I know. I’m one of them.
I don’t dislike all black people. Most of us are fine, once you get to know us.
When people tell me they are surprised to hear that I don’t like black people, I remind them of how little black people were exposed until recent decades of positive images of themselves in media and elsewhere.
I think my condition began at age 4. My parents broke the news that I could not go to the amusement park near our southern Ohio home because it did not admit “colored people.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of my re-education in being a part of an underprivileged class of Americans. Almost everywhere I looked, I saw images of white people achieving things and black people singing, dancing or getting arrested.
The world has changed a lot since then, thanks largely to the hard-won victories of the civil rights revolution. But black self-hatred is not dead, even in this era of a half-black president; it has merely diversified.
That’s why I was disappointed to hear Pence, Republican Donald Trump’s running mate, take offense with Democrat Hillary Clinton’s suggestion during her first debate with Trump that everyone has “implicit bias,” including black police officers.
The “bad-mouthing” of police by people who “use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism,” Pence said in his debate with Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, “really has got to stop.”
Pence cited the recent fatal shooting in Charlotte of a black man, Keith Lamont Scott, that involved a black Charlotte police officer, Brentley Vinson, and touched off several days of riots.
Pence expressed dismay that “Hillary Clinton actually referred to that moment as an example of implicit bias in the police force,” as if a black officer could not be biased against black people. I am not prejudging Vinson’s guilt or innocence when I say that black officers not only can be, but in some communities actually have long histories of bias against black people.
A 2014 ProPublica analysis of deadly force killings, for example, found young black men were 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police. Black officers account for a little more than 10 percent of all fatal police shootings, the investigative journalism organization found, but of those they killed, 78 percent were black.
Project Implicit, a nonprofit research group, found that most white respondents tended to associate blackness with criminality. Responses from blacks were more evenly mixed, “approximately even numbers of black respondents showing a pro-white bias as show a pro-black bias.”
Well, what can we expect, considering how much black Americans have been exposed to negative images and perceptions of black life in media and elsewhere?
Indeed, having witnessed how much progress African-Americans have made over the years, I am not nearly as biased against my fellow black folks as I used to be.
We don’t hate police when we call for less brutality. We’re just looking for help.
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