I guess some things never cease to amaze me. Take, for instance, the fact that certain forms of racism seem to be so pervasive. Intellectually, I already know it, but when I see specific instances, it can be nearly mind-boggling. Last weekend, I saw this report on the 20/20 website where they had two groups of three teenagers, one white and one Black, vandalizing a parked car in a mostly-white neighborhood. Predictably, the police got more calls about the Black vandals than about the white vandals. Surprising to me was the ratio: 10 9-1-1 calls about the Black boys, one 9-1-1 call about the white boys. I might’ve expected a 2:1 ratio, or maybe even 3:1, but 10:1? Wow. But then, that’s part of the experiment. What was even more interesting to me was the unintentional part. WHILE the white chaps were tearin’ up the car, there were some black dudes asleep in a nearby car. THEY got more 9-1-1 calls for being asleep in the car then the white dudes got for vandalizing a car.
Amazing.
But then, you hafta approach stuff like this with a modicum of intelligence. Okay, we know that white folks call the police on Black folks quicker. We been knew that. But is that simply a result of racism, or are there other explanatory variables? I mean, the type of damage they did to the car as the people passed by was quite egregious, so it’s not like they could say they didn’t know anything was wrong, but it would’ve been interesting to see what might’ve happened if they had run a similar experiment in an equivalent Black neighborhood. Do we call the police quicker on white folks, too? That, I think, is a question worth asking.
As has become common, the most interesting part to these news(?) stories is the comments that are posted on the websites. The number of comments, presumably by white readers, that try to nullify the results because there was no corresponding experiment done in a Black neighborhood is astounding. It’s like, ‘yeah, that’s what happened, but it doesn’t really mean anything.’ That’s false. It definitely means something, the question is, what?
That racism still exists is not debatable. I don’t think it’s up for too much discussion that people tend to notice people who are different first. That’s partially why arguments on gentrification tend to focus on white people, as if there aren’t Black gentrifiers. (In some areas, there are more Black gentrifiers, they’re just invisible. But that’s another discussion.) Given that, I think there’s some small explanation of the results, but not enough to totally nullify the results.
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