Here's the controversial video of two black guys getting arrested at Starbucks.
From what I gather, the two men came in and sat down, waiting for their third friend. An employee of Starbucks asked them to leave, they didn't. So the Starbucks called the police, who handcuffed them and lead them out.
After watching the video, it seems pretty unfair that these two men were being led out. They seemed nice enough, and even after they were handcuffed they made no hullabaloo about it. We don't get to see anything that happened prior, so we don't know if the handcuffs were exactly necessary. But the real question that everyone wants to answer is, is this racism?
It's not like it needs to be some kind of explicit overt racism. It could be that that the employee subconsciously added 20% extra concern over the situation because the patrons were black, and that was the extra push they needed to call the police.
And there is some evidence that people are subconsciously racist like that. While I have my suspicions about Implicit Bias Tests that mostly come from Jesse Singal (listen, or read), the Minimal Group Paradigm seems much more convincing to me.
Researchers can incite discrimination by giving some people red shirts or blue shirts. Or another thing they do is make people estimate how many dots are on a piece of paper, and then place them in the group of underestimators or overestimators. And guess what? When they're asked how much money each person should be given they systematically discriminate in favor of their own group, and against the other group.
So humans are tribal and groupish, no doubt. How groupish are we? and which groups are we groupish toward? are the next question we should be asking. There are about a million ways to cut up human diversity, and some of those will matter more to others depending on how people think about themselves in the context of the broader groups.
I suspect that if you put a bunch of black people and white people in a room, they will sort themselves out into black and white. If you put a bunch of black and white physicists and construction workers, they'll sort themselves out by occupation and pay very little attention to race
People like to be on teams. The thing is, there's no reason to believe that race has to be one of those teams. People don't seem to do it at all based on eye color or height or many other arbitrary characteristics. But when you're constantly bringing to mind white people and black people like our society seems to be doing (sometimes with good intentions), it seems like you're likely to create more discrimination, not less.
And that's kind of how I think about the video. This is another instance where people are being told that their race matters, and maybe it does in this situation, but when a viral video comes out telling everybody that their race matters, they're likely to respond by grounding more of their identity in race, not less. And that's exactly the problem we'd like to solve.
So what, do I want to ignore racism?
Well, no. What I think I'd like to do is not blow it up in front of everybody. Red shirts only discriminate against blue shirts when they ground their identity according to that group. If you annoyingly get in the face of a red shirt and say, "you're a red shirt, remember that you're a red shirt, they're blue shirts they're not like you because you're a red shirt. See? Look at your shirt. It's red. Do you see that it's red and not like the others," it seems more likely that that person is going to ground their identity in red shirtedness.
So no, don't ignore racism, but how about not blowing up a someone-somewhere-did-something situation for everyone to see how important their race is? How about a normal human presumption against calling people a terrible word like racist? Or how about not making every situation that could be explained by racism into a definitely-for-sure-racism-and-how-dare-you-deny-it-you-must-be-racist-too? That might help.
