{"id":56393,"date":"2013-07-15T12:30:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T17:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=56393"},"modified":"2015-09-01T21:21:18","modified_gmt":"2015-09-02T02:21:18","slug":"whos-afraid-of-young-black-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/07\/15\/whos-afraid-of-young-black-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Who’s Afraid of Young Black Men?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Trayvon<\/a>
AP Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In conversation, I keep accidentally referring to Zimmerman\u2019s defense lawyers as \u201cthe prosecution.\u201d Not surprising, because the defense of George Zimmerman was only a defense in the technical sense of the law. Substantively,\u00a0it was a prosecution<\/a>\u00a0of Trayvon Martin. And in making the case that Martin was guilty in his own murder, Zimmerman\u2019s lawyers had the burden of proof on their side, as the state had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Martin wasn\u2019t a violent criminal.<\/p>\n

This raises the question, who\u2019s afraid of young black men? Zimmerman\u2019s lawyers took the not-too-risky approach of assuming that white women are (the jury was six women, described by the\u00a0New York Times<\/a><\/i>\u00a0as five white and one Latina).<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the person who \u2026 attacked George Zimmerman,\u201d defense attorney Mark\u00a0O\u2019Mara said<\/a> in his closing argument, holding up two pictures of Trayvon Martin, one of which showed him\u00a0shirtless<\/a>\u00a0and looking down at the camera with a deadpan expression. He held that shirtless one up right in front of the jury for\u00a0almost three minutes<\/a>. \u201cNice kid, actually,\u201d he said, with feigned sincerity.<\/p>\n

\"Mark<\/a>
Joe Burbank\/AP Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Going into the trial, according to\u00a0one analysis<\/a>,\u00a0the female jurors were supposed to have more negative views about Zimmerman\u2019s vigilante behavior, and be more sympathetic over the loss of the child Trayvon. As a former prosecutor\u00a0put it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

With the jury being all women, the defense may have a difficult time having the jurors truly understand their defense, that George Zimmerman was truly in fear for his life. Women are gentler than men by nature and don\u2019t have the instinct to confront trouble head-on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But was the jury\u2019s race, or their gender, the issue? O\u2019Mara\u2019s approach suggests he thought it was the intersection of the two: White women could be convinced that a young black man was dangerous.<\/p>\n

Race and Gender<\/b><\/p>\n

Racial biases are well documented. With regard to crime, for example, one\u00a0recent controlled experiment<\/a>\u00a0using a video game simulation found that white college students were most likely to accidentally\u00a0fire<\/i>\u00a0at an unarmed suspect who was a black male \u2014 and most likely to mistakenly\u00a0hold fire<\/i>\u00a0against armed white females. More abstractly, people generally overestimate the risk of criminal victimization they face, but whites are\u00a0more likely to do so<\/a>\u00a0when they live in areas with more black residents.<\/p>\n

The difference in racial attitudes between white men and women are limited. One\u00a0analysis<\/a>\u00a0by prominent experts in racial attitudes concluded that \u201cgender differences in racial attitudes are small, inconsistent, and limited mostly to attitudes on racial policy.\u201d However, some researchers\u00a0have found<\/a>\u00a0white men more prone than women to accept racist stereotypes about blacks, and the General Social Survey in 2002 found that white women were much more likely than men to describe their feelings toward African Americans positively. (In 2012, a minority of both white men and white women\u00a0voted for Obama<\/a>, although white men were more overwhelmingly in the Romney camp.)<\/p>\n

What about juries? The evidence for racial bias over\u00a0many studies<\/a>\u00a0is quite strong. For example,\u00a0one 2012 study<\/a>\u00a0found that in two Florida counties having an all-white jury pool \u2013 that is, the people from which the jury will be chosen \u2013 increased the chance that a black defendant would be convicted. Since the jury pool is randomly selected from eligible citizens, unaltered by lawyers\u2019 selections or disqualifications, the study has a clean test of the race effect. But I can\u2019t find any on the combined influence of race and gender.<\/p>\n

The classical way of framing the question is whether white women\u2019s group identity as whites is strong enough to overcome their gender-socialized overall \u201cniceness\u201d when it comes to attitudes toward minority groups. But Zimmerman\u2019s lawyers appeared to be invoking a very specific American story: white women\u2019s fear of black male aggression. Of course the \u201cvictim\u201d in their story was Zimmerman, but as he lingered over the shirtless photo, O\u2019Mara was tempting the women on the jury to put themselves in Zimmerman\u2019s fearful shoes.<\/p>\n

Group Threat<\/b><\/p>\n

But do white women really feel threatened by black men? That\u2019s an old, blood-stained debate. In the 20th century there were 455 American men (legally)\u00a0executed for rape<\/a>, and 89 percent of them were black — most were accused of raping white women. That was just the legal tip of Jim Crow\u2019s lynching iceberg, partly driven by white men asserting ownership over white women in the name of protection. But the image of course lives on.<\/p>\n

In the specific realm of U.S. racial psychology, one of the less optimistic, but most reliable, findings is that whites who live in places with larger black populations on average express more racism (here\u2019s a\u00a0recent confirmation<\/a>). Most analysts attribute that to some sense of group threat \u2013 economic, political, or violent \u2013 experienced by the dominant majority.<\/p>\n

Because people inflate things they are afraid of, you can get a ballpark idea of how threatened white people feel by asking them how big they think the black population is. And since they don’t realize their racial attitudes are being measured, they aren’t as likely to shade their answers to appear reasonable.<\/p>\n

The 2000 General Social Survey asked about 1,000 white adults to estimate the size of the black population. Both groups were way off, of course: 95 percent of white women and 85 percent of white men overestimated. But the skew was stronger for women than men: 69 percent of women and 49 percent of men guessed that blacks are more than 20 percent of the population (the correct answer at the time was 12 percent).<\/p>\n

Here are those results, showing the cumulative percentage of white men and women who thought the black population was at or below each level:<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe white women\u2019s greater overestimation of the black population is not an indicator of perceived threat. In the same survey white women were no more likely than white men to describe blacks as \u201cprone to violence\u201d (then again, there’s social pressure to say “no”). \u00a0Anyway, whether women feel more threatened than men do isn\u2019t the issue, since the jury was all women. The question is whether the perceived threat was salient enough that the defense could manipulate it.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what was in the hearts and minds of the jurors in this case, of course. Being on a jury is not like filling out a survey or playing a video game. But however much we elevate the rational elements in the system, emotion also plays a role. Whether they were right or not, Zimmerman\u2019s lawyers clearly thought there was a vein of fear of black men inside the jurors\u2019 psyches, waiting to be mined.<\/p>\n

Originally posted at\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0and Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In conversation, I keep accidentally referring to Zimmerman\u2019s defense lawyers as \u201cthe prosecution.\u201d Not surprising, because the defense of George Zimmerman was only a defense in the technical sense of the law. Substantively,\u00a0it was a prosecution\u00a0of Trayvon Martin. And in making the case that Martin was guilty in his own murder, Zimmerman\u2019s lawyers had the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":56400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2056,55,778,23695,283,285,1760,20063,1757,37],"class_list":["post-56393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crimelaw","tag-gender","tag-intersectionality","tag-intersectionality-gender-x-race","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/07\/26.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56393"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67796,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56393\/revisions\/67796"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}