Negative images can lead to bias, self-hatred for blacks

By Clarence Page

Saturday, Oct. 15, 2016 | 2 a.m.

In case you missed the vice-presidential debate — and who didn’t? — the most memorable moment in my view came when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence sounded shocked, shocked, at the very idea that a black police officer could be biased against black people.

I’ve got news for you, governor. A lot of black people don’t like black people all that much.

I know. I’m one of them.

I don’t dislike all black people. Most of us are fine, once you get to know us.

When people tell me they are surprised to hear that I don’t like black people, I remind them of how little black people were exposed until recent decades to positive images of themselves in media and elsewhere.

I think my condition began at age 4. My parents broke the news that I could not go to the amusement park near our southern Ohio home because it did not admit “colored people.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of my re-education in being a part of an underprivileged class of Americans. Almost everywhere I looked, I saw images of white people achieving things and black people singing, dancing or getting arrested.

The world has changed a lot since then, thanks largely to the hard-won victories of the civil rights revolution. But black self-hatred is not dead, even in this era of a half-black president; it has merely diversified.

That’s why I was disappointed to hear Pence, Republican Donald Trump’s running mate, take offense to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s suggestion during her first debate with Trump that everyone has “implicit bias,” including black police officers.

The “bad-mouthing” of police by people who “use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism,” Pence said in his debate with Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, “really has got to stop.”

Pence cited the recent fatal shooting in Charlotte, N.C., of a black man, Keith Lamont Scott, that involved a black Charlotte police officer, Brentley Vinson, and touched off several days of riots.

Pence expressed dismay that “Hillary Clinton actually referred to that moment as an example of implicit bias in the police force,” as if a black officer could not be biased against black people. I am not prejudging Vinson’s guilt or innocence when I say that black officers not only can be but in some communities actually have long histories of bias against black people.

A 2014 ProPublica analysis of deadly force killings, for example, found young black men were 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police. Black officers account for a little more than 10 percent of fatal police shootings, the investigative journalism organization found, but of those they killed, 78 percent were black.

How many of those victims had it coming? That’s hard to say, given that blacks made up 77 percent of the cases in which the circumstances were listed as “undetermined.”

Project Implicit, a nonprofit research group, found that most white respondents tended to associate blackness with criminality. Responses from blacks were more evenly mixed, “approximately even numbers of black respondents showing a pro-white bias as show a pro-black bias.”

Well, what can we expect, considering how much black Americans have been exposed to negative images and perceptions of black life in media and elsewhere?

That’s why, answering as debate question, Clinton responded to moderator Lester Holt, “Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.”

Indeed, having witnessed how much progress blacks have made over the years, I am not nearly as biased against my fellow black folks as I used to be.

Yet, as the Rev. Jesse Jackson admitted back in the 1980s, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps ... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” That’s not self-hatred, that’s just being careful. We don’t hate police when we call for less brutality. We’re just looking for help.

At least, Pence and Kaine agreed on the value of community policing. Bias shrinks on both sides of the blue line when police and the people they are sworn to protect get to know each other — and beat back their biases.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.