There is only one way out of this civil uprising.

By Corie Farnsley

June 12, 2020

A first experience with racism

In the early 1990s, I was a teen, walking to the park in our little town, when I witnessed a car accident. A young black male had quickly hopped into his car a couple of doors down, then pushed the gas pedal to the floor and instantly lost control, crossing the street and tumbling into a small ravine.

Within minutes, as the young man got out of his car and climbed up the hillside to return to street level, several local people had arrived to see what had happened.

One of them started screaming at the man, saying, “If you hadn’t been here, this wouldn’t have happened!” and, “Go back to Indianapolis, where you belong!” I am sure there were other things being said, too, but those are the comments that jarred me. They have stuck with me for more than 20 years.

As the responding police recorded the event, it became clear that this young man was fleeing from his girlfriend’s house as her father reacted to seeing the color of his skin. One of my white neighbors, in a town I loved, clearly didn’t approve of this black young man driving through town, much less that he was interested in one of the white young women who lived there. 

I had never been so aware of being surrounded by racism as I was at that moment. I can remember feeling frozen, unsure what to do next. I remember commenting under my breath and staring with my “angry eyes” at the man who was rattling off racist remarks — but I didn’t have the courage to speak loud enough for him to hear me. The friend I was with urged us to leave and not make a scene. And we did.

If I were faced with that same situation today, I believe I would react differently. I would say something to the man shouting at the driver, knowing he would probably lash out at me, too.

But at the time, I was young. I was scared of the shouting man. And I didn’t know what to say or do. I felt powerless.

Some people stay silent because they don’t know what else to do. 

I understand why some people keep quiet in the face of blatant racism, even if they are uncomfortable and recognize what is happening. But I also know that, if we want the world to change, we need to call it out. We need to acknowledge that it’s happening, name it what it is, and demand that things be different.

That’s what the protestors have been doing over the past two weeks, and I support them for doing it. People of color are tired of feeling as if they are seen by many as somehow “less than” other groups in our society—and they have a right to say, “Enough is enough!”

I am glad to see people uniting around this issue. The crowds of protestors aren’t just black. There are white people, Asian people, Latinos, young and old — people of varied demographics. And it’s not just a small group of people in a single town (although protests like that are important, too); it’s happening all over our country and even abroad.

The protests aren’t without division at all, certainly. It’s hard to deny that division is why the protests are happening in the first place. And there are both people who are encouraging the protests and those who are against them completely. 

Us vs. them

But it’s important to point out that it’s not a two-sided crowd in terms of the I-believe-in-police-brutality crew versus the I-don’t. No one is saying they believe Officer Derek Chauvin or his colleagues who stood by and watched him kill a man in slow motion were in the right. 

And while skin color is definitely one source of division playing out in horrifying reality, I would argue it goes deeper than that. Sadly, the division seems to be us-versus-them in terms of individual power versus systemic power. Our culture has been built on many hierarchies of power — from those who lead our country to those who lead our neighborhoods, and, yes, our law enforcement agencies.

It’s time for the individuals to be taken seriously. To be heard. And to be seen for who they are — human beings who are tired of being treated unfairly because of systems of power. In this case, the systems that unfairly and systematically strike down individuals based on the color of their skin have had a compounding effect on people of color, who are tired of facing it at every turn.

Racial profiling is real.

In March 2016, I flew to Baltimore to attend power-building training for one of my clients, a social-/racial-justice organization called IndyCAN (now called Faith in Indiana).

I had been working with Faith in Indiana for less than a year, and I was admittedly a fresh, white, naive face in the crowd of mostly black people attending the conference.

I had no idea what was coming. By the time I left the training several days later, my eyes would be open to a world I knew existed on some level, but had never understood.

I come from a town that was (and still is) almost exclusively white. When I was a youth going through school, we had one black student in our class, and I’m not sure there was another black student in the entire district. It wasn’t until I attended a much more diverse school (Indiana University in Bloomington) that I began to realize that not everyone has had the same experiences with “reality” as I have had. Still, until I attended this power-building training many years later, I would argue that I was completely blind to the realities of what it’s like to live as a black individual in a world where white people are so easily accepted—and respected.

“We teach our kids to trust the police.”

At lunch one day during the conference, I sat at a table of 9 — 8 black women from various cities around the country, and me, the lone white face. I don’t remember how the conversation started, but at some point, we got onto the topic of police and their treatment of people of color. In the course of conversation, I said, “We teach our kids from the time they are really young that they can trust a police officer. We have told our kids from the beginning, if you get lost or hurt or feel unsafe, find a police officer; it’s a safe person to talk to.”

I was met with wide-eyed stares, lax jaws and silence from these eight women. I knew I had said something wrong, but I hadn’t caught myself before I let the words loose from my lips. And I had no idea how wrong those words had been. 

Finally, one woman at the table cautiously and slowly answered, “It’s a little different for the black community.”

The women shared their stories about what they have told their kids about police: You can’t trust them. Be on your best behavior. Don’t give them reason to go against you. If you get pulled over, look them in the eye. Put your hands on the steering wheel, in plain sight. Ask for permission to get your registration from the glove box. Say, “Yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir.” Be polite. Above all, avoid interacting with them if at all possible.

Never, they said, had any of them ever told their kids they could trust the police. Each of them had at least one story to tell about their own experiences with law enforcement officers, each one a clear example of how the officers immediately didn’t respect or trust them, or their black children, friends, or others who were with them.

I was shocked. And that was only the beginning of the stories I would hear as I was at that training — and every day I have worked with Faith in Indiana since. It wasn’t just stories about the police; it was stories about the workplace, the health care system, the criminal justice system, the courts, the free enterprise system, the education system — everything.

I had been blind to my privileges.

That training was a defining moment in my life. I shed a lot of tears during those few days, realizing that I had been blind to just how privileged my life had been, not because my parents were rich (they weren’t), or because I grew up in a luxurious neighborhood (I didn’t), or because we could afford name-brand clothing as kids (we couldn’t), but because I was a white person in a white family, and the United States is a good place to be if you’re white.

I also saw the pain on the faces of individuals who were black and brown, who told their own stories of how they were not living a life of privilege — not because they weren’t smart enough to get a good education (they were), or they didn’t work hard enough to have a good job (they did), or because they couldn’t get out of a bad neighborhood (they could), but because they were people of color in a country where countless systems were stacked against them.

It’s “black lives matter,” not “black lives are the only ones that matter.”

As a white person, I will admit to having been rubbed the wrong way when, years ago, I first saw signs and t-shirts that read, “Black lives matter.” I have heard white people retort, “all lives matter.” Before I began to understand how black people face a different world than we as white people do, I probably have even said that myself at some point.

Why? As humans, acceptance is a strong part of our nature. We all want to believe that we matter to the world. White people want to matter as much as black people do, so for some white people, the signs sting a little, at least on the surface. The same can be said when we hear black people say things like, “white people don’t understand black people,” or “white people are racist.” We want to stand up in defense and say, “Wait! Not all white people are that way!” We feel misunderstood in those moments.

And black people feel misunderstood in many, many moments every day. Until we can understand that what people are saying when they say “black lives matter” isn’t “black lives are the only ones that matter,” but instead, “black lives matter, too,” we can never fully empathize with people of color.

White people always seem to matter…

White people by default seem to matter within the systems that are in place in our country, just because they’re white. If you’re not sure that’s true, take a look at the political representatives in our country (or another image here), the leadership of Fortune 500 companies and other large companies everywhere, health care executives and even Hollywood entertainers. The highest ranks are almost exclusively white (white men, no less).

…why don’t black people?

Black people are rarely represented equally. That’s not because they are not qualified or capable of being in those positions, but that the systems that lead anyone to high levels of success are stacked against people of color. 

• Black students are suspended or expelled from school more often than whites — and not because of their behavior. 
• Black students are less likely to have access to or enroll in high school courses that prepare them for college. 
• Black students disproportionately attend schools that have smaller budgets, less-qualified teachers, lower-paid teachers and newer teachers than white students.
• Research has shown that white teachers expect less from their black students than they do of white students. 
• Schools that are composed of 90% or more black students spend $733 less per student per year compared with schools with 90% or more white students. 
• According to a 2019 EdBuild report, "nationwide, 8.9 million students attend school next door to significantly whiter and far better-resourced school districts. Of these pairs, the average disadvantaged district has $4,207 less per student than their more advantaged neighbor." Thirty districts in Indiana alone are divided by race and funding.

In addition to an education system that works against black people, our health care system has similar problems. People of color, especially black people, have disproportionately been affected by COVID-19, in part due to being “over-represented in jobs that are at higher risk … and in the jobs hardest hit economically,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Shaping these outcomes [for black individuals] are structural barriers like wealth and income disparities, inadequate access to health care, and racial discrimination built into the health system.”

Similarly, “black Hoosiers were more likely pushed out of employment during the recession and recovery, and black workers are twice as likely to be low-income (54.2%) than their white counterparts (26.7%), because they are more likely to be working in low-paying occupations,” according to the Indiana Institute for Working Families. “Our Black neighbors are less likely to earn paid time off and more likely to experience the death of their baby before that baby’s first birthday.”

The criminal justice system has its own disparities. For example, blacks and whites use drugs at similar rates, but blacks are jailed more than six times as often. Washington Post reporter Radley Balko (incidentally, a white male) has been covering race-related news for more than 10 years and says, “it’s pretty clear to me that the evidence of racial bias in our criminal justice system isn’t just convincing — it’s overwhelming.” He catalogs a long list of evidence supporting that claim here.

We’re all humans, but not all treated that way.

Black people have to fight harder to get the same opportunities for high-quality education, to break out of generations-long lines of poverty (compared with white people who came from similar circumstances), to live life without suspicion by the police, and sometimes, even just to survive in the world long enough to create for themselves lives that feel safe and comfortable.

We have seen this with what happened to George Floyd. He had a lifetime ahead of him. He had a family, friends, a church and two jobs. Yes, he had a criminal past, but he had been already served his punishment for those. On Memorial Day weekend this year, his alleged crime was that he used a counterfeit $20 bill to pay for something he picked up at a general store. But is using counterfeit money a crime worth a death sentence? Absolutely not. 

The police officer who committed this murder presumably made some assumptions about George Floyd, based solely on the fact that he was black. Why did he feel like he needed to hold his head to the ground — much less for nearly 9 minutes, even after he realized George was unconscious and lacked a pulse? He wasn’t fighting back, and he hadn’t pulled a weapon on the officer. Did he assume George was a dangerous criminal? Why? Because he was black and accused of a (petty) crime. George Floyd appeared to have given him no other reason.

It’s hard to argue that this was wrong.

This was a clear example of brutal policing, and one would be hard-pressed to argue anything else. But George Floyd wasn’t the first black person to die unnecessarily at the hands of a police officer. So why did George Floyd’s murder spark the global unrest we are seeing now?

I tend to believe as Dr. Clyde Posley, senior pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Indianapolis, does: “Indeed, the city and the country has reached a tipping point precipitated by a sweltering pot of racial injustice, the fires of which have been steadily raising and are being constantly stoked by racial rhetoric from the White House—and several incidences where accountability for injustices and crimes against people of color have continued to mount, … more often than not, with very little accountability for the purveyors of the injustice.”

In the same article, University of Indianapolis Professor Terrence Harewood explains that this tipping point has come as a result of the racial injustice that Dr. Posley mentions compounding over time. “So what has been occurring is the result of the universal law of compound effect,” he says. 

Simply put, we have seen such brutal policing, particularly of black people at the hands of white police, so frequently, that it feels like it’s accepted as “normal.”

But this is not normal. Or right.

Compounded negative depictions lead to implicit bias.

I should be clear that I do not believe every police officer is corrupt or that every police department unfairly treats people of color. But I do believe that, as a society, the gut reaction when it comes to black people is not the same as the gut reaction to white people, especially when crime is involved. If George Floyd had been a white man accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill, I would put money on it that he would be alive today.

That “gut reaction” is, in social-scientific and racial-justice communities, called “implicit bias.” Unfortunately, it’s not a phenomenon that exists only among police officers, although, based on the nature of their jobs, they arguably might be more prone to it than some.

In fact, we are all prone to implicit bias. In simple terms, it’s formed when we are exposed, over and over again, to certain images of certain groups of people. Our brains define categories and begin to place people of certain types into those categories, often without us even being aware it’s happening. White bias against black men is common among white people — especially white people whose exposure to black people is primarily via media, not from personal interactions. 

Roots of implicit bias

Why? Research has shown that media (both news and entertainment) disproportionately portray black people as criminals and white people as victims. By being exposed to these images over and over again—especially if we don’t personally experience regular counter-images, such as friendships with black people, black mentors or black community leaders—our brains begin to categorize black people by what they have been trained to believe they are — criminals. This leads to many problems, including black defendants being less likely to face juries that are not biased. The “court of public opinion” becomes tainted, too, because a black alleged criminal is more likely to be covered negatively in the news than one who’s white.

Breaking free from implicit bias

In order for things to change, we must break out of our implicit biases. That’s not an easy task, but researchers at the Perception Institute report that “exposing people to counter-stereotypes can decrease implicit bias.” If media (news and entertainment alike) will work harder to find positive examples of our black neighbors and their actions; spend more time highlighting positive historical examples, like Martin Luther King, Jr.; and “de-saturate” crime reporting, especially crimes with black alleged criminals, we can begin to work toward reducing this bias.

In addition, we must work harder to ensure that we (and our children) are exposed to positive images of people of color — not just black people, but people of various ethnicities and religions, too. That might mean avoiding the evening news; steering clear of television shows that focus on police officers, like “Blue Bloods” and “COPS”; and seeking out opportunities to intermix with people from outside your town or neighborhood. 

Making change will require more than just hiring a certain percentage of black people into your company or electing a certain number of black people to our legislature, in order to be “representative.”

It will be about elevating the good in people, instead of the bad—not simply because of one’s color, but, one might argue, despite it. It’s about more than the color of one’s skin. It’s about the quality of one’s character. 

Elevating the good, for a change

We must seek to amplify the amazing people we know — people of all colors and backgrounds. We must celebrate the diversity of the people God created to inhabit this world. We must seek to understand people who don’t look like exactly like we do. We must seek to empathize with our fellow Hoosiers and Americans, for no other reason than because they’re human beings, and so are we.

Our news, entertainment and other media must change. We must also change what we choose to watch and hear. We must stop making entertainment out of violence. We must not generalize entire groups of people. We must not call people names if we don’t look like or agree with them. We must stop making assumptions about people based on outward appearances. 

We must demand that our news media cover the stories of the good in the world. We must not repeat the name-calling tweets from our president, no matter how harmless or childish they might seem. We must point out the good in the people we see and know. We must elevate people of good character — much more frequently than people of wealth or power. 

It all comes down to this.

We must look at one another with deep and sincere respect. We must want to hear what others have to say. We must help our children to understand that we are all humans. We all can hurt when we are not heard, or when we are beaten down by an individual or an entire society. But we all can love, too. 

Love truly is the most powerful agent of change. If we want to see things change, we must begin to truly love one another, if for no other reason than we are all one race — the human race — and all created in the image of God.