“For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."
- Audre Lorde
When I was 16 years old, my varsity basketball team was competing in summer tournaments. At one game, we played a team from a town I’d never been to, and in the early moments of the first quarter, we were already down 15 points. Our coach was getting increasingly frustrated at our lack of 1:1 defense and, when I let my opponent blow past me again for a bucket, he yelled out, “Kate, stay with your man!” My response in the moment was to shout back, “Coach, I’m trying - they all look the same to me!”
The team we were playing was all Black, and I was having a tough time distinguishing who I was supposed to guard. Looking back on this memory, it’s so clearly problematic, shameful to admit, and I would swiftly have have been “cancelled” if Twitter had existed in 2001… but what I think is even more embarrassing (in retrospect) is what happened afterwards. My coach kind of laughed to himself and said, “Well, do your best, they’re thinking the same thing about you.” And then we moved on. I picked a shoe color and followed that girl’s red laces the rest of the game.
None of my teammates said anything to me about it, and none of the adults addressed it, either. We were growing up in a suburban white community in Metro Detroit and our world was contained, sheltered, and largely empty of experiences with people who looked different from us. The closest neighborhoods with any real racial diversity were in Detroit, but those were usually day trips to see the Pistons or the Red Wings, maybe go to a museum, eat a coney, or run the annual Turkey Trot. Meanwhile, we were told to lock our car doors at each stop sign, put our belongings in the trunk when parked, and if you’re ever there after dark, find the freeway as fast as possible. The message was clear - Detroit is dangerous.
As I got older, breaking through this racist narrative became important to me and I began to learn about Detroit’s rich history as the last stop to freedom on the Underground Railroad, about its creative genius that defined the Motown Sound and jazz music, about its fervent activism for civil rights, and of course, the city’s unwavering tenacity to rebuild and reinvent itself despite a sea of haters. But loving a city doesn’t mean loving its people. Loving the products of Black culture, as we’ve been reminded recently, does not mean caring about its creators. And being a tourist in Detroit but returning to the regularly scheduled programming of white suburbia does not raise one’s consciousness.
At that basketball game, the window was open for a teachable moment, but 20 years ago, thoughtful conversations on race relations were in short supply in my hometown. When I later found out that “The Other-Race Effect” is a well-studied psychological shortcoming in humans where we don’t distinguish between people of other races, I wondered how I might have broken it down for my 16-year old self. The three biggest hypotheses supporting this theory go like this:
a) Humans tend to spend more time with people of our own race and so we only learn to distinguish the characteristics of people who look like us, or,
b) Our brains categorize members of other races into homogenous groups, so we tune out more subtle characteristics, or,
c) Since we evolved in small groups that were always on the defensive, we’re inherently likely to view “different” people as threatening.
Thanks, brains. Super helpful in making sure we can all live harmoniously and recognize the complex humanity in each other. #TLDR
Based on this, maybe I would have pulled 16-year old me over after the game and asked, “Hey, I noticed you said today that you had a hard time sticking with your player. Can you tell me more about that?”
{active listening, active listening, active listening…}
And then I would muster my best Morpheus voice and say, “What if I told you that race is a social construct designed to determine who has access to power in society, and YOU CAN’T GO AROUND SAYING ALL BLACK PEOPLE LOOK THE SAME BECAUSE YOU’LL GROW UP TO BE A KAREN?!?”
Okay…well, this is why we don’t have kids. Maybe I’d say, “You know, what you experienced today is not uncommon, because you haven’t grown up around a lot of Black people, but if you heard another player say that your team all looked the same, how do you think that would feel? {conversation} Right, it would feel kind of awful. So let’s notice where we make assumptions or generalizations about people. I watched a video the other day that said our brains can rewire and learn to do better with this, and it’s called neuroplasticity, want to watch it together?”
Maybe I would have been served a teenage eye roll and a slammed door, but, it’s worth trying, because unchecked bias like this makes me nervous. When I hear about studies where 44% of med students and residents believed that Black patients have thicker skin and are therefore 22% less likely to receive pain medications than white patients, that’s upsetting. When I hear about unarmed Black men out for a run who are then hunted and murdered because they “looked like a robbery suspect”, it’s beyond disturbing. And when I hear about how facial recognition algorithms can lead police departments to wrongfully accuse and detain innocent citizens, I know we can do better, because the way we’re wired now is hurting us all.