Facing the Problem

You don’t have to be an expert. Just alert.

And if so, you probably made a mental note when 25-year-old Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker blithely ticked off his now-infamous . . .er. . . reservations to a Sports Illustrated reporter about why he would never want to pitch for a New York team. You probably filed it under Marge Schott, Fuzzy Zoeller, Reggie White, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder or Al Campanis. It’s happened before. No doubt, it’ll happen again. You shrug, dismiss it: Hey, people say stupid things. . . .

Jody David Armour, on the other hand, is an expert.

An attorney and professor of law at USC, he’s done a little more than just file Rocker’s comments away. He’s taking them apart.

The author of “Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism” (New York University Press, 1997), Armour recognizes the dangers implicit in Rocker’s offhand comments.

As the father of three boys and the son of a black man whose marriage to a white woman was an infraction weighty enough to get him jailed after cops planted drugs in their home, Armour knows that race looms large in our daily dealings.

Yet he also understands that racism and bigotry are elusive and oftentimes ingrained. “They don’t think they are doing something wrong,” says Armour. “They are thinking that they are simply calling it as they see it.”

The way Armour sees it, “negrophobia” or, more broadly, “reasonable” or “rational” bigotry (defined as discrimination that seems to make sense), is insidious because it is based on skewed statistics, anecdotal evidence, incorrect assumptions, environment, media, negative experiences, all of which shape collective thought. And it has devastating legal ramifications, as in the case Armour cites of a white woman who successfully claimed disability because a mugging by a black man left her “unable” to be near black co-workers.

Bigotry lives long; it burrows deep.

Rocker was fined $20,000, suspended until May 1 and ordered to undergo psychological counseling by baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, but has asked an arbitrator to reduce the penalty.

We asked Armour to assess the statements, the punishment and the damage done.

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Question: As all of this was unfolding, what was your initial reaction?

Answer: My initial reaction as a law professor is a little different than as an African American citizen. The law professor in me has to show a lot of deference to 1st Amendment considerations; even if the feelings expressed are anathema, they are still legally protected.

Now, the black citizen side of me sees that words can wound. Words aren’t just vehicles for expression. They can stigmatize. They can degrade. They can inflame. And that side of me really recoils . . . Even in the law we recognize some limits in free speech--you have laws against defamation. We have laws against certain types of verbal assaults. So you don’t necessarily have to genuflect before the 1st Amendment right of freedom of expression at the expense of any and all other [rights]. But I still feel the tension.

Q: When public figures reveal sentiments like these to a reporter in an interview--an intimate one-on-one situation--this feeds a perception about how racism exists or manifests behind closed doors. A perception that tolerance is a mask.

A: First, we have to acknowledge that there are times when people who are well-meaning can have different sides to themselves. We are subject to things like automatic, biased responses and we are all subject to stereotypes and the unconscious effects they can have on our decision making. But if we don’t recognize it, it’s never going to be combated effectively.

Q: What do you think truly alters the way people “see” and understand one another?

A: I try to move the discussion away from fault and blame. We conclude that people who are racially biased are bad or evil. [But we can] approach it as a public-health problem in which we are all responsible for the cure. If we all have the stereotype habit ingrained from a very early age, which my research shows, then we all in a sense have the illness. And we all have to work toward the cure together. Discrimination isn’t something that bad people do, it’s something that all people do.

Q: Some of what Rocker’s Sports Illustrated rant was about could be filed in the category you define in your book as “rational or unconscious discrimination.” What continues to fuel suspicion and bigotry in our culture? And how does “rational racism” impede rigorous discussion of race?

A: There are two dragons we have to slay. The Civil Rights Movement dealt more with conscious bigotry. Now we’ve pretty much slain that dragon in the limited but significant sense that it’s no longer acceptable to be racially illiberal in that way. Now we have to deal with these more modern variations . . . It’s sort of like one of those viruses that mutate as soon as you develop a cure.

Rational discrimination has to be revealed for what it is. For example . . . in the book I talk about a black couple in Times Square who have just gone to a movie. The husband goes to get the car and leaves the [pregnant] wife standing under the marquee. When he comes back, she has disappeared. He discovers that she has been arrested, strip-searched and booked for prostitution. And, by the way, she was five months pregnant. . . .

Now, from the police officer’s standpoint the judgment may have seemed perfectly reasonable. . . . Let’s assume that there was a lot of prostitution activity in that area between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. . . . and a disproportionate amount done by black women. So the officer had a rational basis for his belief, but the actions were unreasonable.

We have to demonstrate that it isn’t reasonable and it’s not acceptable. That’s the moral argument.

We have to go after the argument that it is OK to discriminate on seemingly rational grounds. Even the courts have said it’s OK to make profile stops. How can we blame the cabbies and the police when the courts don’t have it right?

Q: People were so stunned by Rocker’s comments, but he felt comfortable enough to reel them off. That says something about where he lives--not physically but psychologically. That those beliefs are acceptable.

A: They don’t seem just like irrational rantings to him. They just seem like rational descriptions of objective reality: “Hey, don’t we all know that this is just the way it is?” So we have to try to make those kinds of leaps seem less legitimate and acceptable.

For him to have said that in front of a [reporter] means that he’s been saying it in front of his friends and relatives for a long time. So it’s not just his fault. He should be looking at his friends and blaming them and the people in the clubhouse. He’s kind of the fall guy. And in a way, I prefer his sincerity. At least we can deal with it.

Unconscious discrimination is a little tougher. Since the cradle we’ve been immersed in a cultural belief system that tells us that blacks, and other socially marginalized groups, are inferior, are morally bad, are not as smart, or a lot of other very negative things. And we have to realize that being weaned on those associations, establishes in all our memories stereotypes.

And once it’s . . . forged in our memory . . . those associations . . . run automatically even when later in our lives we come to consciously renounce them.

Q: How does that manifest?

A: There are these experiments in which subjects have to evaluate interaction between two confederates . . . There is a debate . . . then there is an ambiguous bump [one bumps into the other].

And when the person who initiates the bump is white, most of the subjects interpret it as innocuous, as horseplay. But when the exact same bump is initiated by a black protagonist over 70% interpret the same bump as hostile or aggressive.

These subjects are not necessarily bigoted or racist. What is happening is black and aggression and hostility are already forged in their memory.

They’ve done it with black kids and white kids and found that they make the same biased judgments. Stereotypes are something that all of us have ingrained in our memories as a result of living in the cultural belief system that we do.

Q: If it is so ingrained and in so many instances unconscious, what can we do to break out of this type of thinking?

A: I was struggling with this as I was writing . . . and it occurred to me if we stopped right there, we have a very fatalistic, pessimistic view of everything. Maybe racism is permanent and a hopeless and inaccessible part of our American kind of reality.

There is hope though.

Look at stereotypes as habits. Whenever you’re around certain cues that trigger the habit, you don’t think about it, it just happens. The way to control any habit is to consciously attend to it when you are in danger of falling into it. You’ve got to think about it. You’ve got to consciously monitor your reactions or responses when you are around cues that trigger the habit. It may seem counterintuitive at first. I think a lot of us think that the way to get over racism is to be “colorblind.” [But] this is just the opposite of what you should do. That’s the surest way to fall into the habitual responses unconsciously. Rather than being colorblind we need to be color-conscious. To resist falling into the habit, you have to be aware that you are in the presence of a cue that may trigger the habit.

Q: There are some who feel that Rocker’s punishment was too severe, that it missed the mark. Do you think that the punishment was inappropriate or that another action should have been taken?

A: I don’t think that it was either too severe or inappropriate. For one thing, he is making a handsome living on the basis of presenting an image to the public. So just as there are sanctions in the military for behavior not becoming to an officer . . . by the same token, I think that there can be behavior unbecoming of a public figure. . . .

Q: But do you think that he really gets it? Or that the punishment gets at the root of the problem--Rocker’s beliefs. Or is it, as you say, still in the realm of the unconscious? Has he walked away thinking, “Whoops, I shouldn’t have said this at all?” Or is he thinking, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said this publicly?”

A: My sense is that he certainly at least appreciates that there are a lot of people whose dignity he has insulted. I think that he may have at least learned that this does wound people. I’m hoping that he is the kind of person who would not intentionally hurt anyone. I’m going to give him that much credit. This isn’t absolving him for what he’s done, but in a sense he is also kind of a scapegoat for what a lot of people are doing and not getting caught. He has probably been doing it around others and others have been doing it around him and there haven’t been any negative consequences. And now he’s the one taking the fall.

It’s kind of like everybody on the 10 [Freeway] is doing 80 miles an hour. So when the officer pulls me over, I’m the one getting the ticket, I’m taking the fall in a sense. But, officer, but I was only going with the flow.

Q: Why do we so often assume that we are further along than we are when it comes to race relations? And when things like this happen, why are we so surprised every time we find out that we are not?

A: Massive and deep denial. I don’t think we want to acknowledge that racism is still as ubiquitous as it is. It would make a lot of us start to feel more uncomfortable about the benefits that we enjoy. . . .

It is more comfortable to think that racism is a relic of a bygone era and that the playing field is perfectly level and you just have this occasional quack who spouts something like this and it isn’t reflective of anything broader or systemic.

The reality is that it is just the tip of the iceberg. And that we need to forthrightly confront that grim reality . . . Rocker is a symptom of a collective malady and needs to be seen as such. We need a systemic cure.