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Study reveals how implicit bias affects pedestrians of color walking on the road.

A fascinating look at driver psychology.

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

A person of color uses a crosswalk.

You missed a study that illuminates the very real dangers of literally "walking while black."

In addition to rogue police officers targeting people of color on the street, a study from Portland State University found that drivers are less likely to stop for black pedestrians.

The study, a follow-up from one conducted in 2014, administered tests using identically dressed black and white volunteers attempting to cross the same intersection. The 2014 study revealed black male pedestrians waited 32% longer than white male pedestrians for cars to stop. The 2017 research expanded on these tests to include black and white women and marked versus unmarked crosswalks.

When the crosswalk was unmarked, the stopping rate was relatively low across the board, regardless of race or gender — and regardless of Oregon law. However, when zebra stripes were added to the crosswalk, drivers were more likely to stop for white pedestrians, regardless of their own race or gender. In these marked crosswalks, cars stopped for white pedestrians 57% of the time and black pedestrians 44% of the time.

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Using a crosswalk has some unwanted inherit risks.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

And the drivers who did stop for black pedestrians tended to crowd the crosswalk, giving black pedestrians less room to cross safely.

The researchers also measured where drivers stopped for pedestrians. A driver stopping on or before the stop line is more than 10 feet away from the intersection, giving the pedestrian ample room to cross. When the pedestrian was a black male, drivers stopped after the stop line in 71% of the trials. For black women, it was 67%.

When the pedestrians were white men or women, the drivers stopped before the line 52% and 55% of the time, respectively.

Yes, you're reading this data correctly — the very tool meant to keep all pedestrians safe is generally effective only when the pedestrians are white.

responsibility, car safety, fatalities, people of color

safe space, respect, bias, studies

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Studies like this don't necessarily mean everyone behind the wheel is racist. But it's likely that implicit biases are at work.

Since the race and ethnicity of the driver had little effect on whether they yielded to pedestrians, it's unlikely that they're driving around with malicious intent to injure or harm pedestrians of color. However, subconscious and implicit biases — aversions, preferences, or attitudes that we prescribe to certain people or communities without even realizing it — are real and powerful. When we have to make quick decisions, our brains often rely on these implicit biases, which can have unintended (even deadly) consequences.

"Driving is a situation where you're processing a lot of information," Kimberly Kahn of the Transportation Research and Education Center at Portland State University told The Oregonian. "It's in those situations where the most subtle and implicit biases can impact decision-making."

Some of these implicit biases may be why people of color are overrepresented when it comes to pedestrian fatalities.

In 2014, nearly 5,000 people in the U.S. were killed while walking. Non-white individuals are approximately 35% of the U.S. population but make up just over 46% of pedestrian deaths. Some of this can be attributed to the higher prevalence of pedestrians of color and the way certain streets and neighborhoods are designed with minimal safe crossings. However, even controlling for these factors, a disparity persists — it's simply not safe to walk in some neighborhoods.

But there are ways to combat both unsafe walking conditions and our own biases.

Increasing the number of drivers stopping for pedestrians across the board will inherently improve the number of drivers stopping for people of color. This means pushing local leaders for better crosswalk signage and street marking. It's also important to implement smart design, investigate where pedestrians are most at risk for being struck, and consider what measures can be put in place to slow cars or change traffic patterns.

And it's crucial that we work on our own implicit biases, first by acknowledging that they exist. It can be difficult to take a good hard look at why we think the way we do, but by examining our own preconceived notions and attitudes, we can make great strides toward dismantling or changing them.

This article originally appeared on 11.01.17

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Fired North Carolina cops are a reminder of how white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement

Photo by Jacky Lam on Unsplash

Three officers were fired this week from the Wilmington, North Carolina police department after dash cam footage revealed horrifically racist conversations between them.

But before we delve into that, let's look at a brief timeline of select white supremacist incidents in police departments across the U.S.—and the FBI warning that came in the middle of them—to add some context to this story.

In 1991, a group of Los Angeles sheriff's deputies were discovered to be part of a "neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang" known as The Vikings—membership that department officials knew about and did nothing to address.

In 1999, an unknown number of officers in three different Cleveland, Ohio police districts were found to have scrawled racist or Nazi graffiti throughout police quarters, including restrooms and locker rooms.

In 2001, two officers in Williamson County, Texas were fired after they were discovered to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 2006, the FBI detailed the specific threat of white supremacists purposefully infiltrating police departments. Though largely (and frustratingly) redacted, an intelligence bulletin describes how white nationalists and skinheads try to blend into police departments by hiding their true beliefs (a practice known as "ghost skinning") with the purpose of disrupting investigations into supremacist groups and recruiting other white supremacists.

Moving right along, in 2014, a Florida deputy police chief and another officer were fired after an FBI informant outed them as members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 2015, a ProPublica article describing copious racist messages in a New York cop blog also pointed to other racist incidents around the same time in various U.S. cities' police departments.

And now, here we are in 2020, watching three Wilmington, North Carolina officers lose their jobs after accidentally recording their blatantly racist and violent conversations.

This is by no means a full list, and North Carolina incident is by no means any less egregious than those that preceded it. In a routine review of dash cam footage, former officer Kevin Piner was heard talking to another officer about the protests for racial justice. He said the police department was only concerned with "kneeling down with the black folks." He called a Black officer in his department "bad news" and a "piece of shit," saying, "Let's see how his boys take care of him when shit gets rough, see if they don't put a bullet in his head."

In a conversation with another officer later in the day, Piner called a woman he arrested the day before a "negro" and "n----r." He referred to a Black magistrate judge as "fucking negro magistrate," saying, "She needed a bullet in her head right then and move on. Let's move the body out of the way and keep going."

As if that weren't bad enough, the two officers talked about the possibility of a "civil war" coming, with Piner saying he was going to buy an assault rifle. "We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them fucking ni—–. I can't wait. God, I can't wait," he said, followed by saying that such a war was needed to "wipe 'em off the fucking map. That'll put 'em back about four or five generations."

The full report of what was recorded can be found here.

And a news conference with the city council and the new Wilmington police chief, Donny Williams, who had to deal with this mess on his first day on the job:

There's a lot of talk about implicit racial bias—racial prejudices that we don't even know we have—in policing. While that's an important consideration, we can't overlook the fact that there are also actual white supremacists within some police departments. How many? No one knows. Those mentioned here are just some of the ones who have been caught and identified. But there have clearly been enough of them that the FBI felt the need to issue a bulletin about it and warn that it was a threat. And what was done with that information in that warning after it came out? Did police departments change the way they screen recruits or do a deep dive into their own ranks? Unclear.

No one is saying that all police officers are blatant white supremacists, obviously. But we've seen far too many stories of officers voicing white supremacist beliefs and far too many officers and officials turning the other way instead of outing them and ousting them.

In 2016, Samuel Jones, professor of law at Chicago's John Marshall School of Law, told PBS News Hour that neither the FBI or police departments had established systems for vetting people for white supremacist ties.

"I cannot imagine that the FBI today could issue a report concerning any kind of threat without people being alarmed and wanting immediate action," he said. "But in this case there seems to be almost an acceptance of it. The thought is 'it's just ideology and they have a right to believe this.'"

The problem is "just ideology" isn't a small thing when we're talking about people with the means, power, and authority to take people's lives. A police officer cannot serve and protect the public if they believe that a large percentage of the public isn't worth serving or protecting. No matter what our personal beliefs are about policing, we should at least all be able to agree on that.


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People who are still living today played horribly racist games at carnivals and kids’ camps

Jim Crow Museum/YouTube

This article includes racially offensive terminology and imagery in a historical context.

Black History Month was established to encourage Americans to dive into history that has long been overlooked. From black champions of civil rights, to black inventors and innovators, to black musicians and mathematicians, we learn about people whose accomplishments haven't always been celebrated. From slavery to Jim Crow laws to mass incarceration, we also learn how our country's legal and justice system practices have systematically oppressed black Americans for centuries.

But sometimes slice of overlooked history hits us so forcefully we have a hard time believing we'd never heard of it—or if it's even true.

Posts have been circulating on social media showing an old, black-and-white photo of kids playing a game called "Hit the N****r Baby," where they throw baseballs at black people's heads for fun. Such carnival games, also known as "African Dodger," "Hit the Negro," or "Hit the Coon," were still played as late as the 1950s.

Jim Crow Museum/YouTube

Snopes says that the "Hit the N****r Baby" photo came from a 1942 YMCA brochure for Camp Minikani, a children's summer camp in Wisconsin. So not only was this game played, but it was acceptable enough to have been included in a freaking camp brochure.

It's so jarring and appalling to most modern sensibilities, it's hard to fathom how such blatant racism was ever the norm—but it was. And it wasn't even that long ago. My own mother was alive when these games were played, and her mother is still living. Two generations of my own family lived when "Hit the N****r Baby" was a considered cute carnival game. And not just in the South, which we know aired its racism out in the open, but all the way up in Wisconsin. That blows my mind.

The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University goes into disturbing detail about how these these games were played and the dehumanization of the people used as targets. A video on YouTube shows how black Americans were used as targets of violence for white people's entertainment for decades. (Please be advised that the video includes racially offensive terms and imagery.)

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This is reason 234,007 why when white folks try to claim that the oppression of black people in America was sooooo long ago, I have to shake my head and blink a few times. Blatant, proud white supremacy was normal for the vast majority of American history—especially in the southern U.S., but not exclusively. People act as if, when slavery was abolished, all the proud white supremacy that fueled it just magically dissipated—but clearly that wasn't the case or we wouldn't have ended up with Jim Crow laws. And it's not like when Jim Crow laws were eliminated a century after slavery ended, all the proud white supremacy that fueled those just magically disappeared. A sweeping change of laws is not the same as a sweeping change of heart.

There are inevitably going to be some "get over it" folks who will complain about this history being brought up, as if it's better to just forget what happened in the past. That's quite convenient for the people who aren't directly and negatively impacted by the history of white supremacy, and quite unfair to the people who are.

Assuming most of us find the content of this video appalling, we have come pretty far in just a generation or two, so that's a somewhat silver lining. But at the same time, the FBI has warned about white supremacist terrorism, and "white nationalism" has become a politically palatable label for far too many people. Citing FBI statistics, New York Magazine's Intelligencer states, "hate-crime violence hit a 16-year high in 2018 with the black, Jewish, Latino, and transgender communities being targeted more than ever."

Clearly we still have more work to do toward eliminating white supremacy, internalizing racial equality, and establishing true racial justice. Hopefully seeing this heinous, relatively recent chapter of our history will lead to recognition of the racism that has been prevalent since our founding, as well as a reckoning of the injustices that the U.S. has still not atoned for.

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Why the FBI moved white supremacist terrorism to the same threat level as ISIS

John Kittelsrud/Creative Commons

In the wake of George Floyd's murder, this story has seen an organic uptick with our audience. In the effort to be transparent, Upworthy is adding this note up top to reflect that the story was originally published in February, 2020. The original story begins below.

Many people think of "terrorism" and immediately conjure images of ISIS or Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. But in the U.S., terrorism has another face—one that's far more familiar, but just as dangerous.

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced this week that the agency has raised racially-motivated and ethnically-motivated violent extremism to the same threat level as ISIS. At an oversight hearing with the House Judiciary Committee on February 5, Wray explained that race-based terrorism is now considered a "national threat priority," which means it will receive the same resources as international terrorism threats such as ISIS.

RELATED: Most domestic terrorism comes from white supremacists, FBI tells lawmakers

"We're particularly focused on domestic terrorism, especially racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists," said Wray. "Not only is the terror threat diverse, it's unrelenting."

Wray also clarified last year that the vast majority of racially-motivated terrorist attacks in the U.S. are "fueled by some type of white supremacy."

In other words, domestic terrorism is as much of a threat to national security as international terrorism, and most domestic terrorism comes from white supremacists.

Despite a documented rise in race-based hate crimes and ample information on such threats from the intelligence community, the White House has been reticent to address it. In fact, the Trump administration spent its first few years canceling Obama-era grants that funded programs to help fight violent extremism, such as Life After Hate, a non-profit founded by a former skinhead that helps people leave Neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It also slashed the office that housed the task force for Countering Violent Extremism.

However, the FBI has been clear on the threat and has been working to address it. Wray says he has now created a "domestic terrorism and hate crimes fusion cell" that combines domestic terror experts and hate crime experts. "They're working together to not just focus on the threats that have already happened but to look ahead around the corner to anticipate where else we need to be," he said.

RELATED: A former white supremacist describes the time he changed his mind and 'life after hate.'

Wray says that domestic terrorists tend to be self-radicalized online. "They choose easily accessible weapons — a car, a knife, a gun, maybe an IED they can build crudely off the internet — and they choose soft targets," Wray said. "That threat is what we assess is the biggest threat to the homeland right now."

The problem is, racially-motivated terrorists are often "lone actors" who go can quickly from rhetoric to violence, so predicting an attack can be a challenge—especially since the FBI focuses specifically on violence, not ideology.

"Our focus is on the violence," Wray said. "We the FBI don't investigate the ideology, no matter how repugnant. We investigate violence. And any extremist ideology, when it turns to violence, we're all over it."

Terrorism of all kinds is, well, terrifying. But while the government pushes more travel bans and a good chunk of Americans equate terrorism with Islam—a religion that nearly a quarter of the humans on Earth belongs to—it's the white supremacist next door who poses the most immediate threat to our nation's security. This is why having white nationalists in the White House is legitimately terrifying. This is why it's wrong to say there are "fine people on both sides" of a rally with Neo-Nazis and protesters of Neo-Nazis. This is why we need to battle white supremacist ideology whenever and wherever we see it, before it has a chance to turn to violence.

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