likely to do it because I was Asian. Or maybe that shooter would have been up for shooting someone who wasn't Asian, or wasn't a woman, but I think he was that much more likely to do it because they were. And a million other things that happen every day, of lesser consequence, but are just a bit more likely to have happened to the people they did in fact happen to.

 

And what makes them so insidious is the spectre of plausible deniability, that in any individual situation, one can defend oneself sincerely and successfully against charges of bias. Only in the large, statistically, can these biases be seen.

 

Most of these are not racist or sexist motives per se. Most of the time, the person is not actively (consciously or otherwise) seeking out someone who fits a particular profile. But by the same token, when the situation hits them, the voice inside them that says, hey, maybe let's not escalate this—that voice is just a little bit softer when it's someone they don't sympathize with for those reasons.

 

That voice is inside us all (mostly). But I don't believe that this voice speaks equally in response to all people of all creeds, colors, and sexes. I certainly don't believe mine does. Oh, I don't think I'm exceptionally biased or anything; I'm quite ordinary.

 

But part of the reason I wasn't more upset about being called racist, I think, is that I deeply believe bias exists in us all, and it's not possible to eliminate it. We can reduce it, but there's a part of being human that makes kneejerk classification a bit too automatic. The only real way to address that irreducible core of bias, I feel, is to explicitly bend over backward to counteract it; it's just too easy, otherwise—too human—to believe, honestly, that one is free of bias. And maybe I gave this man a pass for that reason.

 

Or maybe I just don't like to think of myself as being upset by it. Who knows?

Stages of Prejudice

I don't want to become a downer, I really don't, but when the urge to write hits, I write, and here I am again with another post on prejudice.

I will admit that the immediate trigger for this post is the Elliot Rodger case, but although that's obviously at the forefront of our minds right now, let's not kid ourselves into thinking that a year-and-a-half from now, anyone not directly connected with the case will still be thinking hard about it.  There will always be new tragedies—that's part of being human—and focusing too closely on one of them leads to the fallacy that one makes progress in apprehending a forest by understanding each tree individually.

Still, let's start with that case.  It seems evident that there were some serious problems with Elliot Rodger, to say the least.  It also seems evident to me, however, that those problems mostly just exaggerated attitudes that are already floating around in society all the time: that for men, women are prizes to win, plot devices to negotiate; that because some men are awful, a man deserves a woman's love merely for not being awful; etc.

Now, it may seem ridiculous to say that people think this all the time.  I'm quite certain that if I were to ask a hundred people if they thought like that, and if all hundred were to answer the question sincerely (a big if, I concede), very few—maybe none—would admit to thinking like that.  Because when you put it that baldly, very few people—though not none—do think like that.

But those attitudes are there, all the same.  I don't think there is anyone, myself included certainly, who is completely free of these attitudes.  Such a person would probably have had to grow up completely isolated from everyone else.  Do you think there are numbers of such people around?  I don't.

Listen: Arthur Schopenhauer, whom I've quoted before, once said, famously,

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

That's probably painting with an overly broad brush, but there's a kernel of truth in it.  (I guess I don't know if it passed through three stages.)  At the risk of oversimplification, a similar process happens to prejudices on their way out, but in the reverse order.  First, it is accepted as being self-evident.  When racism was at its post–Civil War peak in the United States, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was received wisdom that African Americans were simply inferior to European Americans, and could appropriately be treated as such by the latter.  (Other groups were subjected to racism, too, but none so violently as African Americans.)  To be sure, the African Americans didn't tend to feel that way, but their opinion was roundly ignored, coming as it did from inferior African Americans.

Eventually, there was violent opposition to this attitude, coming to a boil in the middle part of the twentieth century.  There was always some violent opposition, even before the twentieth century, but it never managed to change societal attitudes.  We can speak all we like of peaceful opposition, but I'm not sure we get what advances were made in the 1950s and 1960s, and later, without violent opposition of some sort.  (I know that's not necessarily the kind of violence that Schopenhauer was talking about, but I find the parallel poetic, OK?)

Finally, it is ridiculed.  And I do think we have, to a certain extent, reached a point where racism, open racism, is ridiculed.  Even an assay at a kind of academically-treated racism (in The Bell Curve) was ridiculed, albeit in a meticulous, academic sort of way.

(Incidentally, you would think that we're fighting thousands of years of racism, but racism in the way that we think of it today—based principally on skin color—is a comparatively new phenomenon.  Several hundred years ago, Europeans considered Africans unusual-looking, but not inherently inferior.  It was only when they found they could manipulate them with marginally more advanced technology that they then had to justify the manipulation.  We don't even know for sure whether the Egyptians of the dynastic era were "Nubians."  As I understand it, we think they were, but we don't know, because people of the time didn't think it noteworthy enough to comment on consistently.  That's not to say that they weren't prejudiced, but their prejudices apparently had more to do with place of origin than with skin color.)

And do we have it there, are we done with it?  Have we put racism to bed?  Not by a long shot, for after all, it is still around to be ridiculed.  We do not have to go back into the history books, to find decades-old instances of racism to poke fun at.  There's more than enough to go around now.

Part of the problem, of course, is that racism, like most prejudices worthy of the name, is subconscious, automatic.  It's difficult to reason away, even if you realize it would be better to do so.  We are not so different from little children who, when scolded for drinking directly from the milk jug, don't actually stop drinking directly from the milk jug.  They just figure out how to do it without getting caught.

So we've learned, as a group, how to be prejudiced without getting caught.  We learn that if we denounce racism openly, we're less likely to get caught for being racist covertly.  We learn that if we apologize for our prior racism, we're less likely to get caught for our present racism.  We learn that if we have a non-racist cover story for a racist act, we're less likely to get caught.  We even learn—in one of the few examples of the random person on the street "getting" statistics—that if our racist decisions are parsimoniously made, we're less likely to get caught, because the sample size is too small.

There's nothing special about racism, in this regard (and this regard alone).  The kind of sexist prejudice that reigned in the Elliot Rodger case is at about the same stage.  Open sexism is (mostly) ridiculed, so it's been sublimated, suppressed in favor of covert sexism.  You know, the kind where we root for the loyal nerd friend crushing on a girl over the glib jock, because he's, well, loyal, and all guys know how irresistible it is when an otherwise plain girl is always there for us.  Well, don't we?

In some sense, there's been progress made, because it's now clear that We Won't Stand For That Anymore (In Public).  On the other hand, it might be a lot harder to stamp out the covert sexism, the hidden racism, especially if it's the 90 percent of the iceberg hanging out under water.  It might be insuperably difficult to root out every last bit of it.

In fact (and I recognize that this is a controversial question to even ask), is there much point in trying to root out every last bit?  Before you excoriate me, let me draw an analogy with science.  Science is a social endeavor in which the community at large attempts to address questions about nature in an objective manner.  It does this, not by attempting to eliminate bias in scientists (for it's recognized that this is plainly too hard), but by having procedures in place for recognizing biases and even potential biases, and compensating appropriately for them.  These procedures, when properly applied, are so successful that it is difficult for scientists to influence their results materially without getting caught—so difficult, in truth, that it must be done intentionally and consciously, if it be done at all.  It cannot be just the result of subconscious bias.

The measures that we take in society at large to deal with biases are not at that relatively advanced stage yet.  These so-called "social programs" are bluntly applied, and although they can and do help, that bluntness also tends to make them easy targets for their detractors.  To be fair, the biases they deal with are probably more intractable.  Science has the luxury of dealing with one almost infinitesimally small question at a time.  Society is, at least with our present understanding, much more tangled.  But the present practice of avoiding getting caught won't work in the long run, and I have a sneaking suspicion that when prejudices are finally dealt with successfully, if they ever are, it will be by having such measures in place that are considered culturally de rigeur, and not by eliminating them entirely.