The Link Between Gun Violence, Race and Politics in America Versus US Human Rights Obligations
Art on Issues
This long read is densely packed with facts regarding gun violence, and it should make you think about what we need to do as a culture to stop this trend - every segment of our society has some blame here, not just the wingnuts who persistently fight to keep things this way. Think about Hollywood, think about the music industry, think about how we divvy up funds for education, think about banking, think about our cultural norms and the evil undertow that always tries to steer things back to a highly biased norm.
A number of references are provided regarding Implicit Bias that is also known as Hidden Bias or Unconscious Bias (ref) (ref) (ref). Drawing from these references, Implicit Bias arose conceptually as a way to explain why discrimination persists even though polling and other research shows that people oppose it. Over 2 million individuals have taken the Implicit Association Test that requires participants to push buttons identifying a face with a judgement like ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Almost 88 percent of white participants react to a black face as ‘bad’ and a white face as ‘good’ thus establishing this as a subconscious preference for whites. Interestingly, 42% of blacks do as well.
In 1999 a shooting occurred in New York City where police officers shot and killed an unarmed 23-year-old West-African immigrant named Amadou Diallo when Diallo reached into his pocket to pull out a wallet. The incident motivated Joshua Correll, then a graduate student in psychology, to conduct research examining the influence of race on shootings. What Correll found time and again was that participants in his research (reacting to video game simulations) wrongly shot unarmed Black “targets”. And his findings held even when his research subjects were black. This phenomenon has been called “shooter bias” (ref). Correll explained that the shooter bias observed in his studies exists because of how individuals are conditioned rather than what they might personally believe or want to believe, coming rather from “long standing associations drilled into our heads every time we go to the movies or pick up a newspaper or hear a joke.” As Correll’s studies have shown, and as has been pointed out by Maya Wiley, the decision to shoot in cases where implicit bias exists is governed by defense mechanisms that trigger with split second speed.
Concerns expressed by the UN committee overseeing US human rights obligations under ICCPR regarding the proliferation of stand-your-ground’ laws are supported by a recent article, Racial bias and ‘stand your ground laws: what the data show. The article raises questions about how notions of self-defense are evolving and whether, under such laws, race-based fears are more likely to influence juries. Results from a recent study, cited in that article, show: “In states with stand-your-ground laws, the shooting of a black person by a white person is found justifiable 17 percent of the time, while the shooting of a white person by a black person is deemed justifiable just over 1 percent of the time… . In states without stand-your-ground laws, white-on-black shootings are found justified just over 9 percent of the time. Such findings ‘show that it’s just harder for black defendants to assert stand-your-ground defense if the victim is white, and easier for whites to raise a stand-your-ground defense if the victims are black,’ according to Darren Hutchinson, a law professor and civil rights law expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville. ‘The bottom line is that it’s really easy for juries to accept that whites had to defend themselves against persons of color’.”