The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [37]
My wife was recently walking to the subway from her job in downtown Boston when she came upon a mugging in progress.20 A middle-aged woman named Barbara Pero had just retrieved her car from the valet at her daughter’s condo when a crazed, vacant-eyed man pushed his way into her car and pulled a knife on her. The valet saw what was happening and started banging on the car and on the assailant with an umbrella. The assailant jumped out of the car, ripping Pero’s purse from her hands, and ran up the street. The valet chased the knife-wielding assailant, calling for help. When the valet caught up, the assailant turned and swung his knife at him. The knife missed its target, and the assailant jumped into a car idling nearby. A police officer arrived and placed the assailant under arrest.
My wife and another woman happened upon the scene as the assailant grabbed Pero’s purse and ran away, followed by the brave valet armed only with an umbrella. My wife tried to comfort Pero while the other woman called 911. The other woman told the dispatcher that a mugging had just occurred, and that the police should be looking for an African American who had just fled the scene.
Here’s where the cultural assumptions come into play: the assailant was white. It was the valet, who protected Pero with only an umbrella, who was black. But the woman who saw the commotion of men fighting and then running up the street had seen the African American man as the assailant. Pero and my wife immediately spoke up, and the caller corrected the description.
But how often do such mistakes occur? Studies repeatedly show that eyewitness accounts are seriously flawed, in part because as the brain tries to process information in a moment of stress, it takes shortcuts. One of these shortcuts is the use of cultural assumptions to shoehorn what we see into what we expect to see.21 Our cultural assumptions play on some of the cognitive flaws described in the last chapter. We often see what we expect to see, not because it is actually what happens but merely because we expect it.
The woman who called the police acted with the best of motivations. But she’s a member of this society like the rest of us, and it is a society where petty criminals are routinely depicted in the news media as men of color. Even though we have elected an African American president, we have not abandoned longstanding racial stereotypes.22 These stereotypes influenced the woman—unknowingly and innocently—to interpret what she saw in a certain way.
Culture can also create blind spots—things other people see but you do not. An example occurred recently in a Supreme Court argument over the Establishment Clause, the provision of the First Amendment that prohibits the government from establishing a religion. Some constitutional scholars believe this provision creates a “wall of separation” between church and state (although this phrase comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson and does not appear in the Constitution itself).23
The case concerned a cross that had been erected in 1934 on federal property in the Mojave National Preserve in California to commemorate the veterans who died in World War I.24 The Supreme Court’s case law about displays of religious symbols on public property emphasizes whether the display makes it appear that the government is endorsing one religion over others, or over non-belief. In the Mojave cross case, the government refused to have other religious symbols erected nearby, and the American Civil Liberties Union brought suit, saying that the cross endorsed Christianity and therefore amounted to an establishment of religion. Lower courts agreed and ordered that the cross be encased in a plywood box while appeals continued. Congress fought back, ordering the Interior Department to convey the small patch of land around the cross to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The question before the Supreme Court was whether this land transfer was sufficient to cure