Shortly after finishing Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt’s wonderful book Biased, I took an implicit bias test – one centered around race and weapons; the focus being whether or not I am biased to associate specific racial groups (whites vs. blacks) with a higher likelihood of carrying weapons.

It took about 7 minutes to complete. As it turns out, I (along with 6% of respondents) am slightly biased to associate whiteness with weapons. There’s a graph below, along with my attempt at an interpretation of the results.

Why I associate Whites with weapons, and Blacks with harmless objects – slightly

Like many people, I’m pretty attuned to current events. Since about 2000, I’ve made it a point to only read the news — never to watch it on television. Below is a summary of my interpretation of 20 or so years of reading news related to race, policing, and violence, expressed as an easy-to-follow over-simplification:

1. When whites get upset, they are free to put rifles on their back, then go shopping at Walmart; or storm city hall; or congregate openly in front of the police decked out in paramilitary garb; or volunteer their services to the police

2. Sometimes, whites like to rhetorically muse on the possibility of murdering, kidnapping, or torturing politicians on Facebook – without offering the full details of their plans – then act very surprised if anyone is bothered by this

3. The police seem to possess an inexhaustible supply of credulity when the behavior of such white people is brought to their attention, and lavish these people with the benefit of the doubt up the wazoo

4. The lesson of items 1-3: white people can say and do all manner of menacing things, even while walking around armed to the teeth. And if they happen to become afraid and mistakenly kill someone (out of fear), well, that kind of mistake is par for the course because their fear is totally reasonable

My Background

I grew up in the south during the late 1970’s. Our next door neighbors, a mixed couple, had a cross burned on their front lawn by the Klan when I was about 3 years old. At the age of 8, though I went to a private school, several of my classmates had ancestors who fought for the confederacy during the American Civil War. Of those I was close friends with, some held fanatical beliefs supporting the glory of the Lost Cause, and conflated them with their sometimes mixed feelings of white supremacy. It was an intricate tap dancing routine around the issue of outright racist behavior. I never once thought of those friends as racists, and still do not. I don’t think the word racist is, in general, useful when invoked in conversations where 2+ people don’t already see eye-to-eye.

Regardless of my small circle of private school white friends, one thing about the world in which I lived was clear to me, and every grown up I knew: blacks and whites were perfectly capable of being cordial in their every day dealings, but beneath that thin veneer of southern politeness was the always-present possibility of explosive violence; violence commissioned by whites against blacks, whenever there were excessive displays of black assertiveness that caused white discomfort. Further, that everyone around me held the rock solid belief that if things got out of hand, armed local law enforcement would naturally align with the white perspective.

My dad was a pragmatist who thought highly of Reagan, but much higher of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Rockefeller. He was a lifelong soldier, and served three tours in Vietnam. He often spoke of the superiority of Western civilization, and of Americans’ duty to uphold and carry on a core set of traditions, originating with the Roman republic. He was a humanist, and believed not so much in the perfectibility of man, so much as the inevitable lessening of mankind’s stupidity through historical processes. He was, and is, a big fan of the Protestant work ethic, and believes that every person alive must earn their way into heaven on their own steam; that simply showing up to church doesn’t amount to shit. When I was 8 years old, he explained to me that I was adopted, and that my biological father was Puerto Rican. He hated living in the south, and, to my surprise, never once considered voting for Donald T****.

My mom was an immigrant from South Korea, born in Pusan one year after the start of the Korean war. She learned English by watching American movies, mostly westerns, and thinks that Reagan was the best president of all time. She loves watching Turner Classic movies, and heavily favors John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Yul Brynner. She is enamored with the idea of tough good guys punching out bad guys. The United States is the greatest country in the world because we consistently punch out the highest number of bad guys. That is a cornerstone of her autobiographical reasoning.

At the age of 18, I enlisted in the Army as a combat engineer. More than any other experience, being in the military shaped my perceptions on race, otherness, and tribe. I realized that skin color, though important, can easily be superseded by different categories; that our sense of selves is completely malleable, and that our identities are capable of moving between overlapping rings of affiliation that are contingent on our situational context. For example:

• Who has an American passport and who doesn’t?

• Who’s seated in first class and who’s not?

• Who’s from the west coast and who’s from the east coast?

• Who speaks Spanish and who’s a native English speaker?

• Who’s from the south and who’s from the north?

• Who went to college and who didn’t?

At the age of 48, because of a DNA test, I confirmed my Puerto Rican ancestry, and connected with one of my cousins who lives here in the continental United States. She and I are good friends, and chat regularly. I also discovered that my biological grandfather was black. Knowing this hasn’t changed my ideas of who I am, but it enlarges the scope of conversations I’d feel comfortable having with people I have yet to meet. And probably the circle of people I might reach out to when having those conversations. In that sense, the information in the DNA test has the real potential to change who I might become.