Shutting Down Racial Bias Education in Oklahoma? The Chilling Impact of HB 1775 and Recent OSBE Decisions

On July 28, 2022, the Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to lower the accreditation status of both Tulsa Public Schools and Mustang Public Schools to the status of “accredited with warning.” In both cases, it was because of an alleged violation of Oklahoma’s new (as of 2021) law, HB 1775, originally developed in order to preclude the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools (although what the law specifically prohibits—enumerated below—is not what critical race theory, a field of legal study developed in law schools, actually says).

I would like to spend a few minutes reflecting on this law and the recent OSBE decisions, with an eye towards the likely future impact of HB 1775 given these decisions—and what implications that has for the state of Oklahoma.

 

What Does HB 1775 Say?

The crucial section of HB 1775 is the “General Prohibition” section, which begins with these words: “No teacher, administrator or other school employee shall require or make part of any Course offered in a public school the following discriminatory principles.” It then enumerates the prohibited principles as follows:

(1) One race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,

(2) An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,

(3) An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex,

(4) Members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex,

(5) An individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex,

(6) An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,

(7) Any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex, or

(8) Meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.

Many—included Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, Joy Hofmeister—have commented that the wording of the law is vague, meaning that even if we have the law in front of us it may be less than clear what the law actually prohibits.

One immediate problem of this sort has to do with what it means to “make part of any Course” one or more of the prohibited principles. The charitable part of me would like to assume that the intent here is not to prohibit bringing up these principles for the sake of critical discussion in a classroom, but rather to prohibit endorsing them (and encouraging students to endorse them). But the wording could go either way. And that creates some serious worries.

Consider the first prohibited principle: one race or sex is inherently superior to another. This principle was accepted by many Americans in history and was used to justify the institution of slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc. A history teacher who did not call attention to this racist ideology and how it shaped historical institutions and events would be failing to provide a proper understanding of our history. But to call attention to this ideology, to make it explicit and look at how it shaped American history, would clearly involve making principle (1) “part of” a history course in one obvious meaning of that phrase.

And so, the wording of the law leaves open the possibility that a history teacher could be found guilty of violating the law simply because they are doing a good job of teaching history.

Or take prohibited principle (6): ”An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

Suppose a high school history teacher wanted to consider the issue of reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre. There are lots of interesting and important arguments here. Property ownership is one of the most significant ways that wealth is passed down from one generation to another, and in the Tulsa Race Massacre, Black Wall Street was burned down—and with it, the property of its citizens. We can reasonably infer that the descendants of those who were killed and dispossessed by the massacre would have been financially better off today had white Tulsans not committed brutal murder and destruction, or had the state compensated the victims at the time. In short, past injustices reach into the present, affecting people alive today. Does Oklahoma as a community have an obligation to try to remedy the injustice that current Oklahomans are experiencing because of the misdeeds of people in the past?

Suppose a history teacher decided to explore this question and consider arguments on both sides of it. Let’s suppose no one is arguing that the students in the classroom are guilty of the crime that was committed by people long dead. No one is arguing, absurdly, that they are responsible in that sense of the word. But some are arguing that the current generation has a moral responsibility to remedy existing injustices in our state, and that the crimes of past generations have cast a long shadow into the present, one which means current Black Oklahomans are worse off than they would have been had the massacre never occurred.

If a teacher in Oklahoma leads a discussion on this question, taking seriously arguments of the latter sort, are they then “teaching” principle (6) in violation of HB1775? Or are they only violating it if they dub their students morally blameworthy for crimes committed before they were born (something no thoughtful person would actually claim)?

 

Straw-Manning

Setting aside problems of vagueness, there are other serious problems with HB 1775, problems that have the potential to hamper excellence in education and impede efforts to fight racism in Oklahoma. These problems arise because HB 1775 emerged out the 2020 culture wars surrounding racism and so-called “critical race theory” in America—and those culture wars featured a lot of straw-manning of views, straw-manning that continues to cause enormous misunderstanding.

If a law is regulating what people are allowed to say, and if we are in the habit of grossly misunderstanding what people say (especially across the culture-war battle lines), then the law is in serious danger of being used to condemn people who didn’t actually violate the law.

To see what I mean, let’s consider principle (2): “An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” This principle is worth thinking about with care, because it’s the principle that takes center stage in the complaint against Tulsa Public Schools.

Given its wording, I have no objection as such to prohibiting the teaching of this principle in public schools, since it is clearly false: the idea that people are inherently racist because of their race is nonsense. Simply having certain physiological features, such as pale skin, has zero impact as such on what you believe about human beings and how you act towards other. How we think about and treat people who look different from us is a function of upbringing and life experiences, education and cultural influence—things that might be influenced by our skin color, but only because we live in a society where skin color impacts life experiences.

That I am racist by nature because of my innate “whiteness” is also problematic because it assumes that race is an actual thing, a biological reality that can have actual effects on what a person is like all by itself. But we know now that race is a cultural construct: it has no biological foundation. Instead, human cultures pick out certain physiological traits that in themselves are meaningless and treat them as if they were significant, grouping people into different categories based on these traits, treating them differently because of them, etc. Race is very real in the sense that it impacts people’s lives and experience, but it is a reality created by culture, not by nature.

Principle (2) supposes that race is a “natural kind” rather than a social construct. As such, it conflicts with everything we now understand about race. Teachers should not be in the business of teaching nonsense to kids, not when public tax dollars are paying their salaries.

But I know, based on carefully following recent public discussions around what has been dubbed “critical race theory,” that the nonsense that is principle (2) is being routinely attributed to people who don’t hold it—people who agree that it is nonsense, who would never endorse principle (2), but who are being treated as if they endorsed (2).

In philosophy, we talk about something called “the straw man fallacy.” This is where, instead of critiquing what a person actually thinks or holds, you attribute to them a distortion of their view, some mischaracterization of it that is clearly false. You then show that this view (the one they don’t actually hold) is false, and condemn them for holding it. It’s called the straw man fallacy because what you’ve basically done is set fire to a straw effigy of someone and then behaved as if you set fire to the actual person.

Some people engage in such “straw-manning” on purpose. If you’re really clever (and unprincipled) you can get lots of people on board, condemning someone you don’t like—a political opponent, say—for an absurd view they don’t hold. This is especially easy to do when your targets express their views using technical terms, terms that are not well understood and take some time and effort to explain. The person engaged in straw-manning can then just attach a false meaning to the term. If they do that loudly and persistently enough in public platforms, the target of straw-manning (who is trying to use the term properly to explain their view) will end up routinely misunderstood—and perhaps mocked or scorned or condemned for views they don’t actually hold.

Relatedly, it can be disturbingly easy for unscrupulous pundits to straw-man ideas that emerge out academic research. Often, understanding those ideas requires studying the body of research, something most people don’t have the time or energy or training to do. And so it can be especially easy for an unprincipled pundit with an audience to mischaracterize the target’s views, express horror about those views, and get the audience to be equally horrified. By the time people who understand the research and are good at explaining it realize what is going on, it may be too late. People don’t like to admit they’ve been duped.

The Straw-Manning of Implicit Bias

In the public debates about so-called “critical race theory,” there’s been a lot of straw-manning going on. And one of the victims of that straw-manning is the concept of “implicit bias” and the research surrounding it. The basic idea of implicit bias is this: all of us develop, based on our socialization and life experiences, certain short-cuts for decision-making that we aren’t conscious of, short-cuts that lead us to prefer some things to others based not on a careful examination of the evidence but just kind of…automatically. Given how many decisions we need to make and how much information is out there, a certain level of automation is essential if we’re going to live our lives and not be paralyzed. But the necessity of implicit bias explains why it is a universal feature of the human condition. It doesn’t entail that implicit bias is always unproblematic.

Some of these automated preferences a pretty odd—such as the fact that the order in which things are presented to us influences our judgments about them. A bias like that can be harmless if you’re choosing which t-shirt to buy, but it’s more serious when it comes to making judgments about which job candidate had the best interview. Since implicit biases are implicit—that is, unconscious and automatic in their operation, like our breathing—we can miss when a bias that really has no bearing on which candidate is better is influencing our judgment.

But also like breathing, we can make ourselves aware of the operation of our biases. And so we can try to control for them in some way. It may not always be easy to figure out how—we can’t exactly interview all the job candidates simultaneously—but knowing that these biases could be at work will allow us to explore ways to minimize their influence.

Most often, “implicit bias” is used to refer to such unconscious/automated preferences as they relate to classes of people. Shawn Marsh, in addition to offering an accessible overview of the research, offers the following helpful definition of implicit bias in this sense: “Implicit bias is a preference—positive or negative—for a group based on stereotypes or attitudes we hold and that tend to develop early in life. In contrast to explicit bias, whereby we are aware of our biases toward a group, implicit bias operates outside our awareness: we don’t even know it is there.”

As noted above, implicit biases emerge because there’s just too much information and too many choices for us to be able to sit down and figure out the best choice, based on all the available information, every time we have a choice to make. We’d be paralyzed. So our brain is designed to automate a lot of things, shaping our split-second judgments.

The process of forming implicit biases starts very early and is shaped by lots of social forces and personal experiences: who raised you and what they looked like, whether they were loving or abusive, what kinds of people you were surrounded by, who your earliest friends were, who scared you, what stories you were told, what kinds of TV shows you watched, how people in your community talked about or reacted to different sorts of people, etc.

Unfortunately, the automated preferences shaped by these experiences can influence our responses to people of different races and sexes, leading to discriminatory treatment that we aren’t even aware we’re engaging in. Some implicit biases take the form of automated trust or automated fear: if some stranger you meet on the street looks like the caretakers who nurtured you, you are likely to give them the benefit of the doubt automatically, to assume they have your best interests at heart until they prove otherwise. So, if that person pulls out a cell phone, you’ll probably assume it’s a cell phone and be shocked when it’s actually a gun and the person is an evil assassin sent to kill you.

In contrast, if someone doesn't look anything like the friends and family you grew up with, your brain will automatically be more cautious—seeing them more truly as a stranger rather than as a friend you haven’t met yet. And if, by contrast, they look like someone you’ve only ever seen on TV, generally in the role of the gun-slinging gangster, they may pull out a cell phone and you’ll swear it’s a gun.

The point is that our split-second judgments about the people we meet are shaped by our personal history and our socialization. Personal experience and culture shape who we find trustworthy at first sight and who we don’t, who we feel at home with and who we are uncomfortable around, etc. Often, this bias is slight and easily corrected with more information. But even that slight unconscious bias could be the reason the black candidate for the job didn’t give white interviewers the same warm feeling as the white candidate and so didn’t get the job—or the reason why police officers slightly more often mistake cell-phones for guns in the hands of black men than in the hands of white women, leading to tragic outcomes in the former case more often than the latter.

And to the extent that the prevailing culture shapes implicit biases, one could have a society where far more people have these small unconscious biases against black people than white people. And the cumulative effect could be more than small. It could make life significantly harder for black people than white people, all else being equal—even when nobody is consciously being racist.

The evidence suggests that the US is such a country. See, for example, here and here. What does that mean? It means that if people do not investigate their own biases and recognize them and work on mitigating them, and if institutions do not control for them, the cumulative impact of these biases is likely to make it harder for blacks than whites to succeed in life, even if no one is overtly racist. When something like a widespread unconscious bias has such a cumulative effect, it serves as a dimension of what is called “systemic racism”: the social system makes life harder for one race than another, even if no individuals are setting out to do this or are actively supporting it based on racist beliefs, etc.

That implicit bias exists is a well-establish fact about human psychology. That white people raised in the US are, in general, likely to have implicit biases that collectively lead to social patterns that disadvantage blacks, is well-supported by the social-scientific evidence.

Someone might sum up these well-supported claims by making the following implicit-bias claim: “In general, white Americans are likely to harbor unconscious or implicit racial biases that disadvantage black people or, in other words, contribute to systemic racism.”

In saying this, is the person saying that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”?

 No.

Implicit bias is an established fact of human psychology, but “inherent racism”—which I assume means racism as a matter of one’s very nature—does not exist. Implicit biases are acquired, not “inherent.” No one has them “by virtue of their race or sex.” We have them by virtue of our lived experience and social environment. My race and sex will surely influence my lived experience and social environment, and hence which implicit biases I have. But nobody is born racist just by virtue of their race. Those who say white Americans are likely to harbor implicit racial biases that disadvantage black people are not claiming otherwise.

So, the implicit bias claim above is very different from prohibited principle (2).

But teachers and trainers and scholars who have made the implicit bias claim above, based on their understanding of the research, have routinely been mischaracterized, accused of asserting the prohibited principle (2) as well as some of the others, such as (5). These accusations are often repeated again and again, loudly, by pundits who benefit from doing so. And since the general public is not always very familiar with the exact meaning of terms like “implicit racial bias” and “systemic racism,” it is easy for pundits who don’t care about truth but only about silencing and discrediting their political opponents to shut down discussions of implicit racial bias and how to overcome it by straw-manning the people who are trying to lay out the problem and identify solutions.

And so, when I first saw HB 1775, my immediate worry was that the law would be used to penalize those who are doing this kind of work—the work of calling attention to the way implicit biases generate systemic racism even when people consciously reject racism; the work of trying to raise consciousness about this problem and promote solutions, thereby helping promote greater racial equity in Oklahoma.

 

Bias Education and Defensiveness

Some social problems can only be fixed when people are willing to introspect honestly—when they are prepared to be vulnerable enough to see how they might be part of the problem, and thereby see how they can work to be part of the solution. Implicit bias education is aimed at inspiring that kind of honesty and vulnerability, but for that very reason it can also inspire defensiveness.

Few of us want to admit that we are part of a problem that hurts people. We might feel guilty about it. And in our defensiveness, we might be motivated to embrace mischaracterizations of those whose words are the occasion for our discomfort. We might be inclined to too-quickly believe uncharitable accounts about the trainer’s or teacher’s intentions—accounts that free us from the responsibility that comes with admitting we contribute to such a problem. We might blame the messenger for making us feel guilty, instead of seeing the messenger as inviting us to take responsibility for making our society a better place, starting with ourselves: looking for ways we can shake off harmful social programming and help others do likewise.

The point here is this: predictably, those doing the work of teaching implicit bias are going to sometimes be accused of trying to make people feel guilty or uncomfortable for being white. The teachers aren’t actually trying to do that, but because the insights they have to share hit home, exposing ways we might be unwittingly contributing to a serious social problem, they sometimes inspire feelings of discomfort and guilt. And so, when I looked at HB 1775, I am immediately struck by principle (7): “Any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Of course, implicit bias teachers/trainers are not out to tell people they should feel guilty for being white. First of all, you don’t have implicit bias because you’re white. Everyone has implicit biases because that is part of human nature. The precise biases you have are not a function of your race but a function of your social environment and life experiences. Your race will influence those things, because people of different races have different social experiences. But a white person in one culture may have very different implicit biases than a white person in another.

Second, implicit bias isn’t something you should feel guilty about, because implicit bias is something you are unaware of and that is wired into you by social and environmental conditioning. It’s not something you have consciously chosen out of bad motives. It’s more like catching a cold: something in your environment is responsible, not you. The trainer is trying to make you aware that you’ve been affected in this way, not to make you feel guilty about something you didn’t choose. Awareness means you can choose to make helpful changes. More often than not, feeling guilty just leads to wallowing or hiding from the thing that makes us feel guilty.

The response implicit bias trainers are hoping for is not guilt but something more practical. Again, the cold analogy is helpful. If I find out I have a cold, it doesn’t make sense to feel guilty. What makes sense is to treat the symptoms, take steps to promote recovery, and try not to spread the cold.

Likewise, while I’m not responsible for having the implicit biases I have, I am responsible for how I respond to discovering my implicit biases. While I shouldn’t feel guilty about having a bias, there might be a reason to feel guilty about attacking the messenger and rebuffing the message with a knee-jerk response of “You’re just trying to make me feel guilty for being white!” That kind of distortion of what is happening may make me feel better in the moment: if they’re just out to get me, then I don’t have to do anything about my implicit bias. I’m off the hook! Whew. But I’ve gotten myself off the hook by attributing false motives to the teacher who’s trying to help me discover ways to improve myself.

That's something that, if I did it, I should maybe feel guilty about.

 

False Accusations and the Chilling Effect of HB 1775

HB 1775, however, enables this defensive response to go a step further: once I’ve shaken off the message and the responsibility it brings by blaming the teacher for the bad feelings I have about it—once I’ve falsely accused the teacher of trying to make me feel bad just because I’m white—there’s now a law that says it’s illegal for them to do this thing (the thing they’re not actually doing but which I have accused them of doing in order to defend my ego). And so, in addition to storming away from the training or the class, fuming because the message challenged me in ways I don’t want to be challenged, I can take the further step of striking back. 

Legally. 

I can file a complaint that accuses the trainer or teacher of violating HB 1775.

In short, it is entirely predictable that those who teach and train about implicit bias, while not in fact guilty of teaching principle (7), will occasionally inspire defensive responses that lead to them being falsely accused of (7). And if decision-makers assessing whether the law has been broken have been primed to misunderstand the relevant ideas by our culture wars’ straw-manning pundits—or if they are psychologically prone to feel defensive themselves—then you can easily see how the law might end up shutting down important work whose aim is to make our society a less racist place.

It doesn’t even have to actually happen for the law to have a chilling effect on these important discussion. It is enough if it looks like it happened. And this brings me back to the recent decisions made by the Oklahoma State Board of Education, in a vote of 4-2, to slap two Oklahoma school districts with warning and threats to their accreditation based on supposed violations of HB 1775.

In the case of Tulsa Public Schools, this penalty was based on a supposed violation of HB 1775 that took place during a required bias training for Tulsa schools staff. It was the result of a complaint by a single teacher who attended this training. Now maybe there really was a violation. Maybe the trainer completely misunderstood implicit bias, and said something like the following: “All white people have implicit bias just because they are white. Their race alone makes them inherently biased against black people. White people are born that way!”

But it strikes me as highly unlikely that someone chosen to lead a training on this issue for a school district would so radically misunderstand the concept of implicit bias. And I’ve also seen sound explanations of implicit bias routinely mischaracterized as statements like the one above. And so I find myself immediately suspicious of the claim that any of the prohibited principles in HB 1775 were actually taught.

And here’s the problem: the grounds for reaching the decision that HB 1775 was violated haven’t been made public. The thing that might allay my suspicion—a transcript of the recording of the training, or copies of the recording itself, showing that the trainer was not misunderstood or mischaracterized or uncharitably interpreted but really was saying that people are innately racist just because of their race and should feel guilty for being white—are not available.

The person who lodged the complaint against Tulsa Public Schools claimed that in the training, she was made to feel guilty about past wrongs by white people and that she and others were told that white people “are implicitly racially biased by nature.” But were the words “by nature” actually spoken, or was that the accuser’s take-away, their own misunderstanding? Again, since implicit bias is a matter of social conditioning—nurture, not nature—it seems unlikely that anyone leading a training on the topic would make such a claim.

Apparently, there is audio recording of the training. It was reviewed by a team investigating the complaint. But not only has it not been made available to the public; it appears to have not been made available to all the board members who were supposed to vote on the matter. In fact, one board member who voted against the downgrade—Carlisha Williams Bradley—complained that she had not been given theopportunity to review the audio for herself.

That said, part or all of the transcript of the audio was presumably made available, since during the meeting Bradley pointed out that OSDE general counsel Brad Clark “had to make an inference based on the audio that never explicitly said that an individual by virtue of his race or her race or sex is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive. None of these things were ever said.”

So, we have the public testimony of one board member who presumably has seen a transcript of the most relevant parts of the training audio—and according to that public testimony, the prohibited principles were never asserted. Instead, the judgment that HB 1775 was violated was based on an inference or an interpretation.

This is not comforting for anyone who is working in or for Oklahoma’s public schools and who cares about racial bias education. Given how our culture wars have led to straw-manning of people’s views and arguments, especially in relation to implicit racial bias, and given how defensiveness can lead to misrepresentations, we find ourselves in a social climate in which people are routinely accused, mistakenly or wrongly, of saying things prohibited by HB 1775. And now, school districts in Oklahoma have been penalized for violating HB 1775 based not on anything that was actually said in clear violation of HB 1775, but based on an inference.

In a social climate so littered with straw-manning and defensive misrepresentation, such inferences are always suspect, because they are so unreliable. How, then, can anyone working in the public school system have any confidence, based on the results of the Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting, that they will not incur penalties for violating HB 1775 even when they take pains not to do so? How can they be sure that if they take up the important conversations about reducing racial bias in our culture, they won’t have their words misinterpreted to mean things that, according to HB 1775, one is not legally permitted to say as a teacher or trainer in Oklahoma’s public schools?

In short, given the recent OSBE decisions, I cannot see how HB 1775 can have any effect other than a chilling one: keeping important research and information out of the hands of teachers who could use it to promote greater inclusivity and fairness in their classrooms, and keeping high school teachers from having some really important conversations with their students (out of fear that they’ll lose their jobs based on a straw-man mangling of their words).

Racism is bad. We need tools to fight it. Among those tools are challenging conversations about implicit bias in our high school classrooms, and training for teachers aimed at helping them avoid unintended bias in their interactions with a diversity of students. When HB 1775 is combined with the recent OSBE decision, the effect is to make our schools and teachers afraid to take up these crucial tools.

And our state will be the worse for it.

Based on all of this, I can only conclude that either HB 1775 should be rescinded, or new and more exacting guidance on its use be issued that prohibits penalizing schools, school districts, teachers, or trainers for contestable interpretations of what they said or meant to say.

Addendum--Added 8/19/22

Originally, OSBE spokespersons indicated that while the slides for the Tulsa Public Schools training did not violate HB 1775, elaborations found on the audio did. Since then, there has been a revelation:the Tulsa World has reviewed the audio and found it to be identical to the slides. Despite this revelation, OSBE stands by their ruling because, apparently, the impact of the words on the slides being read aloud gave them the impression that the spirit of the law had been violated. And that justified a legal penalty.

So, are we to infer from this that someone's tone of voice can change whether they are found to be in violation of HB 1775, and hence whether a school district will be legally penalized or a teacher fired?

This revelation drives home further the fact that the trainer did not in fact say anything explicitly prohibited by HB 1775. Instead, the judgment that a violation occurred is based on some perceived meaning beyond what was explicitly said--and/or some "spirit" of the law beyond what is explicitly prohibited.

The former option is that the trainer meant something by their words that's not only different from what they actually said but opposed to what they actually said. Recall that OSBE took the trainer to be violating the rule against saying that people are inherently racist because of their race. But implicit bias is a matter of nurture not nature (hence, implicit bias is not inherent), and implicit bias research understands biases to derive from personal experience and socialization, not because of their race. An implicit bias trainer knows this, and so it seems highly implausible to claim that the trainer meant to say what HB 1775 explicitly prohibits, even if they didn't explicitly say it.

The more plausible interpretation of the OSBE decision, then turns on their explicit invocation of the "spirit" of HB 1775--something that the law prohibits even if it doesn't come right out and say so. But what do they take this "spirit" to be?

The trainer presented research findings about bias that--while true and important to disseminate if we want a more equitable society, and while not in violation of anything that HB 1775 explicitly prohibits-- are uncomfortable truths: truths that many don't like to hear, because it means they might be unconsciously contributing to racial inequity even if they don't mean to be, and even if they denounce racism.

Is OSBE saying here that they take the law to mean it's illegal for any teacher or trainer in Oklahoma schools to say anything about race that, even if true and not included in the list of prohibited "principles", makes someone uncomfortable? Because if that is what they take the law to mean, they are treating it as prohibiting way more than what it says it prohibits--probably ruling out any effort in public schools to share research that could help reduce racial inequity (since such research is sure to make someone uncomfortable).

White Innocence: A Confession

Here is an unsurprising fact about me: I am imperfect.

I won't give you a comprehensive list of my imperfections, but I do want to talk about one that I have in common with other people like me: white men who have stable careers and comfortable incomes.

I like to enjoy the privileged life I have without being pressured to reflect on all those people in the world who don't enjoy the same advantages, without being called to think about all the ways I could (but don't) use my privilege to make things better for them.

To put the point in less precise but more common terms: I just want to enjoy my life without feeling guilty about it. 

I want to be "blessed." You know what I mean: I want to look at my beautiful home and my beautiful family and my fulfilling job and say, "I'm blessed." And then just be thankful for that.

I don't want to consider the possibility that systemic injustices routinely bestow people like me with blessings while others labor and suffer and strive and still can't hope for the comforts I enjoy. I certainly don't want to make substantial sacrifices to my comfort and advantages for the sake of those who suffer, or challenge the status quo in ways that might make my life less comfortable.

I want to sit back and enjoy my blessings while still being innocent--or at least without being called out for my lack of innocence.

Take a specific example. I am in a position to indulge my kids' passions. I can pay for expensive extracurricular activities--gymnastics and dance and music lessons--that cultivate their talents, develop life skills, and enrich their lives. And why am I in a position to do that? Some of it's luck. Some of it's hard work. But a lot of it is because my parents were able to do that for me.

My parents could afford to pay for the expensive extracurricular activities that enriched my life--in my case violin lessons with the best and most expensive private violin teachers in town. So much of what I know about how to focus and succeed at things can be traced back to what I learned as I was guided through the difficult task of mastering the technical challenges of one new piece of music after another.

Of course I took advantage of these opportunities. And then I went on to use the personal resources I cultivated to earn a PhD, get a tenure track job, secure tenure and eventually promotion to full professor. But first I had to have the opportunities. And there are others who likely would have done even more with them than I did, who would have had even more drive and determination and commitment than me, if only they'd had the chance.

Let me be clear about something: I am not to blame for growing up in a world where those opportunities are unequally distributed. I didn't make that world. And it's hardly blameworthy that I used those opportunities to cultivate my talents and develop my character (it would've been worse had I squandered them). But here I am now, the beneficiary of privileges that most people don't have. It's the choices I make now, about how to use my advantages, that I can be properly praised and blamed for.

And the hard truth is this: I could be doing more, a lot more, to make those kinds of opportunities available to more people in the world. And so, as much as I wish I could be innocent, I'm not.

Some of the advantages I've had in life are tied to my race. They are tied to being white in a society that was created by white European settlers on the backs of black slaves, human beings kidnapped and born of those who were kidnapped and sold like cattle at auction; a society created at the expense of indigenous peoples who were systematically pushed into smaller and narrower reservations, driven along a deadly Trail of Tears into the Indian Territory that is now no longer Indian Territory but the State of Oklahoma, where I live.

All of that is history. But history casts a long shadow. History shapes the present moment. It forms the contours of our society, both for good and ill. The racial categories of whiteness and blackness were invented in the centuries-long era of forced enslavement. Our very concepts of black and white, understood as distinct "races," were invented to justify treating some people as animals to be owned and bought and sold and used.

Let me say that again in a slightly different way: the racial category, "black," was invented in order to justify treating some people (those with brown skin) as things to be used by other people (those with pink skin). The racial categories we have were created as an integral part of an ideological system called white supremacy.

I would be naive to think that the oppressive ideas that helped to shape our racial categories, oppressive ideas that survived the end of slavery and were refashioned into the more subtle oppression of Jim Crow, somehow died for good when I was a kid.

I see people as black and white. As much as I might wish I'd been raised in a world where nobody saw each other in this way, these categories exist. And I am very good at instinctively putting people into these categories. I'd be naive to think that, when I do place them in one racial category or another, my perceptions of them are in no way shaped by what these categories were invented to do, the oppressive meanings they were originally created to have.

History doesn't work that way. Culture doesn't work that way. And my black friends and neighbors, when they tell me of their experiences today, confirm that it doesn't work that way.

This becomes apparent to anyone who listens deeply to people of color, who hears or reads their stories with empathy and compassion. Doing that means looking beyond the comfortable space I inhabit--a space that has always been and continues to be overwhelming white.

When I do, I see that, simply by virtue of my skin, I enjoy advantages over my black peers.

No woman has ever clutched her purse more tightly when I walked onto the elevator. I have never been immediately followed by a security guard when I enter a store. In fact, I can't remember even noticing a security guard in any store I've ever entered, because I can afford to ignore them.

I certainly haven't found myself carrying the cumulative psychological weight of these sorts of suspicious and fearful gestures happening over and over again over the course of a single day (and then experiencing it again the next day, and the next). I've never experienced health problems caused by the long-term stress of carrying that weight.

I routinely go to meet people at coffee shops and wait for them at a table before ordering--and I have never thought twice about it, let alone had the police called on me because of it (or because I asked for plastic silverware at the Waffle House and then asked to contact the manager when I was told I'd be charged).

I have never felt the surge of bone-deep fear that every black friend I know feels when being pulled over by the police.

I have never picked up a book called "How to Draw Faces" only to find that every single face in the book is of a dominant race not my own.

When I was a kid and decided to dress for Halloween as a superhero or legendary wizard or other character out of my Geek Pantheon, they were virtually all white and so I had loads and loads of choices--and when I donned the costume no ever said, "Oh, look! I white Superman. How cute."

Sure, my hair was blond as a kid, not black like Superman's, but no one seemed to notice that. If you're the default race, not only is your race unremarkable but so, too, are those other little details.

I have never been one of only two white men in a room only to learn later that the choices and actions of the other white man, who looked nothing like me, have been attributed to me (or my choices to them).

I've never been slapped with the N-word.

I've never doubted that I would be treated as an individual, assessed on my own merits, and judged by my own failings and accomplishments. In certain rare situations growing up, I found myself called to my best behavior because I represented my school or my church youth group. I was never called to represent my race. I was never assumed to be a representative of my who race, with all the weight that carries.

Every day I make choices with the complete assurance that people will see me as a harmless, decent, well-meaning person who'll be treated with deference, politeness, and respect. This assurance is so routinely confirmed by experience that on those rare occasions when someone seems afraid of me or hostile to me, I am utterly shocked.

I don't have the experience of being an outsider in my society. Almost everywhere I go, I belong. And that feeling is rarely if ever challenged by the ways that people respond to me. And so I am relaxed and at home in my world.

And most of the time, I simply enjoy these facts about my life--without thinking about or wrestling with or doing anything about the fact that for so many people of color, none of these things are true.

This is why I am so grateful for an open letter that George Yancy, a fellow philosophy professor, wrote a few years ago. "Dear White America," the letter begins. And then, with sensitivity and a real effort to avoid being misunderstood, Yancy invites white Americans to really see and experience their privilege--to really see and experience the ways in which even the most well-meaning white people unintentionally participate in a system that disadvantages black Americans.

To capture the spirit of what he wants to express, he begins with a confession. He confesses that he is sexist. And he explains what he means by that. He makes it clear that he is not labeling himself as a male chauvinist who deliberately uses and abuses women. No, when he calls himself sexist he means something different: that he is part of a system that advantages men in a systematic way, and that he hasn't done enough to escape its influence or oppose its harmful effects. Yancy puts it as follows:

This doesn’t mean that I intentionally hate women or that I desire to oppress them. It means that despite my best intentions, I perpetuate sexism every day of my life. Please don’t take this as a confession for which I’m seeking forgiveness. Confessions can be easy, especially when we know that forgiveness is immediately forthcoming. 

As a sexist, I have failed women. I have failed to speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage critically and extensively their pain and suffering in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity of gender roles in my own life...I have been complicit with, and have allowed myself to be seduced by, a country that makes billions of dollars from sexually objectifying women, from pornography, commercials, video games, to Hollywood movies. I am not innocent.

When he calls himself sexist, he means that even though he thinks sexism is wrong, even though he wishes he were not influenced by sexist tropes and patterns in our culture, he remains a participant in social patterns of thinking and behaving that make women's lives worse than they could or should be. He is not innocent.

This is unsurprising. It is virtually impossible for someone in a sexist society to avoid altogether the effects of socialization, to avoid some level of complicity or seduction. But the purpose of recognizing this fact is not to inspire guilt but rather to motivate honesty and vulnerability. To see ourselves truthfully so that we can pursue that unattainable goal that Jesus talked about: Be perfect, as God is perfect.

When Jesus said that, it wasn't to make us comfortable. It was to make us uncomfortable. It was to remind us that the labor of becoming the best we can be is never-ending, and that although there is forgiveness for our failures such forgiveness is not a reason to stop striving, to stop repenting, to stop reflecting on our inadequacies and recommitting ourselves each day to being better than we were before. Success may be beyond us, and our salvation (thank God) doesn't depend on success, but the practice of confession and repentance and re-commitment to the good remains a lifelong calling.

This is what he asks of his white readers. When he calls himself sexist, he mean that he lives and breathes in a society that is shaped by social patterns and structures that invite men to objectify women in ways large and small--and despite his efforts to live against that tide, he falls short. This is what he means when he calls himself sexist.

But then he turns to the issue of racism. And he says these words:

This letter is not asking you to feel bad about yourself, to wallow in guilt. That is too easy. I’m asking for you to tarry, to linger, with the ways in which you perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which you are racist. 

When I first read those words, it was clear what he was saying. He was speaking to me. He was inviting me to confront not just the fact that blacks are systematically disadvantaged in our society but the fact that I am not innocent. He was inviting me to tarry, to linger, with this unsettling question: where do I fall short in my efforts to repudiate these ongoing injustices? When am I silent about racist jokes for the sake of getting along or not making waves? When am I more concerned about my own comfort or the comfort of my white colleague than I am about racial injustice? Where must I make confession, repentance, and a re-commitment to the good?

And to make that invitation, he used that word: racist.

Being a white man in America, I could've warned him about what that would do. But then again, being a black man in America, I'm sure he knew.

No matter how carefully he led up to the use of that word--RACIST--by invoking the analogy of sexism and offering his own confession about being sexist...

No matter how precise he was in specifying what he meant by that word--that he was referring to ways in which white Americans are "perpetuating a racist society," often unconsciously and absent any ugly intentions...

No matter how clear it is that nobody can live in a society and be entirely free from its socializing influence, and hence that the issue isn't about feeling guilty but about becoming self-aware and finding ways to do better...

No matter how obvious it was that he wasn't telling white Americans that all of them consciously hate black people or use the N-word or tell racist jokes or delight in social-media images of Obama being lynched...

No matter how cautiously he approached the use of that word, I could've warned him what it would mean to invite his white readers "to tarry, to linger, with...the ways in which you are racist."

I'm a white man in 21st Century America. One thing I know something about is how this class of people feels, in general, about being invited to wear the label "racist."

I'll quickly confess to being a bit sexist, a bit lazy, a bit too selfish. But racist?

White men like me have got all kinds of defense mechanisms to protect our innocence. Some are more subtle than others.

There's one strategy I knew would be quickly invoked to silence Yancy: the strategy of self-righteous deflection. It looks like this:

"Are you calling me racist? You don't KNOW me! You're calling all your white readers racist just because they're white! THAT'S what's racist! Slapping a negative label onto people based solely on their race is racism! Yancy's a racist! Racist Yancy!"

Yancy becomes the racist, and so we don't need to tarry with the question of how we contribute to the problem of anti-black racist systems in America. Because the one who's asking us to do it made the unforgivable sin of asking that question by using the term "racist."

This defensive strategy piggybacks on a more widespread one: a refusal to accept or even understand the sense of "racism" that Yancy tries so carefully to explain. Clearly, Yancy means by "racist" the propensity to consciously or unconsciously contribute to a system that disadvantages blacks and other races while advantaging whites. But if white Americans use the term in that way, it forces us to do the very thing that Yancy wants white Americans to do: to reflect on how, consciously or unconsciously, we are part of a systemic problem that continues to cause suffering.

We prefer to adopt a different meaning, one more narrow than Yancy's, more narrow than the generally accepted sociological understanding, more narrow than the one the black community generally has in mind. We prefer to reserve the term "racist" exclusively for individuals who harbor explicitly racist beliefs, who endorse white supremacist doctrines, who invoke the N-word, who wear white sheets on weekend cross-burning outings, who actively and intentionally discriminate against people of color.

If we do that, then--at least for those of us who aren't active with our local chapter of the KKK--racism is someone else's problem. It's not our problem. We preserve our innocence.

Of course, Yancy is very careful to specify, clearly and unambiguously, that when he invites his white neighbors to reflect on the ways that they are racist, he doesn't mean this sense of the word, the sense of "racist" that only applies to klansmen and neo-Nazis and their secret admirers. Yancy couldn't have been more clear that what he's inviting his white neighbors to do is reflect on how their lifestyles and choices play into the social structures and cultural patterns that continue to disadvantage blacks over whites in this country.

But such care and precision does no good if it threatens our innocence--a fact that is made blazingly apparent by the kinds of vitriolic responses to his letter that Yancy received. In fact, the urge to protect white innocence is so insanely strong that threats to it can, it seems, inspire in some people frothing displays of the opposite: N-word-spewing death threats in the name of rejecting Yancy's invitation to reflect on how we might be racist.

It would almost be laughable if it weren't so true and so devastating in its human toll. Yancy discusses that truth and that toll in a new essay, "The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America." It is adapted from Yancy's new book, Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America.

What he describes is horrific beyond anything I could conceive.

The reason it is beyond what I could conceive is precisely because I routinely underestimate the force and power of racism in that overt, rabid, hate-spewing sense--not the broad sense Yancy was so careful to specify, but in that ugly sense that most of us can safely distance ourselves from. The kind most white people aren't guilty of--but also the kind that most of us can therefore pretend does not exist.

This is another piece of my confession: I live in a bubble-world where most of the time the racism that exists looks at worst like what Yancy was talking about: the unintended complicity of well-meaning people in a system that was forged long ago and continues to cast an ugly shadow.

But my black neighbors do not live in that world. They do not live in a world where that is the only kind of racism they face. They live in a world where overt, rabid, hate-spewing racism can rear up at any moment, especially as a backlash response to the kind of thing that Yancy did in his open letter: earnest efforts to invite the kind of soul-searching that is required to dismantle racist structures and systems.

Apparently, if you're black, the surest way to inspire overt racists to come out of the woodwork, displaying their racism in unfettered verbal abuse, is to accuse them of being racist. Their raging denials are like the abusive husband who, in response to his wife calling him abusive, beats her to unconsciousness while shouting, "How dare you call me abusive!"

My black neighbors and colleagues and friends do not live in my world. My world is one where racism--whether in its raging, spewing form or in terms of hidden structures and implicit biases--affect other people. That is not the world of my black neighbors. They do not live in a world where it is optional for them whether they face these things or not.

They have no choice but to face them, to live with them. What they have a choice about is whether to speak out or endure in silence. And when they choose to speak, even if they do so in the most carefully worded way they can, they make themselves the targets of a hate that transcends what I can tarry with, what I can linger with.

To imagine myself the target of what Yancy describes in his recent essay and book--at least to do so for more than a moment--is too much for me. And so I retreat. I pretend that sort of thing is safely in the past and that what we need to tackle now is something less horrifying: implicit bias.

And then, when I step back to that level of structural and implicit racism, I exempt myself in a different way.

This is the final part of my confession. When I first read Yancy's letter, I knew that these words were meant for me:

If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism. Don’t hide from your responsibility. Rather, begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable. Being neither a “good” white person nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook. I consider myself to be a decent human being. Yet, I’m sexist. Take another deep breath. I ask that you try to be “un-sutured.”

You see, I'm always taking myself off the hook. My defense mechanisms are more subtle than the ones I've discussed above, such as defining racism narrowly enough to exclude myself, but they are just as real.

A few years ago I took Harvard University's online implicit bias test, which aims to determine the extent to which you unconsciously harbor racial prejudices (as well as other implicit associations and biases). The test, in my case, showed that I harbored no discernible implicit bias against blacks.

But here's the thing, my confession: I exulted in this result. 

I used this result to tell myself that I was not complicit. That I was not part of the problem. That I could rest on my laurels and enjoy my blessings and never need to confess, to repent, to re-commit to the good. Not only is overt racism a problem that only other people have, but so is implicit bias. Hah!

And so I put on my cloak of white innocence. And I've never taken the test again. Because I'm afraid that the comforting result was just a one-time fluke.

It is so easy to pretend that Yancy's letter does not apply to me. It is so easy to say that it applies mainly to those who responded to it with outrage, those who were so defensive in their reactions that they proved their racism in the frothing way that they rejected the racist label.

It's so easy to pretend that Yancy's letter doesn't ask anything of me, since I have already taken it to heart (even though Yancy's invitation is not a one-off thing but an ongoing part of a lifelong effort to be perfect in the ways we know we are not).

But Yancy's letter does apply to me. I know it does when I linger on his closing words:  "If you have young children, before you fall off to sleep tonight, I want you to hold your child. Touch your child’s face. Smell your child’s hair. Count the fingers on your child’s hand. See the miracle that is your child. And then, with as much vision as you can muster, I want you to imagine that your child is black."

Yancy's letter applies to me because every time I hear about another black child gunned down or read another page of Angie Thomas's extraordinary novel, The Hate U Give, I find myself confronting a terrible species of gratitude.

I find myself grateful that my children are white.

Hypothetical Verdicts: Crutcher, Shelby, and Blame

Last night a jury in Tulsa reached a verdict in a high-profile case in which a police officer, Betty Shelby, shot and killed an unarmed black man, Terence Crutcher. When she shot him, Crutcher was neither doing what she ordered him to do nor posing a clear threat (he was walking away from her with his arms raised, apparently putting those arms on the side of his car). Like so many other cases like it, the jury came back with a "not guilty" verdict.

I want to begin by saying​ something about this case that I think ought to be uncontroversial. What happened in this case is that a man with a drug problem who in fact posed no threat encountered, as part of a routine traffic stop, an officer who set out that day to serve and protect, not to kill people. And yet the officer shot the man, killing him. When that happens, something has gone terribly wrong.

What went wrong was not an "act of God." Crutcher did not die from an illness or a natural disaster. He was shot. And yet he did nothing that deserved death. He was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, and he wasn't perfectly obedient to the officers commands. But these are not the sorts of things that warrant death. And so something has gone terribly wrong.

That is the uncontroversial thing I want to l say. But now come the difficult questions. Suppose we accept the jury's judgment that the officer was not responsible for what went so terribly wrong. Who is, then? Is it appropriate to blame the man who died--blame him because in his confused state he wasn't absolutely and perfectly obedient, because he went to put his hands on his car in a move that trained officers (but not the man) have learned bad guys might use to grab for a gun? Is that the choice the jury was given? Blame the white woman in the police uniform, the one sitting in front of them looking earnest and just like them, a good citizen who means well; or blame the drug-using black man who is gone, who is nowhere in sight because he is dead, dead by a bullet lodged in his lung, a bullet propelled there by the twitch of that earnest woman's trigger finger?

Perhaps the jury had too few options. Perhaps when it comes to assessing responsibility for something that has gone so terribly wrong, juries are forced into a false dilemma.The jury was not given the option to  deliver, for example, the following hypothetical verdict: "We cannot convict you because the fault is wider than you and deeper than you. You were just there at that moment with the legacy of our cultural conditioning and our collective fears; you were there, and the systems and practices and norms of our society came together in you, pulling the trigger and making a man die, a man who posed no threat. But it could have been any one of us, and we would have done the same."

There was no option for saying that. Should there be?

Shelby and Crutcher were not alone in that moment. I don't just mean that other officers present and the helicopter whirring overhead. Social forces came together in that moment--including, perhaps, the white majority's collective fear of black men, a fear that we feed and perpetuate in all kinds of subtle ways. We feed it and perpetuate it in the unconscious minds of children who grow up wanting to serve and protect. And then one day an officer is afraid that she won't make it home alive--even though as a matter of fact the man was moving slowly away from her with his arms in the air.

Are we quicker to jump to threat scenarios when it's a black man than when it's, say, a white woman? To Shelby, it seemed like a vivid possibility that Crutcher, drugged and disoriented, might lunge through the car window to grab a gun, spin towards Shelby, and fire with deadly aim. It was so vivid, so live as a threat that she shot and killed this man whose hands were in the air, who had no gun, no gun at all. Would it have struck her as such a vivid possibility, such a plausible source of fear-- something demanding such immediate, fatal, and irrevocable action--if Crutcher had been a white woman? Also, would empathy and fellow human feeling have been potent in that case, acting to curb fatal mistakes by making them seem more dire?

I'm not talking here about overt racism. I'm not talking about deliberately discounting black lives because they are black. What I'm talking about are unconscious, implicit biases formed in us through social conditioning, biases we don't even know we have and which shape our perceptions in moments of crisis when there isn't time to make more steady, considered judgments.

Did the jury find her not guilty in part because they share the same fears, the same unconscious presuppositions that shape how they envision unfolding events? Did they identify with her and her perspective because they were subject to the same social conditioning? Was it especially easy for them, because of our shared culture, to understand why that unarmed man who was not engaged in hostile or aggressive action could appear to the officer in that moment as a deadly threat?

If this were a freakish case, an unheard-of anomaly in the American landscape, then we might accept the verdict, say "Whatever it was that went wrong, the jury looked at the evidence and decided it wasn't the officer's fault," and then move on with our lives. But we don't have that luxury, because this is not some unheard-of anomaly in American life.

If we accept the verdict, that means we must look beyond the officer to determine what went wrong, to discern what brokenness in our society needs to be fixed so that tragedies like this don't keep happening.

A guilty verdict would have said many things. Among them, it would have said to my black friends watching the trial with trepidation and a thread of hope that this time, in this case, a black life mattered. But a guilty verdict might also have said, "We've found the culprit, the source of the problem. It was this particular woman. The rest of us are off the hook." If we accept the verdict and we accept that black lives really do matter as much as white lives, then we need to ask why this sort of thing keeps happening and what we can do to fix it.

Maybe, in our current world, "not guilty" means "No one's to blame! We're off the hook!" while "guilty" means "That one person is to blame! The rest of us are off the hook!" Maybe there is no way, with the verdicts on offer, for any verdict to ever move us to ask what has gone so horribly wrong and what we can do, what we must do, to change things.

And so we return to my hypothetical verdict, a different kind of "not guilty" verdict: "Not guilty by virtue of the fact that we, society, are collectively to blame for the forces that came together in that tragic moment; not guilty because any one of us, conditioned as we have been conditioned and socialized as we have been socialized, might have done the same thing in that moment. Not guilty because we are all guilty, not guilty in a way that demands collective responsibility. Not guilty in a way that does not erase guilt but demand accountability."

And maybe that "not guilty"verdict needs to be paired with a different kind of guilty verdict: "Guilty by virtue of being an agent of something deeper than the individual, of social wrongs that found expression in this person at this moment but are not isolating to the individual; guilty in a way that does not let others off the hook but recognizes the deep roots of tragic wrongs and demands collective responsibility and broader accountability."

In our individualistic culture, we don't like those kinds of verdicts. Such verdicts would be a call to action, a call to social change. Easier to treat not-guilty verdicts as exonerating not only the individuals but also ourselves, and guilty-verdicts as heaping all the guilt on the bad guys so that the rest of us can feel cleansed.

Racism and the Charleston Shootings: Individual and Collective Responsibility

Over the last few days I've seen the following meme reappear on social media. It shows up every once in awhile, usually when someone has done something horrible. This time, it's resurfaced in reaction to discussions about the tragic mass shooting at a black church in Charleston. Here's the meme:

This meme troubles me a lot. I'm a fan of individual responsibility and accountability. My worry is that this meme, in the name of accountability, functions to immunize us from it.

Let me explain. Clearly, the person directly responsible for the deaths in Charleston was the shooter, Dylann Roof. And he should be held accountable. He should be put on trial and, when convicted (which he presumably will be), sentenced harshly.

But when this Reagan quote resurfaces, as it has a tendency to do in the wake of horrific crimes, its purpose is not to encourage holding the agent of the crime accountable. It's purpose, rather, is to point the finger away from ourselves. "Hey, everyone! Look over there! Look at that deranged racist, that agent of horror."

If the trick works, we avoid having to look collectively towards ourselves and the ways in which we as a society contribute to the conditions that breed such agents of horror.

In Matthew 7:3, Jesus offers the following rhetorical question, intended to inspire us to look to ourselves, to see our own sins and not just the sins of others: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

Of course, Dylann Roof's sin is more than just a speck or sliver. People are dead because he pulled the trigger of a gun, again and again and again. He shattered lives. And none of us did anything as bad as that.

But there is a sense in which Dylann Roof is just a speck of sawdust. Because there is in America today the plank of racism, and what Roof did is a sliver off that plank.

"But I'm not a racist! I'd never do anything like what Roof did! What he did horrifies and outrages me!"

I like to think that every reader of this post thinks these very things, and thinks them sincerely. But racism isn't something that springs up in the hearts of individuals all by itself. Racism is learned. Racism isn't an individual thing but a cultural and systemic thing that takes root in individuals.

And all of us play some role in shaping our culture, for better or worse. All of us can take responsibility for fighting to make our society less racist, for identifying the subtle social forces that marginalize black Americans every day, for working to dismantle the hateful ideologies that make them targets for overt acts of violence.

I'm resistant to saying things like, "All of us a racists," because I think this sort of statement generates more heat than light. But even if we aren't all racists, racism is first and foremost a collective phenomenon, not an individual one. Social structures and cultural patterns conspire to make life harder for black citizens than for white ones--and these structures and patterns are bound up with implicit racial biases that most people don't even know they have. These biases are planted in our subconscious minds by broad cultural forces, coloring our choices and our thinking in ways we aren't aware of, ways which are at odds with our conscious values and commitments.

The grim truth is that many white people who aren't racist, who abhor racism, are victims of systemic and cultural racism in a different way than blacks are victims. White Americans who want to promote equality and justice are too often infected, against their wills, with cultural forces that compromise their own best intentions. That's why I prefer to say that those who harbor implicit racial biases are victims of racism, as opposed to being racists. But implicit racial bias is a problem, even if those who harbor those biases aren't individually responsible.

The evidence of this is clear all around us, and documented in study after study: Well-meaning preschool teachers who earnestly read "Martin's Big Words" to their students on Martin Luther King Day are nevertheless more likely to perceive black and white children differently in the classroom without even knowing it. They are, especially, inclined to perceive them as more responsible for their misbehavior. Liberal college professors who preach against racism in the lecture hall are nevertheless less likely to respond to inquiries from prospective graduate students if they think they're black. When I step on an elevator with a woman, she never unconsciously clutches her purse more closely to her body. But this happens to a black friend of mine regularly.

Why does this happen? What are the cultural forces in play? And how are these forces related to the forces that still today perpetuate the more overt forms of racism, like what we saw on display in Charleston? Dylann Roof didn't spring out of the ground. His racist ideology didn't come out of nowhere. What stew of social influences made him ripe for the more overt racism that found voice in his hateful manifesto and eventually drove him to kill? And what can we, collectively, do to change those forces?

These are questions that we need to tackle. If we want to stop tragedies like the Charleston shooting, we need to wrestle with how individual hate crimes are related to broader social patterns, patterns that won't go away just by punishing individuals. Unless we all take collective responsibility for the social force that is racism, that social force will keep giving birth to new Dylann Roofs.

Quoting Reagan may make us feel like we're off the hook. And that's the problem. We didn't shoot those people. And we may not harbor racial prejudices ourselves. But racism is a collective, structural, ideological, and cultural reality. And the only way to end it is if all of us take responsibility for asking the right kinds of questions, for listening to the stories of our black neighbors, for tackling the complex, thorny social issues that keep racism alive.

There's a plank in America's eye. We need to work together, all of us, to pull it out.

"F**k Your Breath": Mistakes in Law Enforcement

The other day, another police shooting of a black man made headlines--this one in Tulsa, so it hit close to home.

It was all captured on video: An officer tackled a fleeing suspect, Eric Harris. While he was ordering Harris to roll onto his stomach, a reserve deputy--a volunteer with full law-enforcement authority--decided to subdue Harris with his Taser. Except that he wasn't holding his Taser. He was holding his handgun.

You can barely hear the "sorry" on the video. It's swamped by Harris's cries: "Oh my God, he shot me! He shot me!"

But if you listen closely you will hear that soft "sorry," and it has an oh-shit quality to it. So I'm confident the Taser story is true. The guy didn't mean to fire his gun. It was a mistake.

A fatal one. Harris died later at the hospital.

Another feature of the story isn't included in the video (at least the one I saw and that's linked to above). At the end of that video, Harris can be heard saying, "I'm losing my breath." And then the video ends. But according to reports, a deputy responded to that fading plea with crude disdain: "F**k your breath."

It's impossible not to think about Eric Garner, a black man who died last summer from a police officer's choke hold, whose last words were, "I can't breathe." Was the deputy thinking about Garner? Was his dismissal of Harris's life breath an expression of a deeper and broader disdain?

I don't know. But I can't help but think about lying on the pavement, bleeding, dying, crying out in pain and horror, and hearing my life and human dignity swept away with "F**k your breath." Perhaps they were the last words Harris ever heard, the final punctuation of his life story.

The man who said those words committed no crime. There will be no charges filed. One man shot Harris by mistake, and may face charges. Another sent him into death with a final message: You don't matter.

Both acts trouble me, but the latter strikes me as more inhuman, even if its consequences were less dire.

I don't like to define people by their worst moments. The officer who said to a dying Harris, "F**k your breath," should not be defined by those words. What he said may have been horrible and inhuman. That doesn't mean he was.

I like to think that right now he is mortified. I like to think that he lies awake thinking, "How could I have said that? What must it have been like, to hear those last words just before he died?" Maybe the officer was caught up in the adrenal rush of the moment: the chase, the unexpected gunshot, the furious thought that this would never have happened if the suspect hadn't run.

Maybe it just slipped out. A different kind of mistake.

I've known numerous police officers over the years, all of them good people with a sense of civic responsibility. They recognize the weight of the public trust they've been invested with, and they're committed not to abusing that trust. I can't imagine any of them saying "F**k your breath" to an apprehended suspect dying from an accidental gunshot wound. And I like to think that none of them would ever mistake the firearm in their hand for a Taser, and so fatally shoot a suspect who--whatever his mistakes--didn't deserve to die.

But mistakes happen. Especially when strong negative emotions overtake us, we say and do things we wouldn't do in wiser moments. It was a mistake for Eric Harris to flee the police. So why did he do it? Maybe he was terrified. Maybe he thought, "I might become the next Eric Garner, the next black man killed by the cops." And so he fled. It's not uncommon for fear-driven behavior to actually bring to life the things we fear.

Police work is dangerous, and the moments when police shootings happen are some of the most high-stress, high-adrenalin moments in a police officer's work life. And such moments are the ones when mistakes are more likely to happen. The right kind of training can reduce their likelihood. Did the reserve deputy who mistook his sidearm for a Taser get the same kind of training that a regular officer receives?

I don't know, but the mistake I want to focus on is the other one: the anger-fueled obscenity, the dismissal of a life. I'm going to assume it was a mistake--that is, something said in the heat of the moment and later regretted, as opposed to the calculated, self-righteous dehumanization of a dying man.

My question has to do with the kind of training that reduces mistakes of that kind. In the heat of the moment, with emotions high and blood pounding in our ears, how much more likely are we to dehumanize those we see as our opponents and our enemies? And what kind of training can ensure that even in those moments, we remember the humanity of those who run from us or talk back at us or lash out at us in anger and frustration?

In some cases, the failure to really see the humanity of a suspect might lead to a crushing remark that discounts a human life in its final moments. In other cases, that failure could mean the difference between shooting a suspect and holding fire. Police should fire when lives are at stake--their own, another officer's, a civilian's. But one of the lives at stake in every police shooting is the one who is shot. That life needs to be given its due weight, too. How do we ensure it isn't discounted? How do we ensure that lives aren't cut short or damaged because, in the adrenalin-fueled moment, those lives aren't valued as they should be?

Much of the discussion about this has focused on race--as well it should. There is rampant evidence of subconscious racism operating beneath the surface of our thoughts, influencing our choices without our knowledge. This isn't a police problem. It's been documented in college professors, preschool teachers, Northerners and Southerners, rich and poor, black and white. (Yes, unconscious bias--against blacks--even influences the thinking of blacks through the phenomenon sometimes called internalized racism.)

While there is also overt racism at work in many corners of our society--as the federal investigation into the Ferguson PD makes plain--the bigger issue by far is the covert kind of racial bias that influences the choices of good people without their conscious knowledge. Such racial bias--especially if we aren't aware that it's at work in us--can increase our likelihood of making mistakes of the kind I'm talking about. Mistakes in which we think less of people than they deserve.

Such mistakes are a problem wherever they happen. But they become a bigger problem in high-stress moments. And they become a potentially fatal problem when guns are involved. This means that we will be more likely to see the problem play out in dramatic fashion among law enforcement, precisely because they are in high stress jobs that sometimes require decisions about using lethal force.

This does not mean that police are somehow especially racist. It isn't "their" problem and it isn't "theirs" to fix. Its our problem. It's ours to fix. The social forces that generate implicit bias don't originate in police departments. They come from everywhere. And if we are afraid of the effects that such biases will have on police officers who need to make life and death decisions and may be influenced by unconscious biases, then all of us need to tackle the sweeping social forces that perpetuate these biases.  (We also need to root out overt racism, and not just in police departments.)

But in the meantime, we need to offer resources to police officers who do not want to be influenced by such biases, who are committed to being fair defenders of the public good. The power they're invested with means that if anything, they need to be better than the rest of us when it comes to such things. And the police I know feel the weight of that and want to live up to that weighty trust. What tools and techniques can we offer that will help?

As important as the issue of implicit racial bias may be, it isn't the only source of the mistakes I'm talking about here. Can we imagine the recent events in Tulsa playing out with a white suspect? Of course. The kinds of scenarios that awaken fight-or-flight responses also fuel adversarial, zero-sum thinking: It's him or me. It's us or them. And as soon as another human being becomes one of "them," their humanity begins to be discounted.

This tendency appears to be rooted deeply in our human instincts. And police officers are asked to throw themselves into the very situations that trip these instincts. It's their duty as police officers to step into danger, to confront law-breakers in a way that's inevitably adversarial. Caught up in the emotional intensity of that conflict, the suffering of the adversary might trigger a flush of righteous animosity, spilling out in words like "F**k your breath."

It's only human. But it's a mistake. A tragic moment of staggering inhumanity. The police officers I know want to be the best they can be, even in those moments that have a tendency to evoke our ugliest selves. What kind of training will help?

It should be clear that I'm talking about something very different from the sort of training that will help a reserve deputy keep his head enough to realize that he's holding a handgun rather than a Taser. What I have in mind is something rooted in our capacity to see and respond to humanity in the face of conflicts and emotional forces that have a natural tendency to drive out such responsiveness.

But there are layers of problems here. Police officers have dangerous jobs, and their survival--their ability to make it home to their families--may depend on responses that are rooted in the same fight-or-flight instincts that fuel our propensity to dehumanize. What kind of training can offer the right sort of balance between preserving those essential survival instincts while nurturing our human capacity to see the humanity even in those we are in conflict with?

That's the balancing act we are asking our police officers to perform. And they're being asked to do it in a society where racial biases and other forms of prejudice are being written into our subconscious responses to our environments from an early age.

It should be clear that I don't have pat or ready answers. My aim here, rather, is to ask questions that acknowledge the deep problems and the tragedies we face without drawing good-guy/bad-guy lines, without oversimplifying, without pointing the finger at the other guy.

The Tulsa case is human. It is human because humans make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are tragically wrong. It is also inhuman. Sometimes our mistakes lead us to fall short of our human potential, and to see our fellow human beings as less than human. When it comes to wrestling with such oh-so-human inhumanity, we need to be in it together, to ask what we can do to help each other be better than we thought we could be.

And that means we need to stop saying "F**k your breath," even to those who say it to others.