S.L Robbins & Associates

It’s Labor Day weekend, and you’ve escaped the crowds in the city to spend time with friends on Long Island. After catching up on the latest news over a leisurely meal, you settle in on the couch downstairs, shrugging off the weight of a rigorous work week and settling into what promises to be a relaxing weekend.

Hands up! You jolt out of dreamy reverie to find a gun in your face as somebody grabs your collar and muscles you off the couch, shoving your face in the carpet. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a couple of guys in uniform and the glaring red numbers on your alarm clock: 6:02 a.m. What is going on? This must be a nightmare.

Since Congress’ immigration law overhaul in 2005, there have been a number of misdirected law-enforcement raids, especially in the Long Island area. Citizens of Suffolk County are especially outraged at the often rash arrests and unwarranted accusations of their friends and neighbors. In one particularly unfortunate scenario in 2007, a dozen federal officials swarmed Peggy Delarosa-Delgado’s home in a 6 a.m. raid; only after rounding up her family in their living room and pulling a gun on their guest did the police realize they were unnecessarily terrorizing U.S. citizens. The man they were looking for had moved out of Delarosa-Delgado’s house several years before.

Incomplete or inaccurate information about other people can foster fear, misunderstanding, and frustration. In this case, a tradition of suspicion of Hispanic immigrants and a failure to do further fact-checking had disastrous results.

Often, law enforcement agents are required to act on a limited amount of information; they use a small slice of evidence to draw conclusions about criminal suspects or to investigate suspicious persons before crimes happen. But underlying biases can color their educated guesses, and they make mistakes. “Predictive profiling” becomes “racial profiling,” and instead of upholding the law, they violate civil rights.

But law-enforcement officers are not the only ones guilty of biased or inaccurate profiling. We also make “educated guesses” based on a limited amount of information.

Research suggests that our media’s biased portrayals of minorities distinctly shape our perceptions of them–sitcoms, TV shows, and news outlets portray blacks and Latinos as criminals in a much higher proportion than the recorded crime statistics. This negative image is replayed over and over, rewritten on neural pathways until it becomes an ingrained belief–one that we’re barely cognizant of as we make decisions about other people.

Studies show that repeated exposure to unfamiliar shapes or images reduces neuron-firing each time we encounter the unfamiliar image. Our brain paves and repaves pathways to help us easily interpret and explain these images. What does that mean? Each time we see the image–say, of a Latino portrayed as a criminal suspect on a forensic science show–it takes less time and less physical energy to recognize, interpret, and associate the image–to profile. Our brain draws from these well-established neural pathways to catalogue our experience and to slip people into neatly constructed categories. In this situation, Latinos are repeatedly associated with criminal suspects, and this colors our judgments of Latinos in our daily interactions. Even if we don’t know that much about a particular person, we make judgments and generalizations from similar interactions–even if they’ve solely been from the movie screen.

It’s not that our cognitive cataloging is always bad. In fact, generalizations help us efficiently navigate our social interactions, our media, the office. But these quick, easy generalizations get us into trouble when we rely on flawed or incomplete knowledge. Our neural structure is built with the blocks of our own experience, and it explains the world in certain ways, giving us windows to some information and not others. Without acknowledging and exploring other perspectives, our limited perspective can’t give us the entire view of the world. And as our world is increasingly connected in economic, political, and social spheres, it’s important to build better, more complete frameworks.

Consider that you might have some inaccurate or incomplete information when it comes to the people around you. It might be difficult to override inaccurate messages and dig up the right information, but it’s worth the impact it will have on your interactions. As our networks in this twenty-first century world get increasingly diverse, incomplete or inaccurate information about people who are different than we are is no longer an option. We can’t escape our previous experience, but we can be mindful of the messages we’ve learned and continuously pursue information about people we don’t know much about.

Time to do some investigation!

Think About It
1) Think about your favorite TV shows–what stereotypes are in the screenplay? How are minorities represented in these media sources? How do these associations inform how you view others?

2) Examine some of America’s beloved films from the past fifty years. How do kung-fu films portray Asians? Do you think westerns provide an accurate representation of Native Americans? How have these representations influenced current perspectives? What do current action films or chick flicks have to say about masculinity or femininity?

3) Can you think of a time when your initial impression of someone was wrong? What surprised you? What if a lot of our first impressions about people are inaccurate?

Tags: Accusations, Alarm Clock, Biases, Crime Scene Investigation, Disastrous Results, Federal Officials, Friends And Neighbors, Hispanic Immigrants, Immigration Law, Labor Day, Labor Day Weekend, Leisurely Meal, Misunderstanding, Racial Profiling, Relaxing Weekend, Reverie, Righ, Rigorous Work, Suffolk County, Suspicious Persons

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