Humainologie creative dialogue with a new book synopsis on topic for Wednesday September 8
- Arthur Clark
- Sep 6, 2021
- 6 min read
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
“True public safety requires a collaboration between law enforcement and the community.” - Betsy Hodges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_Hodges
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” - Henry Ford
Our topic this Wednesday September 8 is Changing First Responder Culture. Thy Nguyen’s introduction to the creative dialogue she and Staff Sergeant Jas Kainth will facilitate includes the following quote and good questions:
"Trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, looks like personality.
Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time, looks like family traits.
Trauma in a people, decontextualized over time, looks like culture."
- Resmaa Menakem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resmaa_Menakem
Questions for the group:
1. Read the quote above and imagine the kinds of trauma First Responders, such as Police officers, Emergency Medical Technicians, Fire Fighters, Emergency Room Staff, face in their day-to-day work.
2. What might be common coping mechanisms?
3. What are challenges to changing a culture in general and First Responder Cultures, in particular?
My synopsis of a highly relevant book by Jennifer Eberhardt is appended below this email message. Here is a TED talk by Jennifer Eberhardt.
And here are amended links to two other short presentations which I think provide good background for our dialogue on Wednesday.
Tracie Keesee TED How police and the public can create safer neighborhoods together
TEDx How we build bridges between police officers and youth
Here is the Zoom link for Wednesday provided by Shinobu:
Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue Time: Sep 8, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Oct 27, 2021, 8 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83728528644?pwd=VmxxbDRSdHoxbU1Jam5rYnlPbnB0UT09 Meeting ID: 837 2852 8644 Passcode: 12345
Arthur
Book: (Jennifer L. Eberhardt) Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (2019, 2020)
A professor of psychology at Stanford University and the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “genius” grant, the author has also been named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. She is a cofounder and codirector of SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions), a center at Stanford University that brings together researchers and practitioners to address specific problems.
Eberhardt helped launch a law enforcement training movement that teaches police officers how bias can influence their interactions with the communities they serve. Despite the training programs, police officers continue to respond lethally to unarmed individuals and juries continue to acquit them. Yet the author knows she must persist.
When her family had moved to an all-white neighborhood, her classmates were outgoing and welcoming. Yet it was stressful for her because she had trouble with white facial recognition. Years later she was part of a research team that, in one study, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine that part of the cerebral cortex wired for facial recognition. We distinguish faces in our own racial group more easily than those in other racial groups, and our cortical activity correlates with the difference.
Our brains have evolved to help us survive, and one of the “skill sets” that help us with that is categorization. That skill set, however, has its disadvantages. The term “stereotype,” was introduced in the 1920s by journalist Walter Lippmann, who used it to refer to “the pictures in our heads.” Our subjective impressions are easily mistaken for objective reality. Jennifer Eberhardt adds depth to Lippmann’s insights. We have a tendency to stereotype people from racial groups other than our own. Each of us can help transform our culture by becoming constantly aware of our bias, our tendency to stereotype, and our ignorance of the details of the lives of those whom we encounter. We must become deeply skeptical of assumptions we make reflexively.
In a chapter entitled “A Bad Dude,” Eberhardt recounts in detail the case of an unarmed black man, Terence Crutcher, shot to death in 2016 by police officer Betty Shelby. A video recorded the incident. Eberhardt travels to Montgomery to meet Tiffany, the twin sister of Terrence, who is a doctor serving a medical clinic in rural Alabama. She learns about the hope for a career in music that Terrence had had until he was attacked and lost his right eye and hearing in his right ear. Thousands of people from across the racial spectrum attended the funeral for Terrence. They gave her hope, and Tiffany joined an otherwise all-white group who were trying to understand and bridge the racial divide. The story of Terrence Crutcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Terence_Crutcher and other case histories can help us understand the complexities and the costs of deadly encounters involving the police.
Knowing local history and culture is often essential. Here are two very different examples provided by the author. In Oakland in 2014, there was a crime spree involving black teenage boys who snatched purses from elderly women in Chinatown exactly because they knew those victims would have trouble identifying them. In the late 1990s, a notorious group of vigilante cops (they called themselves “the Riders”) “roamed the streets of Oakland…planting drugs on innocent people, physically assaulting them, then falsely accusing them of criminal activity.” In her chapter entitled “MALE BLACK,” she notes that in Oakland in 2014, 83% of violent crime was attributed to black people; and also that calls to the police typically include a gender and race description – which results in a police officer typically hearing the words “MALE BLACK” over and over again on a typical day. “It’s implausible to believe that officers – or anyone else – can be immersed in an environment that repetitively exposes them to the categorical pairing of blacks with crime and not have that affect how they think, feel, or behave.”
In the same chapter she describes procedural justice training, in which “the goal is not to tally up as many stops as possible, but to improve the quality of each interaction once a stop has occurred.” Research and practice “have shown that if officers act in accordance with four tenets – voice, fairness, respect, trustworthiness,” the community tends to see them as legitimate authorities and comply with the law.
In a study of nearly a thousand police traffic stops, the author’s research group found that officers “were significantly more respectful to white drivers than they were to black drivers: more likely to use formal titles with white drivers [such as “sir” or “ma’am”]; more likely to express concern for the safety of white drivers (with ‘Have a safe night’ or ‘Drive safely’)…” She also found that “black police officers were just as likely as white officers to exhibit less respect to black drivers.”
In Chapter 6, we learn that the author herself had trouble coping with bias she encountered among well-educated audiences; and the contrast with support she received when she presented to inmates at San Quentin State Prison. The prison inmates rose spontaneously and formed a single line to thank her. One of them, a black man serving a life sentence said, “I appreciate what you do. I really do,” and then looked straight into her eyes and said, “But I don’t know how you do it. We need this work, but how are you able to carry those facts? That’s some real heavy shit you just shared.”
In Chapter 7, “The Comfort of Home,” we learn how unintentional racism created a problem for an initiative (“Nextdoor”) designed to improve neighborhood relations, and how a simple change in the posting requirements largely solved the problem. From other sources we know that interactions with members of another group against which a person is prejudiced can reduce that prejudice. Yet in Chapter 8, we learn that it depends on the details. Citing a 1954 book by Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, Eberhardt states that “contact has a much greater chance of piercing bias when the interactions meet a long list of conditions, including that the contact is between people of equal status, is condoned by authorities, and is personal rather than superficial.”
At the end of the book are questions for discussion for each chapter. For example, questions related to Chapter 3 include these: What is your reaction when you hear about a shooting involving a police officer and a civilian? Do you think first about the officer or about the civilian? Do you start with any assumptions about whether the shooting was justified or avoidable? Do you assume anything about the race of either person involved? Chapter 9, “Higher Learning,” includes “What challenges do universities face in balancing the right to free (even odious) speech with the right of students to be free of harassment and a hostile environment on campus?” Chapter 10, “The Bottom Line,” includes “Although we are all vulnerable to bias, we don’t act on bias all the time. Name some of the situational triggers of bias and describe strategies we can use to keep bias in check.” For the Conclusion of the book there are three questions: What have you learned? What will you do? What gives you hope? This book is a useful reference for improving police – community relations in Calgary.
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