Law professor: Racism today not intended

University of Southern California law professor Jody Armour argued that racism in contemporary… University of Southern California law professor Jody Armour argued that racism in contemporary America is not so much the result of willful intent. Rather, he contended that it is largely a product of unconscious psychological tendencies.

He said, however, that drawing this conclusion doesn’t make it any less pernicious or more acceptable to discriminate.

His argument was founded on psychological concepts as well as ideas from law.

During his lecture, given at noon on Thursday in the Teplitz Memorial Courtroom at Pitt’s School of Law, he cited a number of psychological experiments. One experiment presented situations in which white subjects were bumped into by blacks and whites, then interviewed about the event.

The majority of those bumped by blacks interpreted the bumps as being intentional or mean-spirited, while the majority of those bumped by whites felt that the bumps were innocuous.

The same experiment was later repeated, with comparable results, using a group of 8-year-olds as the test subjects.

He also cited an experiment that elucidated the psychological effects of stereotypes on those who are stereotyped. The experiment featured black and white students taking a test consisting of questions from the GRE. The experimenters told the students the test would measure intelligence. The black students scored significantly lower on the test. A second group took the same test, without being told that the test measured intelligence. This time, the scores were indistinguishable.

Results like those produced by black students were also observed in similar tests. One test had white women scoring lower than white men in a “math test.” Another had white men scoring lower than Asian men, also in a “math test.”

While Armour’s analysis of the cause of racism was largely without blame, he also made it clear that the results were unacceptable.

In Baltimore, according to Armour, 56 percent of black males, age 16 to 29, are in some level of the criminal justice system. The same is true of one-third of that demographic in California, he said.

As a professor, Armour has witnessed the phenomenon firsthand, such as when only one of the eight black students in one of his classes was a man. Armour called for an end to this “dire demographic in the classroom.”

He also recalled a conversation he had with an opponent of affirmative action, who argued that the program interfered with his ability to trust his gut instinct. Armour noted that gut instinct was fully susceptible to racism – that it was influenced by unconscious biases – and that affirmative action helps to counteract those biases.

He rebuked a school of thought suggesting that racism was a natural, instinctual reaction. Using such psychological justification, he said, is a racism that “hides its fascist boots beneath a lab coat.”

Armour discussed the issue of attribution: In the legal system, the question arises as to whether a crime has been committed because of a shortcoming in character, or as the result of a reaction to an untenable situation. He said in the shooting at Columbine, the response to the crimes of whites was to try to attribute the crimes to external, situational factors, such as violence in entertainment media, whereas inner-city crimes committed by minorities, tend to be attributed to character.

Armour also discussed a matter very much directed at the many law students who were among the approximately 150 people in the audience. He said he had initial reservations about pursuing a legal future, because he felt that thinking like a lawyer might entail him to think differently.

He eventually realized, however, that “you don’t have to sacrifice your heart to develop your mind.”

Armour earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology from Harvard University, then moved on to the University of California Berkeley. He earned his J.D. from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School. He was an assistant professor of law at Pitt from 1990-1995, and spent another two years as an associate professor.

Armour’s speech was the latest installment of the law school’s annual “Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture on Racial Justice.”