Some thoughts on prejudice

 Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
I've seen your face before my friend
But I don't know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

 -Phil Collins-

What is an observation without a frame of reference?  We like to think we can observe facts and make rational deductions, but we can't.  Anyone with training in psychology as it pertains to law enforcement  is likely to tell you that eye witness accounts of the same occurrence will vary markedly and it's been clearly demonstrated that observers concentrating on one thing will be completely unaware of  important people and objects in their direct view.

When I read about an unarmed African American "child" kneeling with his hands up being shot multiple times, I was truly irate, I was ready to write off reports of his just having perpetrated a class B felony and his having charged a policeman who had ordered him to stop as racism. It fits with my habitual beliefs about the police and racism.  I may well have been totally wrong and it may not be the first time, but if it turns out that the 6 foot 4 200 pound "Child" did in fact charge the officer, things might just be other than I was primed to believe.

You might relate it to the halo effect: the tendency to have a view of people and things because of, in this case, his being a member of a traditionally disadvantaged class We do after all read about all sorts of injustice based on race and racism seems to explain a lot. But sometimes, of course we're wrong. Sometimes we fail to see things through the eyes of people who run stores and gas stations in "bad" areas whose lives are in danger every day.  Is it too easy for me  to condemn it from the safety of my gated community and the comfort of my air conditioned office? It depends on your viewpoint, your frame of reference, the things you associate with other things because your human and you have a memory.

For most of my life, I was firmly convinced that Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were framed.  I galled me that they were Jews and their trial and execution would reflect on me.  I found it easy to find detailed opinions as to their having been innocent. There were lots of people who agreed, lots of signs and protests from lots of convinced people. People I despised were convinced of their guilt. I was ready to see the whole sad affair as yet another example of the persecution of liberals and most of all Jews.  In fact I was passionate about it. I was wrong.

But we see connections between things, relationships, reminders and all the things that lumped together are called bias and prejudice.  Watching the endless coverage of the gruesome and heartbreaking killing of Stephen Sotloff -- the tall dark man with the knife condemning Obama, blaming Obama for what he was about to do and threatening to do it again and again, in the name of peace and freedom  My rage and loathing must surely have been augmented by the years and years of hearing similar rhetoric from Republicans of all sorts, from Fox News to barber shop conversations. It's going to be hard to temper my rage at the endless Obama bashing and ceaseless hatred of human values. These things are inexorably linked in my mind.

And what do we think of Vlad the Invader?  Putin is an arrogant, dishonest, power hungry autocrat, contmptuous of  Democracy, decency, human rights and Liberty. Contemptuous of us. Have you been listening to how Fox and its followers have been praising him as the kind of bold, confident leader American needs?  If you're a Republican you will have forgotten this instantly, but you'll still be contemptuous of Obama and blame him for being weak, for not waving our nuclear penis around. I still remember though and every time I hear you barking about strength, I will associate it with your fascination with tyrants. Evey time you call Obama a tyrant I will remember. Every time I hear you call him weak and indecisiveness, I will associate it with your praise of ruthless aggression.  I will never, ever trust you to tell us the time of day even if my watch confirms it. I know who you are and what you've done and it's all been a pack of lies.

So, yes, I'm human.  Yes, I know there is wisdom and enlightenment in trying to see things through other eyes, but there is discomfort in equal amounts from remembering, from associating or correlating one thing with another. I suffer from rage and closed mindedness and prejudice like everyone else does, so when I see bloody handed monsters I will think of Republicans. When I hear the word "conservative" I think of hate, of tyranny, of  arrogance -- of evil.  the camera can't show it, but I know that face behind the black mask and I see him everywhere.

We're a little more honest -- honestly.

Emotional reasoning: we all do it.  Liberals and conservatives all have our pet pieties and our ways of protecting them against facts.  I don't need to summarize my posts about right wing hypocrisy and self-contradictory arguments or the tendency to invent scenarios independent of statistics or facts or logic.  You've heard it from me for years. It's not true that half the country pays no taxes and "Obama is giving them all our money," but they'll string you up from a light pole or drag you behind a truck for contradicting their beliefs.  They're delusional.

But, as I said, everyone does it. Liberals will jump all over drone attacks while ignoring the fact that it's the least likely way to produce unwanted casualties, while ignoring the fact that no war does not involve civilian casualties, that we are fighting a war against non-uniformed civilians and we insist that our drone strikes in Pakistan are a violation of their sovereignty even though they gave us permission to do so because many of us are invested in the notion of American imperialism.  We make the evidence fit the conviction even when there is no evidence and a few selected facts are proof.

They on the other hand will tell you condoms don't work, rape doesn't cause pregnancy, vaccination against HPV will make you daughter promiscuous.  They'll insist that advertisements showing a woman in a car with a pig promote bestiality (I'm not joking,) that same sex marriage destroys heterosexual marriage and there is a plot to turn kids gay. America is a Christian Nation, the constitution doesn't separate church and State and the Founders were pious Christians we are told.  Roosevelt caused the Depression.  Obama's 'policies' are bankrupting us. The media are saturated with "creation science" lies and other fictions on a daily basis and worse on Sunday. You know it all too well.

I find it depressing.  I find myself looking for reasons to tell myself that maybe I and the folks I agree with most of the time are human, with all the self delusion and fact twisting that involves, but we're still better than the the people I blame for most of our backwardness and our pursuit of bankruptcy in the name of prosperity: the American Right. I mean, we have to be better, right?

I think encouragement is at hand.  A study described in Salon.com, appearing in in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, claims that

 "when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep-seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument."

But they're much worse.  OK, we knew Trayvon Marton was murdered for being black before we knew the facts. We may still not know them, but we're still certain.  We knew that the "stand your ground" legislation justified it when it certainly did not in any way and we knew Zimmerman was a homicidal racist because it was in line with our deep seated convictions about guns and gun laws and racists. We constructed a scenario that made what we knew fit the puzzle and in a way that justified our Liberal faith.

But Conservatives, says the study, score higher on a trait called the need for cognitive closure, they are more uncomfortable with uncertainty and need to hold strong convictions -- to be certain that Liberals.  We can't have some abortions and not others -- it's good or evil and nothing in between. An egg has to be a "baby" else we can't be sure when it becomes fully human.  

This asymmetrical need for certainty despite the facts between Right and Left is of course debatable and is being debated amongst psychologists and yet it seems obvious to me -- because, no doubt, it fits my deep seated convictions about the righteousness of my opinions -- and that's why I'm sticking with it!  We're better than they are.