You're dressed and headed for work. Opening the garage, you find yourself eye to eye with a full grown tiger. What's your response? You'd leave the area with great dispatch. That prediction is uninteresting, but the reasons for your behavior aren't. Was your decision based on detailed information about that particular tiger? Or was it based on information held about tiger folklore and behavior of other tigers? You stereotyped that tiger. Instead of trying to see whether that tiger was like others before you took action, you prejudged him.
On a Saturday morning in 1972, while picking up litter outside my house in Chevy Chase, Md., an exclusive neighborhood in the Washington, D.C., area, a white man approached and asked whether later I'd be interested in doing handy work at his house. I responded no because I'd be in the house working on my Ph.D. dissertation. The man was embarrassed and apologized profusely.Months later, my wife's car was being repaired, and she went hitchhiking to the bus stop. A black lady, who turned out to be a domestic servant, picked her up. During the conversation, the lady asked, "Don't you just hate coming way out here to work for these white people?" To her regret, my wife replied that she didn't work in Chevy Chase; she lived there - end of conversation. A few blocks later, the lady made an excuse for not going to the Chevy Chase Circle and said my wife would have to get out.
Both the white man who propositioned me and the black lady who picked up my wife are probably not racists. Both were playing correct odds, namely that if you saw a black in Chevy Chase at that time, he probably worked there. Race and physical appearances correlate nicely with other attributes. Both the white man and the black lady could have been a bit smarter about playing the correct odds, such as directly seeking additional information prior to their pronouncements.
In the wake of the "water buffalo" imbroglio at the University of Philadelphia, black students complained about another form of racism: They are more frequently asked to show ID cards when entering dormitories than white students.
In Washington, D.C., there's a similar phenomenon. Taxi drivers, including black drivers, frequently pass up prospective black male customers, particularly at night. Might we accuse taxi drivers of racism? We can't be sure in either their case or that of dormitory guards at University of Pennsylvania.
Whether we like it or not, race and crime are highly correlated. And more important for dorm guards and taxi drivers, violent criminal acts are highly correlated to race. Black people know this, and so do white people. Under certain circumstances, taking extra security precautions with a black person is likely to reduce the risk of being a crime victim.
By no stretch of the imagination is this fair to honest, law-abiding black people; it's insulting. But who creates the stereotype that imposes this unfair burden? It's not white people. Some white people don't like Japanese and Chinese, but they haven't been able to pin them with the criminal stereotype. Those who create the hurtful burden of the criminal stereotype for law-abiding black people are the tiny percentage of the black population who are thugs and hoodlums and commit a disproportionate percent of violent crime.
We must be more intelligent about race in order to solve racial problems. A good beginning is to recognize what is racism and what is not.