Some people pooh-pooh the existence of bigotry, but I myself, an elderly white guy, have been profiled against repeatedly recently — and it ain’t pretty folks! Yet often snap judgments based on cursory information, including appearance, are economically efficient. Social scientists call this “heuristics.” So I am torn.
My wife and I are moving from a house to a retirement condo. We sleep and eat in the new place, but work at getting the house ready to sell. I’m doing concrete work on the foundation, tarring around dormers, stuccoing, fixing the retaining wall, etc.
I wear old clothes and get dirty. The third night in the condo I wearily got in the elevator long after dark. A well-dressed older lady eyed me warily. She saw a guy with unkempt hair in faded jeans pocked with welding holes, cement splashes on his glasses, a smear of tar on one elbow and a whiff of gasoline from cleaning other tar off. “Are you working in the building?” she asked sharply.
Since then I regularly get stares from new neighbors. This week, going in the main entrance, I had to wait as a resident opened the door for a liquor deliveryman. I waited, key in hand. But rather than just letting the door close behind her for me to open myself, she turned, asking sharply, “Do you live in this building?”
Being judged based on one’s superficial appearance can hurt. But we had just seen a PBS documentary on archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age village in the fens of England. They concluded the village had been burned out by established tribes driving away interlopers.
The impulse to challenge outsiders has deep socio-biological roots. Any village that did not challenge menacing strangers got decimated. In a condominium dominated by retired university faculty, clothes showing you do manual labor mark you as an interloper. Statistically, a disheveled guy in dirty clothes in a senior condo probably is more dangerous than someone in a sports jacket. Physical safety is an important reason seniors buy such units. Ensuring intruders don’t breach security isn’t trivial.
Alertness to possible threats and challenging them is a civic virtue, an example of the social cohesion that political scientist Robert Putnam hailed in his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Communities where residents call the police when unfamiliar teens cluster around a neighbor’s garage or who are alert to whether an elderly neighbor is stirring are healthier than neighborhoods where looking the other way is the norm. Effective public safety is cheaper and more effective when citizens are involved.
But a society becomes unjust when black adolescents walking through an alley on their way home get angry stares while white classmates are ignored. And it is unjust for police to target African-American motorists for minor or even made-up traffic infractions while ignoring similar ones made by whites like me.
People are less likely to engage when most of their contacts with authorities are negative. Last week, I was ahead of a police cruiser on Snelling Avenue when I merged left across two lanes and then turned left onto Larpenteur. Only then did I remember a burned-out bulb for my left rear turn signal. The cop I crossed in front of did not stop me.
Which brings to mind Philando Castile.
I remembered the bad bulb, ironically, just as I passed flowers left in memory of Castile, a black man who had been stopped 51 times by police, and in July was pulled over for a bad taillight in Falcon Heights before being shot to death by an officer. That officer is now facing charges.
But why was Castile stopped so often and I so seldom? Were the police behind me last week on a more urgent task? Did they not notice my lack of signals?
Or is it because I am an old white guy? I may be profiled as an unkempt working man by my new neighbors, but I repeatedly also benefit from privilege, as I may have that day on Snelling.
The 195-mile trek between here and our farmland southeast of Pipestone is wearily familiar. I often exceed the speed limit on Highway 30. Two summers ago, returning late one Saturday night, a sheriff’s deputy pulled me over. As he walked to my window he played his flashlight over my pickup. I gave him my driver’s license and we had the following exchange:
“Do you know how fast you were going?”
“At least 70.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home to St. Paul, been working on the farm by Chandler a few days.”
Flicking his flashlight from my license to decals on the window behind my head he asked:
“That red one with the ‘AA,’ that’s the 82nd. But what’s the white wing and red sword?”
“173rd Airborne, we were at LZ English (in Vietnam).”
“Thank you for your service, sir. Try to keep it at least under 65 in Cottonwood County.”
The deputy was using “heuristics,” utilizing available information to reach an approximate solution when getting all the data necessary for an optimal solution is expensive or impossible. Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologist who got the 2002 Nobel in economics, has researched heuristics in economic decisions.
The deputy’s heuristic apparently was “current tabs, Army bumper sticker, cutting torch, manure piled against tailgate, tote of sweet corn, sober, cooperative, white codger, current license, Vietnam vet — give license back with a warning.”
Perhaps that was an efficient use of taxpayers’ money. Getting back across the county to monitor people leaving the bar in Westbrook may improve public safety more than ticketing for me. So might a sweep of dirt roads where adolescents gather on summer nights to drink beer.
But what if I had been an African-American, everything else the same, including army decals on the window? Would the officer’s heuristic calculations been the same? Would he have let me go without even checking for priors? What if I had been a 20-year-old Hispanic man with my same torch? Would the deputy’s heuristic have been, “oh, a hobby farmer” or, “hey, the bigest Smith torch and regulators, where did this Mexican steal them?”
We recently hired a masterful stucco worker. He had stuccoed in Nevada for 22 years. But he does not have a green card. If the U.S. is going to deport up to 3 million illegal immigrants, supposedly with criminal records, after the inauguration, what heuristics will we use to identify them? Will these be consistent with our Constitution? With any sense of common decency? Will we go door to door in West St. Paul and Landfall and south Minneapolis, looking at people’s faces, listening to their speech? How about North Oaks or Wayzata? Will we hire battalions of trained linguists to troll construction sites and restaurants, evaluating accents? Would their heuristic be Guatemalan — yes, Irish — maybe, Dutch or Swedish — no?
There are efficiency reasons to use profiling and other heuristics such as ”rules of thumb” and “educated guesses.” If a shopkeeper bursts out his door and yells, “Help, I’ve been robbed,” and a police officer sees a young male running in one direction and an elderly woman walking slowly in the other, is there much question which she should pursue? What if one is a codger in dirty jeans with tar on his elbow and the other sports a natty jacket? What if one is a white guy with a mullet and tattoos and the other is a Somali teen in dress shirt and pants?
Racism and bigotry are real. And the impulse to make quick decisions based on limited sensory cues is deep in our human nature. Such decisions affect our economy in multiple ways. They may save a deputy’s time. And they may waste productivity of millions of people. The loan officer of the Federal Land Bank in Slayton, Minn., was using a heuristic in 1958 when he told my mother, “Mrs. Lotterman, our policy is that we don’t make loans to women.” That rule of thumb, reflecting the social mores of the age, perhaps simplified work for his office. But it was deeply unjust and reflected a huge waste of economic resources nationally. And that all is the subject of another column.