Editor’s note: This commentary is by Gerry Silverstein, of South Burlington, who has interests in individual, community, and global health.
[I]n 1970, a musical group known as the Moody Blues released an album entitled “A Question of Balance.” The title could apply to current events in America.
On April 14 two individuals of color were asked by the store manager to leave a Starbucks in Philadelphia because they had not ordered anything. The request by the manager was compatible with official store policy. The individuals refused to leave and police were called. Police repeated three times the request that the two individuals leave.
The request was declined and the individuals were arrested because, as they had not ordered anything and had been asked to leave, they were now trespassing. The incident quickly when viral and was declared evidence of omnipresent racism in America. An avalanche of editorials appeared in newspapers from coast to coast. The two individuals later received an apology and a “settlement” from Starbucks.
Starbucks then closed 8,000 of its stores so that employees could undergo unconscious bias training. Unconscious bias, also referred to as implicit bias, details that individuals are unaware of biases they hold because, apparently, the human brain, an organ of incredibility complexity and almost incomprehensible abilities, is incapable of understanding what it believes.
The theory is reportedly based upon and demonstrated in a lab test known as the implicit association test (IAT). The test-retest reliability (repeatability) of the Race IAT is 0.42-0.44, which falls well below the psychometric minimum standard of 0.7-0.8. In essence test results vary significantly from day to day with the same individual, making objective extrapolations impossible.
Indeed, four separate meta-analyses of 46-167 individual studies found that IAT scores are poor predictors of actual behavior (“lack of validity”). Unfortunately, since so many respected individuals and institutions frequently refer to implicit bias to justify accusations of near-universal racism, it has become accepted as true. This unfortunate reality follows the tragic paradigm that if you tell a lie 100 times, it becomes the truth for many individuals.
On May 29, a television celebrity, Roseanne Barr, suggested that a former member of the Obama administration who is a person of color was the offspring of an ape. Numerous editorials appeared in newspapers across the country condemning the tweet and detailing the ongoing and virulent evil of racism in America. Was the tweet stupid? Certainly. Racist? Probably. Did the comment warrant the pyroclastic flow of condemnation that followed? That is far less clear.
Let’s state the obvious: Americans say stupid and mean-spirited things all the time. Was Ms. Barr’s comment more malevolent than Hillary Clinton referring to half of Donald Trump’s supporters as being a “basket of deplorables,” or Barack Obama’s description of working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”?
More recently there was Robert De Niro’s F-bomb recommendation to President Donald Trump at a Hollywood awards ceremony (the same De Niro who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by President Obama) and “comedian” Samantha Bee’s commentary on Ivanka Trump that included what many consider a derogatory term for a part of female anatomy involved in reproduction.
Americans voicing stupid and derogatory commentary is as much a part of America as apple pie and baseball. The intelligent and informed response is to declare any stupid and/or derogatory statement as stupid and/or derogatory and make clear that such statements do not reflect the values and beliefs of intelligent and respectful individuals.
On May 21, another event involving relations between people of color and Caucasians in America occurred, but received virtually no national attention. On that day, a resident in a Baltimore County neighborhood called 911 to report three African-American males exiting a home in the area and returning to a car where a fourth African-American male was in the driver’s seat.
Police officer Amy Caprio, 29, Caucasian, and a four-year veteran of the police force, was sent to the scene. Upon arrival, Officer Caprio located the car and ordered the occupants multiple times to get out of the car.
The driver of the car, only 16 years old, is said to have partially opened his door, but then shut it and stepped on the gas pedal running over Officer Caprio. She was pronounced deceased at a regional hospital, with cause of death being blunt force trauma to the torso and head.
Over a period of 60 days in America two individuals of color were removed from a Starbucks because they had not placed an order, a derogatory tweet about a person of color was made by a white TV celebrity, and the life of a white female police was lost while responding to a criminal act.
The first two events led to an unrelenting storm of editorials decrying the evil of racism in America. The third event, involving the death of a young white female police officer whose job was to protect and to serve, was ignored by virtually all major news organizations that had spoken vociferously against the injustice of a tweet and a trespassing event.
Racism does exist in American and it will continue to be a challenging problem to remediate, but it is certainly not the only corrosive reality that is eroding the moral foundation of this nation.
