I spent my life through college graduation in the tropics, and I had never traveled to a snowy location.  However, I did grow up on the sunny beaches along the Atlantic Ocean, both in Puerto Rico and Florida.  I had a quiet fascination with snow, the white, fluffy solid water.  Our freezer grew frost that resembled hairy ice; that’s about the closest I got.  In Puerto Rico, we had a shaved ice treat called a piragua.  That certainly resembled snow, but maybe the quantity of a snowball.

My other fascination is the combination of snow and beaches.  The rational pre-engineer in me reasoned that beaches existed in locations cold enough to snow, and snow must at least occasionally accumulate there.  Therefore, there must be instances of waves crashing onto a shore while snow is visible.  This isn’t rocket science.  Why don’t we see pictures of it?  This thought crossed my mind before we all had access to the internet; I couldn’t get answers through a web search.

My friend Tom

Let me tell you a story about my friend Tom.  He’s a former colleague of mine from Microsoft.  Tom is well-spoken and gregarious.  He lived in Seattle and drove a Volvo when we worked together.  Tom was a good, law-abiding driver.  I mean, he occasionally sped, but all of us do.  He didn’t speed more frequently than anyone else, nor did he do it excessively.  We had a running joke among our friends about how frequently the police officers would stop Tom for a traffic violation.

These stops occurred every few weeks or a month.  The police officers would nearly always let him go, but they persistently found a reason to stop him.  We would give him some grief about yet another stop.  I definitely joked and asked, in jest, what were you doing this time.

Abruptly one day, I finally realized that Tom was not only (Eastern) Indian, but also a dark-skinned Indian.  Suddenly, it stopped being funny.  Will I tell you that every single police officer looked at Tom driving by in his Volvo, concluded in that instant that he was a black motorist, and this alone warranted a traffic stop?  No.  Truthfully, I won’t even tell you they were necessarily aware of it.  However, that doesn’t mean that bias doesn’t happen.

Those exchanges with Tom were many years ago; some will assert that this is no longer ‘a thing’, except that it is.  A study conducted by Stanford demonstrated that racial bias in traffic stops decreased significantly at night, when the police officers were less able to observe the race of the driver.  It is often referred to as ‘The Veil of Darkness’ study.  It includes 95 million traffic stop records and spanned 2011 to 2018.

Racism still exists

I get it; the cartoonishly explicit forms of racism are gone (or exceedingly rare).  Schools are no longer segregated; neither are public bathrooms.  I have literally never heard of any burning crosses in anyone’s yard.  Black citizens have been able to vote since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Conservatives would have you believe that racism, like smallpox, has been completely eradicated.  Naturally, they won’t deny that instances of racism exist, but they somehow believe that they are isolated and exceedingly rare.

They convince themselves that systemic racism doesn’t exist because the alternative is worse.  If systemic racism occurs, then they’re either accountable or, at very least, complicit in its survival.  Honestly, it’s much easier than you may believe.  All we need to do is willfully ignore or minimize those conversations.

Let’s reflect on my friend Tom.  I never mentioned my observation about the traffic stops and the color of his skin to any of our friends.  What do you think their responses would’ve been?  They may have gone something like this:

• “You don’t know that’s why he was pulled over.”
• “It’s not cool to make that accusation without evidence.”
• “Hey, I just came here to play basketball and hang out with friends… not discuss politics.”

The problem transforms.  Dr. Brené Brown explains, “Brave leaders are never silent about hard things.  Our job is to excavate the unsaid.”  To that assertion, I’ll add, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

Out of sight, out of mind

Conservative friends claim that we have eradicated racism, and it’s a thing of the past.  They say that when they’re not a person of color, and while knowing few people of color.  The dilemma is that if:

• They themselves are unlikely to be a target of racism.
• They do not witness others being the target of racism.
• They’re unwilling to listen to (or deny) accounts of racism.

Then, obviously, racism doesn’t exist.  Racism has become the ‘snow on the beach’.  Even when they instinctively know it occurs, they pretend that it doesn’t actually happen because they don’t personally witness it.  Or perhaps, that it happens so infrequently that we can safely ignore it.  We can’t.

Plausible deniability

Again, do I believe all of those police officers looked at Tom in his Volvo and pulled him over because they thought he was black?  No.  Do I even believe they all were necessarily consciously aware of Tom’s skin color?  No.

We watch a police officer conduct traffic stops.  Stopping one black motorist for driving one mile over the speed limit is not necessarily a sign of racism.  Stopping one Caucasian motorist only after exceeding twenty miles over the speed limit is also not necessarily a sign of racism.  Individually, they both fall within the threshold of plausible deniability.

How frequently does that officer stop black motorists for exceeding the speed limit by one mile?  What if the officer conducts traffic stops like this 25% of the time?  40% of the time?  What is the threshold of ‘suspicious’?  What is the threshold of ‘blatant’?  If 100% of that officer’s stops are for black motorists who exceeded the speed limit by less than three miles, may we label them a racist?

Or to put it another way, rolling a pair of dice and getting a sum of twelve isn’t a problem.  Neither is doing it twice.  Again and again.  At what stage do you cross the threshold of ‘plausible’ into ‘naïve’ or even ‘gullible’?

Tabulating the numbers

What is the antidote to plausible deniability?  The antidote to bias from anecdotal observations?  Facts and statistics.  You want to believe that systemic racism doesn’t exist.  After all, if racism was indeed so pervasive, you may be similarly afflicted, and that certainly isn’t happening.  However, as we examine the numbers, it tells a different story:

• The aforementioned ‘veil of darkness’ study includes 95 million observations and spanned seven years.  It included statistics from 21 state patrol and 35 municipal police forces.
• A Harvard study found that black college graduates had the same chances of being called back for a job as white convicted felons.  Do you want to maintain the absurd notion that we are colorblind?
• This is a direct quote from World Metrics:  “Black individuals are 28% of police shooting victims but 12% of the U.S. population.”
• How about selling your home?  Would you be surprised that the same home appraised for 40% more once the black homeowner replaced the pictures of black family members with pictures of Caucasian people?
• Suppose that a white man and a black man are convicted of the same crime.  Would it surprise you to learn that black men, on average, receive a 19% longer sentence than a white man for similar offenses?

One individual data point is simply an outlier.  Collectively, they are trends, not outliers.  The numerous times the police stopped my friend Tom in a ‘routine’ traffic stop wasn’t incidental; it was racism.

Just because we don’t observe the snow on the beach doesn’t mean it doesn’t occur.  The same is true about racism.