Erika V. Hall, Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Goizueta Business School

Erika V. Hall, Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Goizueta Business School

Listening to Erika V. Hall, Assistant Professor of Organization and Management at the Goizueta Business School, present her paper "Black and Blue: Exploring Racial Bias and Law Enforcement in the Killing of Unarmed Black Male Civilians" at the Lunch Colloquium on March 19 reminded me of a documentary I saw a couple of years ago about the Black Panther movement.  The showing was sponsored by the Emory chapter of the Black Law Students' Association and featured my friend and colleague, Kathleen Cleaver, who was active in the movement.  I was struck by two things.  First, that the students knew almost nothing about the movement.  Admittedly it was 50 years ago, long before they were born and, indeed, even before their parents were adults.  Second, the core message of the Black Panther movement was almost completely overlooked in the media coverage of the movement.  Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the movement in 1966 primarily to provide armed citizen patrols to protect their community from acts of brutality by the Oakland Police Department!  Now, 50 years later, Erika Hall, through her research, is still addressing and seeking to shine a light on that same issue! I, for one, find this quite depressing.

After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, Professor Hall began to look deeply into the psychological aspects of that killing and other police killings of unarmed black males.  She refutes the idea that each of the killings can be explained by their idiosyncratic circumstances.  She suggests that the very factor of "blackness" has negative consequences manifested in these killings of unarmed black men.  Intriguingly, she pointed out that whites favor the term "African-American" over "black," underscoring that the negative connotations of "black" are much greater than those of "African-American."  Referring to many studies, Professor Hall demonstrated that bias against those seen as "black" may be unconscious even in those convinced they have no bias, and in the case of law enforcement, acting on that bias is often deadly.  Studies show that those seen as "black" may be seen as being more violent than whites, subhuman or superhuman, adult-like, and hierarchy subverters, and hence more dangerous than whites.

Using images drawn from police training material, Professor Hall showed how police officers must make split second decisions:  Is the suspect armed?  Is the item in his hand a cell phone or a gun?  The suspect is nervous - does that connote guilt?  Anecdotal evidence including some from Professor Hall herself suggests that black men are generally nervous when addressed by police officers given their lived experience.  The studies show that the police criterion for deciding to shoot is less stringent if an officer is confronting a black male rather than a white.  Interestingly, light-skinned blacks are less likely to be shot than darker-skinned blacks. Police officers consistently overestimate the age of a black suspect claiming they thought him older than his actual age and therefore potentially more dangerous. Police officers have a higher social dominance orientation than those in the community generally and therefore tend to overreact and over-punish those whom they see as challenging that hierarchy.  When they do overreact, it is notoriously difficult to indict police officers for acts of brutality, acts that their biases led them to believe are justified.  The police brotherhood closes ranks, protecting their fellow officers.

In conclusion, Erika pointed out that we all have biases, acknowledged or unacknowledged.  The question is how do we override those biases so that we do not disadvantage others. Police killings of unarmed black males are the most acute evidence we have of the operation of bias towards members of the black community.  What would Bobby Seale or Huey Newton say?

--Jan Pratt

You can read some of Erika's recent papers by clicking on the following links:

Black and Blue

A Rose by Any Other Name

The Hubris Penalty 

As if to illustrate the contemporary reality of what Erika talked about on Monday, on the previous evening in Sacramento, CA, Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed by police in his grandparents' backyard.  As the AP News reported:

Body camera footage from two officers who fired at the man includes audio of them asking the man to show his hands then shouting "gun, gun, gun" before beginning to fire.  

Neither the body camera videos nor the helicopter video clearly depict what the man was doing in the moments before the police fired.

The man turned out to be holding a cellphone and no gun was found.