Inherent racial bias poses a threat to our country

FRIDAY, APRIL 13: I am not a racist.

Sure.

That’s what we all say. Most of us sincerely believe it. Yet most of us are filled with biases of every description. Some are harmless, some are amusing, and some are very damaging to other people and to society as a whole.

If you doubt it, try taking the famous on-line Harvard implicit bias test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

About three-quarters of whites find they are biased against backs. And a lot of blacks find they are biased against blacks as well.

If by chance you’re one of the minority who aren’t racially biased, don’t feel superior: Try testing your bias based on skin tone, gender, religion, weight, age, and a lot of other things besides.

You’re almost certainly unfairly biased against some group or another because, after all, you’re a human being.

In some ways, bias is the natural state of man, imbued in us for survival reasons when our ancestors slithered from the primordial slime.

Anything that looked like a wolf and howled at the moon was a possible threat, and it didn’t pay to wait until its fangs had sunk into your neck to verify if it was somebody’s pet puppy.

People who looked or acted different from you and your neighbours were a dangerous threat as well. They probably weren’t part of your tribe. They might well be out to get you.

But times have changed, quicker than our instincts have.

We are not supposed to be primitive any more, and we are all part of the same tribe.

Yet time and time again, we are the victims of bias — either somebody else’s or our own.

That is why CURB’s recent conference on race and the criminal justice system in Bermuda was so important.

A host of high-powered participants, including Attorney General Sen. Kim Wilson, looked critically at the ill-advised 2005 “Stop and Search” amendment, which gave police widespread powers to stop and search without specific cause.

The “Stop and Search” law was passed in response to fears of violent crime, and there’s nothing wrong with getting strict about that. Citizens have every right to insist on strong police action against all kinds of crime.

But you can guess who gets disproportionately targeted: Young black men.

It is tempting to think that “racial profiling” doesn’t play much of a role in a place like Bermuda, where the majority population is black, the political leadership is black, and a high percentage of the legal and law enforcement community is black as well.

But remember that blacks are frequently, if unintentionally, biased against blacks.

Indeed, the fundamental law enforcement problems seen in the infamous shooting of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by the white/hispanic man George Zimmerman in Florida isn’t that much different than the “stop and search” problem in Bermuda.

Florida’s reprehensible “Stand Your Ground” law, just like Bermuda’s “Stop and Search” amendment, doesn’t account for the inevitable role of human bias.

The systems and the structures haven’t been worked out to assure that racial bias doesn’t play a role. Rarely, indeed, are statistics even kept of the race of citizens involved in police stops or other encounters with the law.

And if we aren’t doing that, how can anyone argue that bias — which we know is widespread even among the most well-meaning of us — is not playing a major role?

The whole point of requiring police to have a specific cause before stopping and searching citizens was to eliminate bias and capriciousness and harassment.

It is little consolation to argue that, well, if people aren’t doing anything wrong they have nothing to fear.

The people who have nothing to fear are those who don’t get stopped, don’t get searched and don’t get shot at. At the very least, those who are unfairly targeted are inconvenienced, humiliated, stigmatized and, well, treated unfairly.

That’s wrong, anywhere and at any time.

But in a place like Bermuda, whose survival depends on overcoming a long history of racism and inequality, it’s worse than that: It’s seriously damaging to our country’s future.