By Chris Satullo
It’s glaringly obvious, but apparently it can’t be pointed out enough.
So let’s do this. Compare and contrast these events:
In the run-up to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the leaders of the Capitol Hill Police received multiple warnings that a large crowd intent on mayhem and bloodshed was headed their way. The alerts came both from their own intel officers and external sources such as the FBI, which shared a social media message that was making the rounds. It read in part: “Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood…being spilled. Get violent…stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die.”
The response from the Capitol police leadership charged with protecting the seat of the national government: Ho-hum. Don’t make a scene. Don’t trot out the heavy anti-riot gear, the flash bangs and so on. Keep some riot shields locked in a trailer to which no one seems to have a key. (All this comes from a new, blistering report by the force’s own inspector general, Michael Bolton.)
Meanwhile, in Windsor, Va.:
A police cruiser signals for Caron Nazario, a Black Latino Army lieutenant who’s in uniform while driving a car he’d just bought, to pull over. It’s an illegal stop; they have no cause. They’ve missed the new-car paper registration plastered to his rear window. Nazario – not unreasonably – doesn’t want this stop to unfold at night on a deserted stretch of road. So he drives a bit to reach a well-lit gas station where he pulls in. Hands up, polite (it’s all on video), Nazario announces himself as active-duty military, willing to cooperate but needing to know why he’s been pulled over. The beefy, belligerent police officer barks menace at Nazario, then leans forward to blast his face repeatedly with pepper spray at close range. Nazario is then dragged out of the car, shoved to the ground and manhandled.
Then, of course, a few days ago in Brooklyn Center, Minn.:
Daunte Wright, a young black man driving with his girlfriend, is pulled over by police, also on a bullshit pretext. He has had some misdemeanor trouble with a gun in his past, which the cops can see on their on-board computer. Wright lives not all that far from where George Floyd died. So he’s agitated and resistant to getting out of his car. And moments later, he’s dead, shot by a cop who claims (and apparently, shockingly, this alleged mistake is not as implausible as you might think) that she thought she was pulling her Taser on Wright, not her gun.
So let’s review:
In D.C., a mob well-seeded with both former military and off-duty cops shows up with bulging veins, zip ties, bear spray, nooses and battering rams – and the leaders of the Capitol Hill Police act as though it’s no biggie. The boys just need to blow off a little steam; it’s OK; we got this.
But in Virginia, a person serving in our nation’s military drives peaceably down the road in his new car and cops go instantly to DefCon 1, using pepper spray and violent force. And in Minnesota, a skinny 20-year-old Black kid goes in a matter of moments from cruising with his girlfriend to dead, because a veteran cop with her blood up makes a fatal rookie mistake.
What’s the difference here? Why, in one case, was dire, blatant threat treated as all in a day’s work, while in the other two cases no or minimal threat got treated like an episode of S.W.A.T.?
Need I say it? Because the Stop the Steal mob is 99.5 percent white. People Like Us.
And Nazario and Wright are Black. The Suspicious Other.
Racism is at the root of the starkly different blue attitudes.
So am I saying that the now-fired heads of Capitol security, the now-fired Windsor cop who wielded the pepper spray and the now-fired Brooklyn Center cop who mistook her gun for a Taser are all racists?
No, I am not. First off, I do not know them and I’ve never been in the type of white-hot moment of perceived threat they mishandled. Second, racist is a blunt-force-trauma weapon of a word, as inadequate and inappropriate to the situation at hand as Lt. Joe Guttierez’s pepper spray and Officer Kim Potter’s service gun.
Racism is a spectrum, and every human being, whether we want to admit it or not, sits somewhere along it. The overt racism of a Proud Boy is easy to spot, easy to decry. For most of us though, the operations of implicit bias, the nuanced ways it affects and distorts our judgment, are complicated. And they are based not on clear moral failing, but on the subtle and (by most) dimly understood ways that all our brains function.
Let me now drag Daniel Kahneman into the conversation. Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who pulled decades of research together into a remarkable tome titled Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman has a metaphor for how our minds work that, for me at least, is far more useful in understanding racism – and a lot of other stuff – than the more familiar categories like the subconscious and unconscious, or the superego and id.
He calls them System 1, which thinks fast and is on all the time, and System 2, which is called upon to mull more complicated problems. They can work simultaneously. Imagine you’re driving to work in the morning. System 2 can be listening to a podcast and pondering work challenges, while System 1 recognizes a traffic light turning red and instructs your foot to hit the break, all reflexively, without interrupting System 2’s flow.
But now let’s say that the light is malfunctioning and flashing yellow. System 1 isn’t sure what to do, so it cries Help! to System 2. Figure this out for me.
Your mind makes millions of small decisions and choices each day – and System 1 handles the bulk of them. If System 2 had to be called on constantly, to reconsider every choice afresh, it would burn out. So, based on your experiences of choices going well or badly, System 2 works with System 1 to equip it with rules of thumb, mental shortcuts, that help it handle even some complex stimuli reflexively, swiftly. Kahneman calls these shortcuts “heuristics”; collectively, they add up to what we call instincts. The mind, Kahneman says, is kind of a machine for creating these shortcuts to turn complicated problems into simple ones.
And much of the time, the heuristics work. Other times, though, they lead us astray, miring us in the logical fallacies the mind is prone to, such as confirmation bias (noting, remembering and overvaluing the facts that back up what we already believe) and the availability fallacy (e.g. parents freaking out over the one stranger abduction that’s covered sensationally on CNN, but ignoring the much greater, everyday risk of their kids riding bikes without a helmet).
Implicit racial bias is a classic, toxic example of heuristics gone bad. One of System 1’s core jobs, rooted deep in our evolution, is to make quick guesses sorting friend from foe, threat from opportunity. Back on the savannah or in the rainforest, I suppose, coloration was one of the traits that helped our ancestors do that. So it’s wired into System 1 to notice color. It’s up to System 2 to modify that instinct, using experience and reason to curb System 1’s bent for making erroneous snap judgments of threat based on color.
Remember, though, System 2 can be lazy. It likes to make hard choices simple through the use of mental shortcuts. And System 1 readily adopts shortcuts that mirror what it already reflexively wants to do. When a tense situation demands a swift threat analysis, System 1, flooding with adrenalin, will grab the shortcut that’s closest to hand – which is often a bias, based on color, to see one person or group as inherently more threatening than others. The white guys who look like your softball teammates or the folks in the next pew on Sunday are deemed somehow less threatening than the skinny Black kid or the Black military man in camouflage.
You don’t have to be an avowed racist with a white supremacy agenda for this to happen. You could be someone who, when System 2 is fully in charge of your brain, would sincerely denounce racist thinking.
Say you’re someone who’s been trained to see threat everywhere, to act decisively in its presence – but who has never been trained to recognize, mistrust and rewrite the mental shortcuts you use when navigating a multiracial society. So when a “suspect” doesn’t behave with perfect, obedient docility, when your pulse is racing and your adrenalin is high, your System 1 screams “Pepper spray!” or “Taser!” and you react in ways you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting.
And ordinary people end up getting traumatized. Or dying.
In the rooms where our police get trained, we need less Dirty Harry, more Daniel Kahneman.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia