Below is an open letter I recently wrote on Rivera's now infamous comments:
As a legal academic, active scholar, and father that writes on issues relating to social justice, focusing particularly on the Latino and Latina community, I am always cautious about condemning another person of color out of concern over promoting factionalism. I was nevertheless compelled to write this open letter after your recent comments on the Fox & Friends program.
While you have since tried to distance yourself from those words — because, as you stated, your son said he was ashamed of you — your deed was already done. Indeed, you stated you would "bet money" that Trayvon Martin wouldn't have been fatally shot if he had not been wearing a hoodie. If that moment of great lapse in judgment wasn't enough, you went on to say:
I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies… I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was.
Upon learning of the above, I almost fell out of my chair in disbelief. You attempted to later explain that you were speaking from the perspective of a concerned parent, and "that [your] mission is to save kids' lives in the real world." What you failed to realize when you made the comments — and sadly, it did not dawn upon you later when you tried to explain yourself — is that you were buying-into classic stereotypes concerning urban youth, particularly young African-Americans and Latinos.
That beautiful child that was killed was no more a "gangsta," to use your own language, because he was wearing a hoodie than he was one for being African-American. You did a disservice to all youth by engaging in a classic form of implicit bias, a bias that I have written extensively on because of the actions of those in your profession, and particularly of those on your Fox cable channel (an issue, though related, better left for another day).
In the event you are not aware of the term — hidden bias, or unconscious bias, is a concept that helps explain why discrimination persists, despite polling and other research demonstrating that people oppose it. As a report of the American Values Institute observes, Doctors Anthony Greenwald and M.R. Benaji posited that it was possible that our social behavior was not completely under our conscious control.
In Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem and Stereotypes, they concluded that much of our social behavior is driven by learned stereotypes that operate automatically — and therefore unconsciously — when we interact with other people. Related to this, given the sheer amount of information that bombards our senses everyday, we need to appreciate how we process and understand all that information. Our minds work through what are called "schemas." As Professor Jerry Kang notes, "if we unpack these schemas further, we see that some of the underlying cognitions include stereotypes, which are simply traits we associate with a category." What is particularly important here is that, as Kang has taught us, if we are not careful, these mental shortcuts, or schemas, can easily lead to discriminatory behavior.
Sadly, Mr. Rivera, in your comments concerning hoodies being the cause of young Trayvon's death, not only did you in effect blame the victim, a classic insensitive and ill-informed tactic, you also used your mental shorthand association of criminals with a common everyday reality for American youth of all colors and backgrounds. Simply put, teenagers wear hoodies. Heck, all athletes wear hoodies! Indeed, as a fellow parent, I do not find such attire all that urban, or a cause for any particular identification. Sadly, you did. In your comments, you associated hoodies with urban criminals or thugs. I suggest you reflect on your own mental shortcuts and associations. There may very well be something far more sinister in your implicit thinking.
I suggest your next step should be an apology to the public, and it should not be motivated by your son's reaction. It should be an apology because in your comments you displayed the same type of association the shooter displayed by virtue of young Trayvon's use of a hoodies (or his skin color).
I for one was proud, yet saddened, this past Friday when after I picked up my boys from elementary school, a group of roughly half a dozen African-American and Latino students from Miami's American Senior High walked into my local Blockbuster store. And yes, they were all wearing hoodies! They showed a solidarity and social responsibility that ideally can lead us all to learn, and perhaps eventually lead us to not make rash decisions that prove tragic.
Nice post, Ediberto.
I think this post runs together two separate issues: whether Rivera should have said it and whether it's, in fact, true. Nothing in the (rather sanctimonious!) letter denies that the probabilistic claim that P (being shot | wearing a hoodie) > P (being shot | ~ wearing hoodie). Or else engages in any sort of ANOVA analysis about the relative causal contributions of wearing a hoodie (putative cause 1) and Zimmerman's shot (cause 2). Rather, this is hubris about Rivera's claim and racial stereotypes, without even considering that the former doesn't implicate the latter; in other words, of course people are more likely to shoot people in hoodies–i.e., people they can't see as well–than people who aren't wearing hoodies. Anyway, whether Rivera should have said it or not doesn't make it false. I think this is an uncritical letter that doesn't tend to what could be interesting issues.
Anon,
I'm not sure what Rivera's exact words were, and since I can't think of a single good reason to care what he thinks about a single subject, I'll not bother to check. But, if he said that Martin was partly "responsible" for his being shot because of what he wore, then he was, at least, grossly wrong. Why? Because "responsible", in the normal sense of things, is a moral term. It doesn't just mean "causal contributor to", at least when applied to humans. (Of course, we do sometimes use it when applied to things that are not agents, but that's a somewhat loose or metaphorical use, I think- not wrong, but not the core meaning.) Perhaps Martin's wearing a hoodie was a causal contributor to his being shot. It seems pretty likely that his being black was a causal contributor, too. But the responsibility, in the normal or core sense of the term, falls, and has to fall, entirely on Zimmerman. And, talk like Rivera's is pretty clearly meant to relieve Zimmerman of his responsibility- if Martin was partly responsible, then Zimmerman is less than fully responsible. But that's just false. Martin did nothing wrong in wearing a jacket. Therefore, in the normal or core sense of the term he bore no responsibility for his being shot, any more than his being black made him responsible for being shot. Failure to distinguish "responsible" from "causal contributor" here is a serious mistake. It's a mistake that someone who isn't interested in relieving Zimmerman of his responsibility is unlikely to make. That Rivera was quick to make this mistake shows something about him, I think. It wasn't as if we needed reasons to think he had nothing to contribute to public discourse before this, but it's certainly another mark to that end.
(Perhaps we should warn young black men not to dress in perfectly normal ways, or even in particular ways, for fear of being shot for no good reason at all. But that wouldn't mean they were responsible if they were shot, only that we, and especially they, living in a much worse world than we'd like to think.)
Well said Matt! I agree with your assessment. Thanks!
Hi Matt, anon here again. What Rivera said here actually matters, and disarms your distinction. To wit, he said that the "hoodie was responsible" not that Martin was responsible for wearing it. Since we don't ascribe moral agency to apparel, it has to be a causal, not moral claim. Second, even if someone were responsible for something, it doesn't make someone else less responsible; responsibility is not a zero sum game. For example, Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, but so were a bunch of other people; we don't apportion their individual blame down to marginally above zero just because there were a bunch of them! Rather, they're all (fully) morally responsible, which is just to say that they all are (fully) deserving of moral blame. Anyway, I'm a philosopher, not a lawyer–hence the technical points–but it just seems to me that Rivera's claim is straightforwardly true: Martin would have been less likely to have been shot if he hadn't been wearing a hoodie. That doesn't mean that Martin was probably a gangster–in fact, statistically, he probably wasn't–but rather just that the hoodie made him more likely to be perceived as one.
Sorry to be slow to get back to this- I've been very busy. I still don't think this will work, for a couple of reasons. First, it seems clear that there must be a reference to Martin, and not just his jacket, here- his jacket didn't do anything at all- it was just on him. It, itself, was no more responsible for his death than his underpants. It wasn't like a faulty part of a bridge that broke which we could say (a bit metaphorically, I still want to insist) was "responsible" for the deaths of people on the bridge. So, the most plausible way to interpret Rivera is that _Martin's wearing_ of the coat was (partially, we hope) "responsible" for his being murdered. That's false, though, and monsterous. Again, the jacket here plays exactly the same role as Martin being young and black, but it would be false and mosterous to say that Martin's being young and black were "responsible" for his being killed, even though they were clearly causal contributors. Secondly, while it's right that responsibility can be shared, in the sense that this doesn't lessen the responsibility of either party, this is mostly so in cases where there is a joint activity of some sort. But a sweat shirt can't be involved in a joint activity with anyone, so there can't be shared responsibility here, and even on the worst reading of Martin's actions (for which there seems to be little evidence) it still seems clear to me that Zimmerman would bear full moral responsibility for murdering Martin, as nothing Martin did could, on any plausible reading, justify killing him. So, Riveria is still, at best, deeply confused, and most likely expressing some seriously racist and otherwise immoral views. That's what we should expect from him, of course, which is one more reason why it's really best to play him no attention. He adds nothing to the world.
Thanks Matt for your comments. I largely agree with you, and well said by the way. I do, nonetheless, take slight issue with your conclusion concerning RIvera. Sadly, he took a position that many others hold. Having a public figure, to put it nicely, take such stances and having them go unchallenged, subtly confirms to some that bias is okay. Such confirmations are thus dangerous. Ultimately, that is why I and others tried to take him to task. But, as my subsequent post noted, he did not change his position in a subsequent interview.