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Do Police Intentions Matter?

photograph of armed police officer

Imagine if it became widely-reported that police officers had been intentionally killing Black Americans for the expressed reason that they are Black. Public outrage would be essentially universal. But, while it is true that Black Americans are disproportionately the victims of police use of force, including lethal force, it seems unlikely that these rights violations are part of a conscious, intentional scheme on the part of those in power to oppress or terrorize Black citizens. At any rate, the official statements from law enforcement regarding these incidents invariably deny discriminatory motivations on the part of officers. Why, then, are we seeing calls to defund the police?

The slogan “Defund the Police” has been clarified by Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza on NBC’s Meet the Press: “When we talk about defunding the police, what we’re saying is, ‘Invest in the resources that our communities need.’” The underlying problem runs deep: it is rooted in an unrelenting devaluation of communities of color. Rights violations by police are part of a larger picture of racial inequality that includes economic, health, and educational disadvantages.

The sources of this inequality are mostly implicit and institutional: a product of the unconscious biases of individuals, including police officers, and prejudicial treatment “baked into” our institutions, like the justice system. That is, social inequality seems to be systemic and not an intentional program of overtly racist policies. In particular, most of us feel strongly that the all-to-frequent killing of unarmed Black citizens, though repellent, has been unintentional.

But does this distinction matter? A plausible argument could be made that the chronic, unintentional killing of unarmed Black men and women by police is morally on a par with the intentional killing of these citizens. Let me explain.

Let’s begin with the reasonable assumption that implicit racial bias, specifically an implicit devaluation of Black lives, impacts decisions made by all members of our society, including police officers. What is devaluation? Attitudes toward enemy lives in war throws some light on the concept: each side invariably comes to view enemy lives as less valuable than their own. Even unintended enemy civilian casualties, euphemistically termed “collateral damage,” become tolerable if the military objective is important enough. On the battlefield, tactical decisions must conform to a “tolerable” relation between the value of an objective and the anticipated extent of collateral damage. This relation is called “proportionality.”

By contrast, policing is intended to be a preventative exercise of authority in the interest of keeping the peace and protecting the rights of citizens, including suspected criminals. Still, police do violate rights on occasion, and police officials operate with their own concept of proportionality: use of force must be proportional to the threat or resistance the officer anticipates.

Ironically, rights violations usually occur in the name of the protection of rights; when, for example, an officer uses excessive force to subdue a thief. Often, these violations are regarded as regrettable, but unavoidable; they are justified as the price we pay for law and order. But, in reality, these violations frequently stem from implicit racial biases. What’s more, the policy of “qualified immunity” offers legal protections for police officers and this disproportionately deprives Black victims of justice in such cases. This combination of factors has led some to argue that police authority amounts to a form of State-sponsored violence. These rights violations resemble wartime collateral damage: they are unintended consequences deemed proportional to legitimate efforts to protect citizen’s rights.

Now consider the following question posed by philosopher Igor Primoratz regarding wartime collateral damage: is the foreseeable killing of civilians as a side-effect of a military operation any morally better than the intentional killing of civilians. Specifically he asks, “suppose you were bound to be killed, but could choose between being killed with intent and being killed without intent, but as a side-effect of the killer’s pursuit of his end. Would you have any reason for preferring the latter fate to the former?”

Imagine two police officers, each of whom has killed a Black suspect under identical circumstances. When asked whether the suspect’s race was relevant to the use of force, the first officer says, “No, and I regret that deadly force was proportional to the threat I encountered.” The second officer says, “Yes, race was a factor. Cultural stereotypes predispose me to view Black men as likely threats, and institutional practices in the justice system keep the stakes for the use of lethal force relatively low. Thus, I regret my use of deadly force that I considered proportional to my perception of the threat in the absence of serious legal consequences.”

The second officer’s response would be surprising, but honest. Depictions of Black men in particular as violent “superpredators” in the media, in movies, and by politicians, are ample. Furthermore, the doctrine of qualified immunity, which bars people from recovering damages when police violate their rights, offers protection to officers whose actions implicitly manifest bias.

In the absence of damning outside testimony, the first officer will be held blameless. The second officer will be said to have acted on conscious biases and his honesty puts him at risk of discipline or discharge. Although the disciplinary actions each officer faces will differ, the same result was obtained, under identical circumstances. The only difference is that the second officer made the implicit explicit, and the first officer simply denied that his own implicit bias was a factor in his decision.

Where, then, does the moral difference lie between, on one hand, the foreseeable violation of the rights of Black lives in a society that systemically devalues those lives, and, on the other hand, the intentional violation of the rights of Black lives? If the well-documented effect of racial bias in law enforcement leads us to foresee the same pattern of disproportionate rights-violations in the future, and we do nothing about it, our acceptance of those violations is no more morally justified than the acceptance of intentional right-violations.

That is, if we can’t say why the intentional violations of Black rights is morally worse than giving police a monopoly on sanctioned violence under social conditions that harbor implicit racial biases, then sanctioning police violence looks morally unjustifiable in principle. That is enough to validate the call to divert funding from police departments into better economic, health, and educational resources for communities of color.

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The “Wall of Moms” and Manipulating Implicit Bias

photograph of "Wall of Moms" protesting in Portland

Since Officer Chauvin murdered George Floyd, cities across the US and the world have protested the ongoing murder of Black men and women in public and without consequence by the police, and even by neighbors. Protesters have been met with more violence and escalation, by responding police officers, followed by national reserve units, and most recently the deployment of unmarked federal agents to multiple cities.

In the media, the characterization of these protests has been shifting since their onset. Reports of rioting, property damage, and looting contrasted with messages of the priority of the significance of human lives taken by white supremacist violence and the damage to the Black community over time. While some news stories highlighted the rowdiness of protests after dark, in response to police driving vehicles into crowds, tear-gassing groups, and shooting rubber bullets, others focused on the peaceful gatherings with speeches, songs, and non-escalating marches.

On social media, advice regarding how to stay safe in the midst of these large gatherings during COVID and in the face of military escalation proliferated. From wearing masks, to how to contact a lawyer, to what to do if teargassed, messages about how to stand up for Black Lives Matter were readily available. A common thread among these topics of advice was what to do if you are white and out supporting BLM.

The advice for white protesters frequently included the importance of reminding oneself that the protests center on experiences that are not endemic to the white population, but rather the non-white. This means that while numbers speak to support and are important, it is in the supportive rather than directive role that white protesters may be most strong. Further, as a member of the protest that is less susceptible to violence and physical threat, individuals can help others that are more at risk. Videos began to show white protesters putting their bodies between Black speakers, demonstrators, or groups of protesters and police officers in riot gear.

The white ally had a clear space in the media: protector of protesters.

On July 21st, a group of white women joined arms and formed a wall between police in riot gear and protesters in Portland on a late Tuesday night. Calling themselves a “Wall of Moms,” they shouted at the most recent show of militarized force by the police using phrases such as, “You wouldn’t shoot your mother!” They were teargassed and absolutely shocked at such treatment by “their” police.

The white individuals between militarized police and Black protesters, including the Wall of Moms, are using the biases of the police in order to lessen the likelihood that violence will break out, counting on their disinclination to harm white bodies compared to Black bodies. The effectiveness of this strategy relies on the notion that the police behave differently when faced with white members of society than non-white members, and this has been shown over and over again, both in protests and in the data on police brutality.

When faced with armed and yelling white people outside state capitals fighting public health policies, police are quite capable of de-escalation. However, people marching, unarmed, to bring awareness to, and protesting, such pernicious racial injustice that have led to systemic murder prompts such escalation as to draw extreme concern from the UN Human Rights Council. In fact, in many cases BLM protesters had to de-escalate police, rather than the other way around.

The Wall of Moms incorporates a variety of police and societal biases, which they explicitly invoked in their explanations of their strategies. As with all cases of the sort of white support mentioned above, using the privilege of one’s skin to attempt to change police’s behavior is manipulating the perceived biases of the police. The Wall of Moms evokes race, class, and gender in order to be effective.

The middle class white women who conform to the role of “mother” are attempting to draw a contrast between themselves and the protesters behind them. Many used rhetoric involving “protecting the children,” labeling the protesters in Portland as youths in need of mothering. Further, the call to “bring out the moms” itself reflects racial bias, including a de-feminization of Black women and reduction of Black individuals who inhabit the same roles as white people. It  neglects the fact that many Black mothers have played active roles in past BLM movements and been a part of the 2020 protests from the beginning.

The Wall of Moms went a step further than the other white bodies placed between protesters doing the protesting and the violent police. They created their own message, and, in the end, their own 501c3. They co-opted the idea that moms were a new and necessary part of the protests. They reinforced gender norms and the role of “Mother.” A “Wall of Dads” joined them armed with leaf blowers. The sense of white middle-class “normalcy” to play with the police’s preconceptions of people not to harm went beyond working with the underlying biases that make up the potential issues with de-escalation and underscored the roles of race and gender as real divides in our society.

In the case of the Wall of Moms, the privileges that put them in the position to potentially de-escalate the police’s racist violence also manifests the privileges regarding media coverage. The way that the Wall of Moms embraces the traditional picture of what it means to be a “normal” woman in our society plays on gendered biases involved in the hierarchies of privilege, and this in part is what leads to the ease with which they can take over the narrative of the protests in the media. White women occupy roles that call out for the need to be protected, and yet they were harmed here. This narrative takes over the story and eclipses the 125 cases of police violence against protesters before the Wall of Moms ever appeared on the scene.

The next day and into the week, media coverage of their courage, and outrage at their treatment, took over. In a piece by The Washington Post, the courage of the Wall of Moms was lauded in heroic terms:

“In front of the federal courthouse, federal agents in tactical gear used batons to push back the moms in bike helmets. Dozens were tear-gassed. Some were hit with less-lethal bullets fired into the crowd.

Still, they stayed.”

CNN reported the reaction of one participant, in disbelief that the Wall of Moms received the treatment that had been reported for weeks, this time framed in a decidedly positive light:

“The Feds came out of the building, they walked slowly, assembled themselves and started shooting [teargas] I couldn’t believe it was happening. Traumatic doesn’t even begin to describe it… Getting shot and gassed and vomiting all over myself and not being able to see, something clicked in my brain and I was like how could we collectively as mothers let our kids do this? I got home and showered and I told my husband we were going out the next night.”

A “Today” article reporting on events opened with, “The group, which includes hundreds of mothers, has said the protests are peaceful, but the police have been violent.” Such reports highlight the testimony of a group of white women after weeks of similar reporting by Black protesters that had not been compelling enough to quell dismissal or criticism of the protests.

The move from supportive role to main-story is not a novel one for white allies, especially for white women.

If we understand these behaviors in terms of implicit biases, they are relatively difficult to fit into our theoretical frameworks of moral evaluation. The biases include:

  • The police’s racist biases,
  • the “white ally” or savior’s explicit manipulation of the racist biases,
  • the Wall of Moms bringing in the implicit biases of motherhood and traditional gender roles that intersect with the racist stereotypes that don’t fit these roles, and
  • the media/audience biases that allow the story to be one not of the strategic manipulation of biases but rather reifying the roles the Wall of Moms invoke

These implicit biases pose issues for moral responsibility. When individuals endorse their behaviors and the attitudes that result in their behaviors, it is easier to hold them fully accountable for their behaviors and attitudes.

In the case where I think “Rich people are smart” and agree with the view that our society is set up in the structure of a meritocracy, it may be a simple matter to hold me responsible for the behavior that results from this perspective. The associations in our society that cast the behaviors of wealthier people in a more positive light may very well be influencing my belief, but my explicit endorsement plays a role in how we assess my behavior. If, for instance, I negatively judge and avoid individuals that have features I associate with less affluent groups, the fact that I have a belief system I stand behind that informs this behavior suggests that I am knowingly complicit. The harm I may cause to individuals is attributable to me and my beliefs, and therefore morally evaluating my behavior is relatively straightforward.

In contrast, say that while I have internalized the notion that we live in a meritocracy, and therefore rich people have in some way deserved their place in our economic and social system, I don’t actively or consciously endorse the idea that they are, in fact, smarter than those in other economic strata. These notions may come out in my behaviors – judging and avoiding personality characteristics or features associated with the less affluent, voting for policies that punish the poor or support the rich, etc. In this case, I may cause harm, but due to beliefs and attitudes that I do not explicitly endorse. They are attributable to me in a less clear or direct way: they are part of my motivational set, but wouldn’t show up in my explicit deliberation, narrative, or defenses for my behavior. This makes the behavior (and harm) resulting from the implicit biases more difficult to evaluate, and more difficult to alter in the long run.

In ethics, harm-based views have an easier time dealing with the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes, because the important part of our behavior is the result: if you cause harm, that is the focus, and what we should hold you accountable for. Views that focus on intent, or the quality of the will behind the actions, have a more difficult time distinguishing what moral evaluation we should assign behaviors that result from implicit attitudes.

In the case of the police’s racist biases, this leads to systemic murder and brutalization of non-white, especially Black members of our communities. It leads to dramatic differences in responses to groups of people protesting, and a culture of terror inflicted in non-white spaces.

For the “white ally” these biases can be manipulated to produce positive results — avoiding harm and supporting movements by making space for messages and impact to continue forward without the force of the police’s biases to run free. However, the performance can also erode these effects and do harm by perpetuating the “white savior” narrative.

The Wall of Moms echoes this duality. While they might play a supportive role – making space for safe and impactful movements – they might also reinforce the stereotypes and biases they are attempting to play on.

The media, unfortunately, is a reflection and amplification of the societal biases and stereotypes that make it less likely for white people to be subject to violence and extreme violence. Protests for racial justice are more likely to be subject to suspicion and violence than protests in support of white interests. The media picks up on the interests of its average viewer – as the Wall of Moms members put it, “normal,” in both age, class, skin tone, and gender.

A harm-based view can account for both these drawbacks and advantages of the behaviors of white participants in the BLM protests. It can recognize that these behaviors are the topic of so many discussions and come up in such problematic ways. It can direct us in how to refocus and what to refocus on.

When the interaction of so many implicit biases is necessary to make sense of these tactics, evaluating the behavior morally at individual levels defies our models of moral evaluation. The individuals and groups involved in these behaviors would likely deny or fail to endorse the underlying attitudes and bases for their behaviors. The police would deny their behaviors are rooted in a contrasting value of white and non-white lives, and the Wall of Moms likely would deny their reification of the interaction between race and gender roles, and fail to acknowledge their role in taking over the message with their privilege.

In important ways, the biases of both the police and the white allies are reflecting the biases of societal privilege back to each other and to the society. The behavior of the Wall of Moms and the other white actors discussed here wouldn’t make sense as tactics without the racism inherent in our society – either implicitly or explicitly present in police officers or systems of policing put in place by our communities. This makes bias and the systems of privilege that cultivate it the responsibility of the community, and especially those with the privilege, to dismantle.

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Implicit Bias and the Efficacy of Training

colored image of a human brain

On September 12th, California’s state legislature passed a series of measures designed to reduce unconscious biases among medical practitioners and other public servants; under the new laws, doctors, nurses, lawyers and court workers will be expected to undergo implicit bias training as a regular continuing education requirement. A number of advocacy groups argue that it is these unconscious biases that strongly contribute to wage gaps, differential education outcomes, criminal justice proceedings, and healthcare results – such as the fact that pregnant black women are three to four times more likely to die from complications during labor and delivery than are pregnant white women. Bias training is supposed to be a tool for chipping away at the generations of crystallized racism encasing our society.

The only problem is that implicit bias training probably doesn’t work – at least not in the way that people want it to. 

At this point, the data seem clear about two things: 

    1. Unconscious biases are pervasive elements of how we perceive our social environments, and
    2. Unconscious biases are exceedingly difficult to permanently change.

Since Saul Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first drew attention to the phenomenon of cognitive biases in the early 1970s, researchers have explored the varieties of mental shortcuts on which we daily rely; tricks like ‘confirmation bias,’ ‘the halo effect,’ ‘the availability heuristic,’ ‘anchoring’ and more have been explored by everything from psychologists and philosophers trying to understand the mind to marketers trying to convince customers to purchase products. 

One of the more surprising things about implicit biases is how they can sometimes conflict with your explicit beliefs or attitudes. You might, for example, explicitly believe that racism or misogyny is wrong while nevertheless harboring an implicit bias against minority groups or genders that could lead you to naturally react in harmful ways (either behaviorally or even just by jumping to an unfounded conclusion).  You can explore this sort of thing yourself: implicit association tests (IATs) purport to be able to peel back your natural assumptions to reveal some of the underlying mental shortcuts that operate behind the scenes of your normal thought processes. In general, implicit bias training aims to highlight these cognitive biases by making the implicit processes explicit, with the hope that this will allow people to make conscious choices they actually endorse thereafter.

However, a study published this month in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicates that the demonstrable effect of a variety of implicit bias training modules was, at best, a short-term affair that did not contribute to lasting changes in either explicit measures or behavior. By analyzing evidence from nearly 500 separate studies, researchers discovered that, although implicit bias training seminars, workshops, classes, or other short-form lessons could provoke short-term shifts in mood or emotions, there was next-to-no evidence that these shifts would ultimately translate into different patterns of actual behavior. 

This fits with a general pattern of casting doubt on the efficacy of intensive bias training; in fact, by focusing on implicit problems (rather than the manifest explicit issues), some have argued that implicit training is simply distracting from the systemic issues underlying the real problem – some evidence even suggests that mandatory training (as opposed to voluntary exercises) might even make said biases stronger. Overall, this is likely intuitive: the notion that biased attitudes built up over decades of a person’s life could somehow simply be broken apart by a single day’s training is, at best, naive. 

If there is one consistent beneficiary of implicit bias training, it’s the companies mandating them. Consider what happened after a video of two black customers being racially profiled at a Starbucks in Philadelphia went viral: the coffee company closed its stores nationwide for several hours so that its workforce could undergo bias training. By appearing decisive, Starbucks was able to address (and generally sidestep) an intensely damaging PR incident at the cost of a few hours of profit. The fact that the bias training was not likely to effectively change the racist environment that precipitated the video was beside the point. As Brian Nosek, one of the psychologists who helped develop the IAT, put it, “I have been studying this since 1996, and I still have implicit bias.” Nonetheless, Starbucks apologized and the news cycle moved on.

So, it remains to be seen what the future holds for the state of California. Certainly, the move towards action regarding the problems of implicit bias is a step in the right direction. However, that sort of training by itself, without a systemic addressals of the institutional problems that promote oppressive environments (intentionally or otherwise), will be ultimately powerless.

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Who is Welcome at Starbucks?

Image of the Starbucks logo

Most Starbucks customers have spent a good number of non-paying hours in Starbucks stores—waiting for a friend, writing a paper or grading one, staying warm, or just chilling. And most regular customers will admit to an occasional purchase-free visit to the store just for the purpose of using the bathroom. But when two black men in Philadelphia went to a store in Rittenhouse Square for a business meeting and asked for the bathroom key, having ordered nothing first, it was only two minutes before an employee called 911. The police showed up minutes later, handcuffed the two and put them in a squad car. Only after nine hours at police headquarters, with Starbucks declining to press trespassing charges, were they released.

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Does Implicit Bias Explain Gender Discrimination?

Photo of men's and women's bathroom stall signs

Implicit bias is a concept that’s been enormously useful to feminists grappling with the way progress for women has stalled in some areas. Women are still under 5 percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. They still make considerably less per hour than men for doing the same work. Women are still just 20 percent of PhD engineers and around the same percentage of philosophers. They still haven’t made it into the pantheon of US presidents, and only 23 out of the current members of the US Senate are women.

It’s all difficult to explain, especially if you don’t believe that women as a group have distinctive interests or aptitudes. But then, what’s going on? Outright sexism and misogyny aren’t exactly rare in the US, but neither are they common. Thus, if you suspect bias is at the root of the underrepresentation problem, implicit bias is a welcome concept.

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A Question of Responsibility for Biased 911 Callers

The caller said the student had a gun. Placed on the night of May 1 to Colgate University’s campus safety department, the call provoked a full-scale lockdown of the upstate New York college. For four hours, students waited in their dorms as police combed the campus for the shooter. Soon, though, it became clear that the caller had been wrong. There was no active shooter. Instead, the caller had seen a black student walking into an academic building holding a glue gun.

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The Implicit Bias of Zero Tolerance Policies

The promise of free and compulsory public education in the United States is the basis for an equal and educated citizenry and the foundation of our democracy. According to most, equal access to education levels the playing field and is the ultimate provider of social mobility and economic opportunity; therefore, we have the duty to inspect what threatens this access.

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What Does It Mean To Be Implicitly Biased?

In 1998, a team of researchers founded Project Implicit for the purpose of identifying, measuring, and correcting implicit (i.e. subconscious) biases in the general public. Project Implicit is organized around the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a psychometric evaluation used to probe the depth and nature of bias in individuals. By showing test takers various pairings of words and concepts (“white,” “black,” “pleasant,” “unpleasant”), the IAT can determine which associations takers make more readily. Consistent lags in pairing a category, like “black,” with positive concepts, like “pleasant,” indicate that the test-taker is biased against that category of people.

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Who is Getting a Fair Trial? A Problem with Ensuring the Impartiality of Juries

When you are accused of a crime, likely of chief concern will be that your jury will treat you fairly. Once the jury is presented with the facts and are briefed on how to understand the law, they go off to deliberate. How the jury deliberates from there is up to them, and you trust that they follow the judge’s instructions and don’t hold any biases they may have against you.

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So I am a racist. What do I do now?

This post originally appeared on October 27, 2015.

Like most human beings, I grew up imbibing racist stereotypes. Since I am Italian, those stereotypes were to some extent different from the kind of stereotypes I would have acquired had I grown up in the United States. For instance, I thought all people “of color” were exotic and more beautiful than “Whites”. This positive, and yet still damaging, stereotype included Black women and men, and Asian men, who in the American dating market are known to be greatly disadvantaged.

My personal attitude was to some extent reflective of Italian culture. The fascination with women of color, for instance, is fairly widespread among Italian men, as you would expect given Italy’s colonial past and its relatively racially homogenous present.

When I started visiting the US academically more ten years ago, I grew accustomed to a much more sophisticated discussion about race, and went through an awkward and often painful process of realization of how implicitly racist I was. I learned that asking “Where are you really from?” to a Seattle native of Korean descent was racist, or at the very least racially insensitive. I realized the tricky undertones of many expressions that I deemed simply descriptive, such as “Black music”. And I found out, much to my surprise, that even my aesthetic appreciation for non-Caucasian people was highly suspicious.

I also discovered that Black women are supposed to be bossy, angry, and dependent on welfare, and that Black men are supposed to be criminals and absent fathers; that East-Asian men are supposed to be unattractive and effeminate, and all Asian women submissive; that Asians in general are good at science… Some of these stereotypes were somewhat in line with my own culture’s, if not necessarily my own, but some were a complete surprise, and that surprise, that sense of “I would never think that” gave me an unwarranted sense of reassurance. When taking the IAT, I even compared positively to White Americans with regard to implicit bias toward Native Americans. So I thought: now that I know all this stuff about race, and given that I am a committed anti-racist, I’ll get rid of all the bad stuff, and I’ll stop being racist!

But, in fact, it didn’t go quite like that… When walking in segregated New Haven, seeing hooded Black men walking behind me made me nervous. I was very aware and ashamed of my own nervousness, but I was nervous nonetheless. Later on, when living in the United Kingdom, I found myself mistaking Black men for store employees. These are only two of the most unnerving instances of my implicit racism surfacing to my uncomfortable consciousness.

And it doesn’t even stop at race: I have become aware of many other forms of discrimination, over the years, and that has greatly increased my capacity at catching myself being implicitly homophobic or transphobic, fattist, ableist, and so forth. But, in fact, it seems to have only increased my awareness, not my ability to be less biased.

Philosopher Robin Zheng, whose research is on moral responsibility and implicit bias, has reassured me that I am not alone. Empirical research confirms that fighting implicit bias require a lot more than just informing people about the reality of discrimination.

This research wouldn’t be surprising to those familiar with more general work on implicit reasoning. For those who are not, I find useful an ancient metaphor from the Buddhist tradition popularized by Jonathan Haidt in his acclaimed pop-psychology book The Happiness Hypothesis. The metaphor describes the human mind as composed by an elephant and its rider. According to Haidt, the elephant roughly corresponds to what has been called System I in dual-processing accounts of reasoning: a system that is old in evolutionary terms, and shared with other animals. This system is comprised of a set of autonomous subsystems that include both innate input modules and domain-specific knowledge acquired by a domain-general learning mechanism. System I is fast, automatic and operates under the level of consciousness. The rider roughly corresponds to System II: a system that is evolutionarily recent and distinctively human. System II permits abstract reasoning and hypothetical thinking, and is slower, controlled and conscious. “The rider evolved to serve the elephant,” says Haidt, and while it may sometimes override it, trick it into obedience, “it cannot order the elephant around against its will” (The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 17).

This tension between the rider and the elephant has many different manifestations, but one that is particularly relevant to the discussion of the implicit biases is the case of mental intrusions. If we are explicitly asked to not think about a white bear, all we can think of is, you guessed it, a white bear. This ironic process of mental control is the consequence of automatic and controlled processes firing at each other: the request of not thinking a certain thought activates System II, which attempts to suppress the thought. System I activates automatic monitoring of one’s progress, which in this case means continuously checking whether one is not thinking about a white bear. That move turns out to be obviously counterproductive, since it reintroduces the thought that one is supposed to ban. But “because controlled processes tire quickly, eventually the inexhaustible automatic processes run unopposed, conjuring up herds of white bears” (The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 20). Dan Wegner, who first studied ironic process in a lab setting, has shown that it affects also people who try to repress unendorsed stereotypes.

While there is interesting research addressing more productive and effective ways of fighting implicit bias and stereotyping, I want to conclude with a remark about the implications of this empirical literature for microaggressions, a topic that has gained much attention recently.

I largely disagree with Haidt’s criticisms of trigger and content warnings in academic settings, for reasons well-articulated by Regina Rini and Kate Manne. But I do share his attention to underlying psychological mechanisms, and I worry that they are sometimes neglected in the political commentary.

Committed anti-racists are unlikely to engage in overtly prejudiced behavior. However, they may still find themselves inadvertently engaging in microaggressions such as those I described at the beginning of the post: inappropriate jokes or questions, or bona fide mistakes stemming from deeply-ingrained stereotypes. The elephant acts against the rider’s wishes, or even awareness: when something that has been internalized as a threat (such as a hooded Black man) appears in view, the elephant doesn’t hesitate, and kicks the rider in the shins, making it jump. The rider will take one or two seconds to realize that there is in fact no threat, and that will be too late: the jump was visible, the offense taken, the harm done. Not fully understanding how powerful these unconscious mechanisms are affects not only our moral assessment of the perpetrators (which can be also self-assessment). It also produces condemnatory reactions that, while appropriate in theory, are not necessarily fertile in practice, such as a certain relatively widespread paralyzing White guilt of well-intentioned liberals, who go around admitting their White privilege without knowing exactly what to do about it. Realizing that some of the mechanisms motivating our behavior are outside of our direct control allows us to focus on indirect ways to modify our behavior, and to shift from a sterile admission of White privilege to a more proactive commitment to changing the institutional injustice that gives rise to it. You can’t order the elephant at will, but you can change the environment it is raised in.