Jody David Armour: "Unconscious Bias: The Social Construction of Black Criminals"

hello everybody good afternoon so tonight we are honored to have with us dr. Jody David Armour so dr. Armour is the Roy P Crocker professor of law at the University of Southern California his expertise ranges from personal injury claims to claims about the relationship relationship between racial justice criminal justice and the rule of law dr. armor studies the intersection of race and legal decision-making and reform movements dr. armor is a widely published scholar and a renowned lecturer and he has published articles in Stanford Law Review California Law Review Ohio State Journal law of criminal review just to name a few he has also appeared as a legal analyst on NBC ABC MSNBC KPCC in a variety of other television and news programs dr. Armour earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from Harvard University and his JD degree from both Law School of Music Lee he currently teaches his students a diverse array of subjects including criminal law torts stereotypes and Prejudice the role of cognitive unconscious in the rule of law it is my honor to present to all of you dr. Jody armours speaking on the unconscious bias to social constructions of black criminals [Applause] thanks very much it's a your honor and pleasure to address you today about a subject that's near and dear to me and I've been grappling with for quite a few years now and that is the subject of social perceptions right that's what we're talking about share with you a social perception of this Roy P crocker professor of law at USC that she just described right I took my Roy pre Crocker self down to JW Marriott in downtown LA and I was meeting my roommate from a better chance I went through a program called a better chance which targets inner-city kids and gives them puts them in boarding schools where they'll have a better chance to go on to college etc and I hadn't seen neon Garcia in 20 25 years so it's like opening a time capsule he was a general manager of ESPN the port a so he'd come up and I was just basking in his reflected glory dream kind of you know a toast in a sense a toast of time 20 years later and I was approached by and waiting in the lobby after we met regards to white guards and a black guard the reason that significant is they sent the black guard over and I was dressed like I am tonight without the tie and the guard came up to me and said the Black Guard came up to me the two white men standing further back social perceptions were talking about right what does a boy peacock a professor of law look like he said sir are you here to see someone and I said well yes but why aren't you asking anyone else in the lobby have you been down the JW Marriott you see it's a big lobby teeming with people he said well sir we've been having a problem with transients right the clear implication is I look like the transient to him right that's why he is not adjusting other folks in the lobby and he's addressing me but as a lawyer I wanted to actually hear him utter the words right I said so you're saying I look like a transient he said sir don't take it personally all right and then he went back and he joined the other two guards at that point we were just talking about a new social media and I'd been dragged into the 21st century kicking and screaming there's a couple years ago by my students who said Professor Armour you got to get on this Twitter and get with it so I happen to be on at that point so I started tweeting about this interaction at the same time the nice thing about teaching in law school for 20-plus years now there's a lot of your students are out practicing in law firms downtown partners at those firms so I called one and Latham and Watkins I said I know he's not gonna come back but in case he does I want you here on the phone and I'm tweeting I said no it's not gonna happen they'll come on he comes back this time the other two guards are closer with him he comes back and he says sir what is the name of the person the guest you came here to see so as a both torts professor and criminal law professor I can characterize that situation for you legally at that moment what he was saying is if I don't give them a name they can find in their database I've assumed the ejectable status of a trespasser and they were about to lay hands on me and throw me out of that Lobby all right so that was a situation and I was at that moment confronted with a situation that black folk in America are confronted with thousands of times a day hundreds of thousands in some cases this is the basic trick this is the basic choice set that you have this is the situation either I won give him the name Lee know Garcia validate his impressions of me vindicate his assumptions about me swallow that indignity suffer that spirit murder either I do that or option number two and this is the only other option I tell him to go himself there's the only other option either option either option is going to result in indignity right this one is going to result with me in the back of a car right and I'm probably not in front of you today because you know details of 6 USC law professor in legal analyst ABC legal analyst arrested for assault details at 6 and 11 that's option 2 that indignity or the swallowing this indignity and that is the pick your poison a many black folk on a daily basis right and that is the stuff I wrote about in my first book Negro phobic Negro fobian reasonable racism didn't cost being black in America that was based on some of the Articles that you mentioned you don't know from Stanford and Cal etc about unconscious bias and judging people in assessing somebody's riskiness dangerousness an ambiguous figure so profiling in other words so I did all of that and then I had to think about another set of issues and that's the one I want to talk to you about today not our biased social perceptions of blacks from the standpoint of their dangerousness but our bias moral judgments of them they're two different questions one has to do with profiling ambiguous people making predictions about them the other has to do with the problem mass incarceration the people who are caught up in the criminal justice system most of whom have done the crimes they preach are with so I'm talking we're talking about wrongdoers who have done crimes committed crimes and now we make mu happen moral judgments of them and deciding how to blame and punish them because that's what I teach when I teach criminal law is about blame and punishment and the blame part is about moral judgment call some subjective culpability how wicked is the person we want the punishment to fit the blame punishment to fit the subjective culpability that's the mens rea requirement and so we make frontal assessments of the subjective culpability the moral status of wrongdoers routinely as part of the criminal justice process and I wanted to think about the implications of our moral judgments about people who are disproportionately black because the people caught up in the criminal justice system are disproportionately black so when you put a black face on crime what does it trigger in social perceivers what reactions do we have to folk who are caught up in the criminal justice system what more what perceptions do we have of them how do we view them right so before I get to that particular question I'll just back up for a moment and talk a little bit about the cognitive unconscious where I'm going to be seeing a lot of this stuff is coming from right the cognitive unconscious is something I started writing about early in my career as an alternative to the Freudian model of the unconscious which you had to be you know if you believe in 14 model then it's convinced you if you didn't it wasn't empirically very convincing the cognitive the cognitive unconscious model of the unconscious let us really kind of zero in on social cognition which is an information processing approach to human cognition so we're able to kind of really zero in on how our brains operate when they were making judgments related to race so we're able to say here's your here's your brain here's your brain on race right and we're able to do that better and better with the kinds of brain imaging studies that we're doing now we're really able to see your brain on race right and understanding and understanding of our unconscious responses to people our unconscious wait our unconscious reflexes shape our perceptions of others of members of social groups so when I started writing about this cognitive unconscious I had to help people first understand how it is possible that you could unconsciously do stuff right because it's not intuitive that we do so our high tunes I'll share this with you now to understand stereotypes I call stereotypes following the literature well learn not just beliefs well learned sets of associations they can run automatically without our conscious awareness that's a stereotype of well learned set of associations they can run automatically without our conscious worth giving example of a stereotype Phyllis cats in The New York Times describes a three year old white girl who upon seeing a black infant says to her mom look mom a baby made right now that three year old little girl is not a racist she's not a big she's merely describing an association that's been forged in her memory between women from a certain social group in a social occupation she commonly sees them in right she may reach the age of judgment and come to renounce that is an appropriate way to respond to women from that group so her personal standards for how she ought to respond to the world may go one way but she still has this association that's been forged in her memory right this well-learned set of associations that may be the basis of another set of responses unconsciously to her so to understand how that kind of well-earned set of associations can drive us unconsciously I just think of oh I'm not at home back up when I think of that I think of Wow well my deal when I go to work I live ten minutes from my office at SC I pull out of my driveway I go down Crenshaw MLK in there fig and you and I on numerous occasions pulled out of my garage and I could not tell you how I got to the garage I yes see it was all on automatic pilot I was thinking about the Vette look lesson I was going to teach you know and you just you're triggered to make turns and do things without any conscious attention right without any conscious effort that's how well learned sets of associations work right William James said we free our mind our conscious mind for survival activity if we can relegate to the unconscious realm well learn sets of associations that can run automatically without all that extra cognitive energy right so if indeed stereotypes are these well Dern sets of associations that can run automatically and oh let's say just one more example so you can kind understand how this works i man I have three sons my youngest just getting out of he was recruited by the men's basketball team at Cal so and and now another Akron Ohio guy is coming here LeBron James all right to resuscitate LA Laker basketball but when I was teaching my youngest how to drive every initial movement requires intention attention and effort right how to turn the wheel when you put another threat when you're hitting the gas versus hitting the brake and man I hate to say this but when I taught all three of my boys how to drive sticks we had a rent one you know as I was Enterprise rental because there was you know initially the intent there's a lot of myths you know there's a lot of learning there's a learning curve until the of sets of associations become subject to your not control processes but automatic processes then as well learn Association I'm rolling down fig with my boys and we're debating health care reform and they're just rolling along yeah you know because all of this is now part of the cognitive unconscious well learned sets of associations or like mental habits right habits are just well learned sets of associations that can run automatically without our conscious awareness right so how do you combat these stereotypes as well during sets of associations you run automatically without our conscious awareness becomes our next question can we combat them and I suggest that we can but it requires us to adopt a solution that runs counter to what many of us have learned many of us have learned that the way they dress discrimination against members of stereotyped groups so when I talk about color blindness or color consciousness I mean color to cover any Marg marker marginality there's people stereotyped on the basis of whether it's gender LGBTQ status ability status whatever those species of stereotypes are right when we have these well learned sets of associations about these members of these stereotype groups we are often told that what we should do is ignore the fact that we're talking to a member of a stereotype group right we should be colorblind we should be gender blind we should be ability status blind we should be in every way blind right goes back to Plessy Ferguson color blindness is the Col or whatever variant blindness um but if stereotypes are mental habits well right what's the surest way to fall into a habit or what's the hard what's the surest way not to break a habit is to ignore it when you're in the presence of environmental cues that trigger the habit think about buying your nails for example let's say that's a habit and you tend to do it when you're watching TV right so if one thing you do one way you break that habit is when I'm in front of the TV I to mine my you know commitment my conviction I'm going to break this habit it takes intention attention and effort to resist the coming to habitual responses right so rather than color blindness color consciousness is required in a lot of situations in which you may be subject to discriminating against a member of a stereotype group that sounds counterintuitive right to us from a lot of our thinking about these issues or hearing about it from Plessy Ferguson and the legal arena or what have you so much so that when I wrote one of my first articles I had to argue against then standing legal doctrine that said you couldn't mention that factor in the courtroom without playing to the prejudices of the jury they start any if you mention anything about the social identity of a litigant you were playing to the prejudice of the jury and so that was forbidden and did how many did people see the movie of Philadelphia and people see that was on Tom Hanks was a young lawyer and Denzel Washington was his attorney and and Hanks was discriminated against in his law firm because he was gay and the partners didn't want to get partner and Denzel Washington character brings out in the courtroom the fact that his client is a member the LGBT community of gay particularly person and tells the jury to confront that fact when they are looking at this fact pattern ingre and grappling with this case to resist succumbing to unconscious biases and to recognize what's really going on in the judge interject and says you can't mention that in the courtroom so I took that on unfortunately courts have started to resolve their issue differently now and do allow you to even during voir dear during jury questioning start to challenge jurors to question their biases against certain out group members and you know state their commitment embrace their commitment to be neutral to be as fair and objective and impartial as it possible and the resist succumbing to any kind of unconscious biases against whatever our group member may be a litigant in the case so how does all of that cash out in the moral arena becomes my next became my next question and is what I really want to talk to you about today that is do we judge black hearts differently than similarly situated white hearts in the criminal justice process because the criminal justice process requires you to judge the heart of the offender that's one of the things that in my latest article that was read for professor Chile's class I talked about how the mens rea requirement in a criminal case requires you to find two things you have to two things find two things rather one of which is the mens rea requirement you have to find that the defendant committed a prohibited act whatever that that's the Act estrellas now to commit the prohibited act then had a accompany never had prohibited act has to be mens rea oh that's subjective culpability moral blameworthiness that's how it works in in establishing what is moral blameworthiness the law one of the formulations the law likes to use is a depraved heart of the prayed and malignant heart the they call it the depraved heart test and they make it real clear that a big part of the moral judgment process that jurors have to go through is assessments of the character the heart of the defendant right and then the question becomes do black defendants get the same kind of moral judgments made of them as similarly situated white or other non black defendants that becomes it's an empirical question it's a simple right that it's straightforward at some point empirical question right it's it's kind of empirical in the way that another case of discrimination are connected to before I come back to it I have a colleague at Rossier School of Education at SC who's been teaching for years of course online and he decided to run an experiment he ran the same course first with a male's name his name and then the next year with a woman's name same course online control can't tell see him or his evaluations we're talking about student evaluations his evaluations were jaw-droppingly worse as a woman jaw-droppingly worse right that's how we can that's how unconscious bias can affect your evaluation process all right that's an evaluation that we're talking about like mens rea oh you're making an evaluation of credit or blame how much praise or blame to give someone those are flip sides are the same evaluative coin right and that shows you that there can be that kind of unconscious bias and how we evaluate people along gender lines well along racial lines I found the same kind of bias two kinds of biases I talked about in the article one attribution bias to in-group empathy bias you know under attribution bias here is the reasonable person test is at the heart of many legal doctrines right it's the quantity to which all is related by we all is measured in the area of self-defense and in a lot of other areas right and the way the reasonable test person test works is this you asked the jury with a reasonable person in the situation have done the same thing if a reasonable person in the situation would have done the same thing defendants excuse right so we look at what an ordinary or typical a reasonable person in the situation would do what the model Penal Code points out is that to the extent that we attribute any act of wrongdoing to the situation we mitigate or excuse we say no liability or much less liability to the extent that we attribute the wrongdoing to not the situation but the character of the actor we blame we condemn right we want to punish okay so that's basic attribution question right an attribution theory in social psychology you'll find that's talked about this is a basic explanatory method that humans engage in either tribute human behavior to the situation or to the person there's a basic split what's interesting is they found and I could name the study I won't go into the details right now I'll be glad to get into this more that when you have black and white wrongdoers that is the subjects have concluded that both of them have done something they weren't supposed to do this is Burke Duncan the University of California study they found both with both these black and white wrongdoers the subjects have said they were wrongdoers they did something they weren't supposed to do then they asked them to what do you attribute that wrongful act to the character of the actor or to the situation because you know it's like a case of road rage road rage you can say ah it's he's a hothead or you can say yeah I've had that happen to its human there's kind of a situation can you know there's a lot of situations in which can go one way or that in fact according to attribution theory and social psychology that's what we do all the time routinely and the reasonable person situation test is illegal it allows us to do that so the interesting thing they found is that there was a systematic and is a systematic tendency among the subjects to attribute the wrongdoing of the white actor to the situation in the wrongdoing of the black actor to his character for the same act right the same violent act the same wrongdoing we both we've concluded that they were both all wrongdoers violent hostile act then they had to make an attribution judgment well that attribution judgment is really a moral judgment right we see that that's really a more that's all that's what we say in the criminal law to the extent that you can attribute the behavior to the situation you excuse you don't blame to the extent that you attribute it to the city to the character you do blame so really what the attribution judgment is doing is moral judgment work right it's the basis for jurors to make moral judgments and we see that there's a systematic tendency to attribute a wrongful act more often to a black wrongdoers interstate his or her heart and attribute a white wrongdoers behavior to his or her situation to make more allowances for it right which means you can have a black and white wrongdoer both who do the exact same act one will be found guilty of merely manslaughter the other murder even though they did the same act on the basis of this differential attribution right in other words criminals are constructed not just found in the fact-finding process of trials right there's a there's an active construction going on in the mental processes of the jurors when they're looking at different litigants coming before them and having to make moral assessments of them give you one other example the model Penal Code talks about the reasonable person test is essentially being a vehicle by which the jury can express sympathy or but the with the defendant in other words to the extent that you sympathetically identify with the defendant you will find what he or she did reasonable to the extent that you don't you will not find it reasonable right so it's a vehicle for sympathy well there's a whole set of studies we talked about in professor Keeley's class today that's in my latest article there's a whole set of studies that again here's your brain on race here it is here these brain imaging studies and which they look at what a person who's observing another person drink for example a cup of water if you watch another person drink a cup of water your mirror neurons are gonna fire and you're gonna simulate in your own mind what you're seeing you're not actually gonna bring your hit hand up to your mouth but in your in your your mere neurons through your mirror neurons you're gonna simulate it in your own mind right that's built baton one of the basic building blocks of sympathy and empathy vicarious experiences reason you squint and in in movie theaters and things like that so but what the studies found when they've got a little more granular is that if you are a white person who's watching another white person drink a cup of coffee or a glass of water your mere neurons fire you simulate what you see if you're watching a black person drink a cup of water there's no activity in the mirror neurons your brain on race the basic building blocks of empathy and sympathy aren't firing aren't they're right and I think that can explain a lot that goes towards explaining a lot to me that explains a lot about for example the response to Hurricane Katrina in the Ninth Ward right when you had black folks in New Orleans Ninth Ward standing on rooftops with literally the water up to their chest and here's the cameras that go beaming down on them and four days in Sean Penn is rolling up in a rowboat handing out fresh water because FEMA still couldn't get its act together right that was that was that was Hurricane Katrina compare that response to the response to 9/11 right if there was a panic of empathy they just got it done there was no talk about any bureaucratic red tape there was just the panic of empathy get it done right look at what's happening to Puerto Rico now it's a kind of current day hat example of Katrina right once you want you other rise in some way the the victims those who are suffering that plight then there's not the base the basic building blocks for empathy aren't there you don't have that panic of in the empathy yeah maybe you feel some sympathy but there's not that panic of empathy that comes from really deeply sympathetically identifying with the people who are in distress and so this same phenomenon goes into the reasonable person test and ask the jurors do you sympathetically identify with the defendant to the extent that you do you'll find what the defendant did reasonable to the extent that you don't you won't find it reasonable and now we know there's a cognitive basis for people finding out group members less sympathetic than in group members and therefore less reasonable therefore more culpable more blameworthy see Blaine isn't turning on categorical imperatives moral judgments aren't turning on you know whether you're adhering to some moral code it's turning on things like do i I sympathetically identify with you do I want to make allowances for your ordinary human frailties do I see myself in you how can I blame you if you're just like me right when people want to understand what happened in the for example Trayvon Martin case here's what happened you know people come up with a lot of explanations that I think actually can confuse the issue what happened is the judge instructed the jury in the way the judges instruct the juries in self-defense cases in general and that instruction says using the reasonable person test of a reasonable person in the situation or the fell fear you all excused in other words the judge told the jury go back in the deliberation room gaze into a looking-glass if you see george zimmerman looking back at you acquit right when they saw and george zimmerman looking back at them when they sympathetically identified with him and they couldn't differentiate themselves from him they acquitted because that's what they're supposed to do under the law right the jury box it can just be a conduit for ordinary social beliefs prevailing social attitudes ordinary social expectations they just come right on in the jury right on in the courtroom right through the jury box we really get into this also not only when we're talking about race but sexual assault when I get to that in my criminal law class it's the same process because a reasonable person is right at the center everything again was the mistake reasonable as to consent how do we define reasonable right we come right back to it combating it what what are the implications of all of this I think there are a number of implications that have come to mind for me immediately one above all is epistemic humility about our moral judgments of others generally I think you know catching it when it comes to this stereotyped group black socially marginalized one the most maligned and marginalized in American history yes you know that is gives us an important insight but I think even more insight can be gained from recognizing the ways that it also calls and calls into question more generally the objectivity and neutrality of our blaming and punishing practices we're starting this critically self-reflect on that as a country in the last sole eight years or so in a way we haven't for a long time shell Alexander's the new Jim Crow came out a lot of people who used to look at black as wrongdoers in general and disproportionate black they didn't look at that then at them as a social justice issue they just looked at that as a as an issue of people making bad choices now social justice issue right but for the last eight years we started to critically self reflect on that in a way that we have and so this approach that I'm suggesting is counseling epistemic humility about our ability to really judge the Just Desserts of another because you got to be pretty damn sure that you know exactly what the Just Desserts of another are if you're going to put their life out in capital punishment for example right or put them in a cage like when I take my students up to San Quentin a 6x9 cage stick stuff two of them in there and keep them in there sometimes for two three days at a time and them at how many times they can flush the toilet because of water issues right you have to be pretty damn sure of your moral contempt for those people to treat them like that to authorize them in that way and treat them like that and this what I'm talking about and that's coming out of the empirical psychology is that our moral judgments aren't pristine aren't necessarily at all bias free in a in a whole variety of ways and so maybe we should think twice about draconian punishments being extremely punitive when I was talking down at in San Pedro at Terminal Island at the federal prison down there two guards about unconscious bias the took me out and giving me a tour of the grounds and I saw this big expanse of asphalt and I said man you expected a big parking lot there I said you know I'm but I'm not seeing any cars that I said what's what's going on there they said well you know the people from back on East DC came out there for a visit and they saw the grass and the trees out there and they said what's the grass and trees doing out there the prisoners shouldn't be able to look at grass and trees all right so they uprooted the trees and paved over the grass because that's how we thought we chant in California code we said the point of the criminal sanction in California is punishment we went away from rehabilitation we were we said punishment all right that was a conscious decision right but in saying that your goal is punishment you're kind of saying that the retributive urge your feeling it's justified to act on that attribute of urge you can trust that attribute of urge you just want to punish you want to inflict as much pain and suffering as it takes because it doesn't really matter because they are not really people who are morally worthy of our consideration morally were the example that comes to mind to make that point is we're something else we talked about in class today my twitter handle comes from which is theory and I was talking in class about how that's caused picket signs to Rupp do some talks I was given by auntie in word by n-word abolitionists right but where I'm pulling that word from is a moral distinction invited in made by one of the most popular comedians in popular culture and in which he launched his comedic career Chris launched his comedic career on the basis of this routine in which he's going walking back and forth in front of the Jews to being all these householders I went in black households especially he's not yeah this Chris Rock cut in there somewhere well Chris Rock walking back and forth in front of an all-black audience saying let me get pretty roughly to it it's something like it's like a civil war going on in black America and there's two sides there's black people in this and have got to go I love black people but I hate boy I wish they'd let me join the Ku Klux Klan I do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn and he keeps on like that for 45 minutes and the crowd is falling out in their seats right and it's core distinction between lovable black people and condemnable is criminality right a is a black person who does crime that's his core definition core criterion right by that logic that latest article that you shared with your class by that logic because they asked me to pinpoint psych this professor they said man this just seems like it's hyperbolic we're going to have to have pinpoint science they got the pinpoint psych of 90% of young black males and some of our inner-city neighborhoods are gonna wind up in jail on probation on parole at some point in their lives so what somebody like Chris Rock and those from that politics of respectability school are saying is that up to 90% of our own children and that's the logic right that that conclusion should sufficiently impeach any logic on which it rests right but it is a popular logic it is the one that somebody like Oh Bill Cosby let's let's name names right in 2004 Bill Cosby was part of the politics of respectability school in which you're saying you know don't confuse me with them and he was wagging his fingers he did a famous poundcake speech and when you got the n-double-a-cp Image Award and when she said people are crying about that black kid getting shot in the head over the poundcake well why do you steal the pound cake I've been hungry I've seen a pound cake I didn't take you know why something called upbringing that's Bill Cosby talking about he's flipping roofies into women's drinks that's not still debated is it 50 60 women in some point you because you're turning into a I don't know a climate denier or evolution deny or something right but that was the attitude of a lot of the politics of respectability folk and it's still there and it's rooted in a certainty about moral distinction so I know good Negroes versus bad Negroes and I don't have any problem with having corrosive contempt for the bad ones that's Randy Kennedy in his book race crime in law 1997 black harvard law professor he says black community needs to start distinguishing between good and evil and bad neutrals he uses Chris Rock's distinction only stated in the more genteel language of the Academy good Negroes versus bad Negroes right but says the exact same thing and in fact is able to trace it to folks like you know Thurgood Marshall and I'm sorry I'm gonna step on some toes now but Barack Obama he uses a big politics of respectability proponent went to Morehouse and wagged his finger at them about not making excuses but didn't go to Ohio State and said don't make excuses but told these these black youth who had shown a lot of personal responsibility getting the graduation day don't go out there and make excuses because you know our people are prone to making excuses what where's that coming from that's politics of respectability right and it's it's rooted in our moral perceptions our perceptions of others and it's showing that even in people who are on the receiving end of stereotypes can use those stereotypes against members of their own group I live on a street called Kenway in a area called View Park which the LA Times is called the black Beverly Hills you take view Park put it together with Baldwin Hills Windsor Hills on the dare Heights you have the largest contiguous upper middle-class and upper-class neighborhood in the country and I've had neighbors in my on my street come to me and say because my sons you know I didn't I didn't limit my sons to jack-and-jill social clubs you know I we had them all over LA in the Southland au basketball Little League football Pop Warner import Pop Warner football Little League baseball AAU basketball and they made friends from lots of different neighborhoods lots of places when those friends would come to visit them I've had neighbors in my black Beverly Hills neighborhood come to me and say we don't want Compton up here I've had sheriffs deputies come to my event planner and say we don't want South Central up here even though we live in South Central but it's another example of how groups even within a group and the irony to me is here here are some people these the you know this black bourgeoisie these upper-middle class blacks who rail against racial profiling in on ellis cose book the rage of a privileged class he talks about black middle class who are enraged because they're constantly being profiled despite their medical degrees but spite their law degrees despite their income they're constantly being profiled so he talks about that the irony is here's a group of my people my neighbors who railing against racial profiling but practicing spatial profiling against members of their own group without any sense of irony at all you know class profiling is okay I guess theory let's talk a little bit more about that Professor Keeley because now we get to talk about how these perceptions play into the debate about free speech on campus we just had someone named Ben Shapiro come to our campus and say some very uncomfortable things about stuff we're talking about today and students protested there were demonstrations but he spoke in Bovard auditorium and people called me a sellout and they called me one now because I supported his right to speak and I supported his right to speak because I can't separate his right to speak from my right to be able to expound Nega theory the way I do I sprouted i provoked picket lines at a number of venues I've spoken at bi inward abolitionists who've come out and said that that's a blood-soaked epithet that is tainted fruit whose roots run into a racist past and so it's a form of hate speech right and so for you to get up here and use that language is to normalize it and to traumatize right and they didn't want to hear about any connections Tupac nas cube hold I don't want to hear any of that you know n-double-a-cp buried the n-word in Detroit in 2006 and Freedom Plaza remember that it barely brought it through the streets with a casket wooden casket and had a eulogy over it Julian Bond and car Patrick and as we talked about in class miraculously the this morning like Lazarus it did rose again I heard in popular culture I heard my son spanien throwing it back and forth right but I have had folks who feel very strongly in that way say I'm going to demonstrate your talk and demonstrate against it and I have stood 100% behind them I'm sad number one I am 100% you're behind your right to demonstrate my talk that's the that's your expression of your freedom of speech that's your freedom of expression freedom of political expression freedom of association freedom of speech lots of things that's yours and I respected and I saluted because it's going to deepen I think the discussion ultimately and does but on the other hand they did allow me to speak so there was that compromise I was allowed to speak I was allowed to share my views and I asked the I asked some of those who folks who had attended to talk to be the first one to ask questions I wanted to hear you know those tough questions right off the bat so knowing that knowing how easily it is how easy it is to label someone a black identity extremists which Karen bass pointed out was a a problem in the Congress congressional floor how just expressing your black lives matter sympathies could get you labeled by the FBI as a black identity extremists and for lots of other reasons having to do with like Ice Cube when I interviewed Ice Cube for one of my plays he said when I uttered the words the police coming straight from the underground on a young got it back because I'm brown and not the other color so police think I got that you got the they have the authority to kill the minority when I utter those words the police said they would come out and cuff me and lock me up and that's what they did came out and cuffed him and locked him up so I just seen the you know speech restrictions coming down disproportionately on marginalized dissidents I'm reluctant to give any authority more tools against dissidents especially from marginalized groups right so that is why that's why I and I can't draw a clear distinction between me and Ben Shapiro I really can't you know I'm not saying what Ben Shapiro saying a lot of ways but some people just say look are me you're not kneeling during the National I mean you're not standing up during that land you're kneeling and you know supporting Kapernick I find that just as odious as what some people on the other side find about being Sapiro how am I going to be able to sting with those cases except by saying oh well there's a difference between domination and subordination yeah that can get awfully let me tell you the lawyer that can get awfully slippery as a basis as a principle basis for saying you know one group can speak freely but another can now does that mean it's okay with me for somebody to say I want to express my free freedom of expression and come into the classroom wearing a KKK hood and sit down in the classroom no I got to draw the line I'm going to say that the subject is nuanced and complicated I can't give you any sound bites I don't think you can reduce this subject to sound bites that you can slap on bumper stickers or stitch on throw pillows or paint on the side of a barn I mean it's a complicated discussion it's a nuanced difficult discussion but again turns on how we how we talk about our different social perceptions how we get in the same room and say we're going to have some discussions about things like social perceptions and social biases and unconscious biases and we're going to make we're going to make that the center of our inclusion diversity and equity efforts but we're also going to do it in a way that allows people say unpopular things and allows people to stick their foot in their mouths because one of the ways I've learned through my life is by sticking my foot in my mouth that's been a good teacher I stick my foot in my mouth and I learn I know not to stick my foot in my mouth again I do I go back I think that through so that you know when we're talking about this subject of different social perceptions and unconscious bias and you know the different ways it affects us and cuz I hope that we do it in that spirit that allows for you know not so much safe space all those safe space is very important and I'm a big proponent of safe space for homeland's of homeland's the places to go to just be away from the constant I'm I understand that but I'm also a big proponent of what they call brave spaces you know where we come together in half tough conversations uncomfortable conversation and put it out there and allow one another to make mistakes you know I had one of my students a law student black woman she was defending client in one of our high polls in class and she said well I would consider race and assessing someone's dangerous myself dangerous myself and I'm a black woman that haunted her for the rest of her law school life and even after I'm out there now years later there there are classmates will bring up that somebody says something so in politic right you can't have a conversation if people are going to say that anytime you say something that is viewed as inappropriate because that's how we learn if we if we if we trust one another anyway and I guess that's the that's the real thing do we trust one another man I'm gonna guess stop it at this and then take questions I love the community I've seen here at Fitz I wish I had come here sooner this this thing's like if it's a small enough community where you can develop those that kind of trust I worry about the bigger institutions you really we give the lip service but it's hard to do that on that mass scale but it really feels like you can you can help you can help you out you can have enough trust here to have those really difficult conversations that's my impression anyway but I'll take questions [Applause] you

Channel: Pitzer College

Views: 3,510

Rating: 4.4285712 out of 5

Keywords: Pitzer, Pitzer College, Munroe Center for Social Inquiry

Id: Lch3OzWuRVY

Length: 55min 39sec (3339 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 08 2018