Narrative #1: "Bridging the Walls That Divide Our Perceptions: Russell Robinson"
Narrative Excerpt from Russell K. Robinson, Perceptual Segregation, 108 Columbia L. Rev. 1093 (2008) (citations omitted). For a full version of the article from which this is drawn, visit this site.
In the summer of 2005, I presented a work in progress at a conference. Although I was excited about presenting, I also grappled with a barely conscious feeling of fear, and a consequent vigilance, in case my presentation was met with hostility. I have learned always to be on guard in such situations, even though actual confrontations are few and far between. I am an African American man, and my professional speaking engagements typically involve a mostly white audience. I also write and teach about issues of race, which tend to provoke strong reactions. In my experience, the most pointed or dismissive challenges to my ideas often come from white men. In approaching scholarly presentations, I always imagine, at least fleetingly, the worst case scenario: a question that I simply cannot answer. To some extent, this fear is universal. What gives the fear an extra bite in my experience is that I perceive the risk not simply to be that I will be viewed as unprepared or otherwise personally inadequate, but that I will be viewed as a stand- in for all African Americans, or at least all African Americans in academia. My failure then would confirm the racial “question mark,” the invisible expectation of inferior performance that many African Americans believe hovers over their heads.
It was with a mix of excitement and trepidation, then, that I approached the summer conference. As part of a panel of scholars, I presented a paper on the legal implications of race and gender discrimination in the casting of actors in the film industry. The chair/discussant was a white male professor, whom I will call Professor Miller. I had never met nor heard of Miller. Miller became frustrated with me because he perceived that I failed to comply with his request regarding the submission of papers prior to the conference. On May 27th, about one week before the panel, I had emailed Miller to confirm that he was the chair and to ask whether I could use a PowerPoint presentation. Miller never acknowledged my email, but he did send the following email to all the panelists on May 30th:
Dear paper givers,
1) While enlisted as discussant, I discover now that I am supposed to act as chair as well. I have written for instructions on format, but of the 1h45 allotted for our panels, I propose to give you each 20 minutes to present your work. I will ruthlessly stop you at the 21st minute. As I do not believe that there is any utility whatsoever in having meetings without discussion, this will preserve a good 35-40 minutes for discussion, including my comments.
2) I have yet to receive anyone’s paper. If I do not get your paper by tomorrow (Tuesday, May 31) at noon it is exceedingly unlikely that I will have time to receive or print it out, no less to read it. I look forward to meeting you all. Thanks in advance for your prompt response to this message.
Yours,
Phillip Miller
Miller sent his email at 4:32 PM and required us to submit our papers by “noon” the next day. I received Miller’s email in the evening. Since classes had ended, I was running errands that day, working from home and not checking email as regularly as usual. Although I had not planned on working on campus the next day, I rearranged my schedule so that I could stop by campus and email him the latest draft of my paper, which was only on my work computer, by 11:15 AM.
Miller perceived that my paper was late and announced this to the audience. In the introduction to his comments on the papers, he stated that he would not be able fully to discuss my paper because, “Professor Robinson sent it in late, and he sent me a 95-page draft even though he has been reading from a much shorter version.” I was utterly confused. Hadn’t I sent him the paper by the noon deadline? I could have sworn that I did, but my first impulse was to check my email log to make sure. I was also baffled by Miller’s complaint about the “shorter version” of my paper. I was reading from notes summarizing the paper, not the paper itself, which I thought was common practice. But I had never participated in this conference, and I feared that I had unwittingly violated some unarticulated norm. Alongside the thoughts of confusion was a surge of anger. I felt that whatever rules I may have violated, I did not deserve a public rebuke, which I found deeply embarrassing. I perceived that, as an African American, I was particularly vulnerable to a charge of lateness. Given the choice of accepting the word of a tenured, white male professor or a junior, black male, I thought it likely that some in the audience would believe I had submitted the paper on “CPT,” or “Colored People’s Time.”
Thus, I did not feel that I could simply remain silent. I spoke up, hoping that my voice would not wobble or reveal my seething anger. “I’m sorry, but you must be mistaken,” I said, “because I did submit the paper by the deadline. In any event, surely we can resolve this privately and not in front of the audience.” Miller insisted that the paper was late and then went on to critique my paper in scathing terms. He called the central idea “a non sequitur.” He also claimed that I failed to deal with the studio development process leading up to the casting of a film, including the writing process. At this point, I felt the need to interrupt again because I did not understand how Miller could fail to read my paper closely (which he had basically admitted) and yet attempt to eviscerate it. I felt embattled because of the combination of an intense substantive critique added to a charge of lateness, both of which I perceived to be unjustified. This time, I spoke up more authoritatively. I stated that I did in fact deal with the aspects that he thought were absent. When Miller attempted to silence me, I said: “Is this a lecture, or will we have an opportunity to respond?”
By now, the audience seemed uncomfortable with the escalating tension in the room. One professor in the audience, Anne, a white woman and former colleague of mine, interrupted Miller and said, “Excuse me, but the tone of this panel feels unproductive, and I think it all started with your unnecessary public rebuke of Professor Robinson. Can we move away from that and focus on the substance of the papers?” Miller failed to acknowledge Anne’s plea and continued with his remarks. Afterward, I approached Miller and asked him to check his email, so that he could see that I had sent him the paper by the deadline. He disagreed and expressed frustration with people at the conference “not being able to follow deadlines.”
Most of the people in the small audience, which was predominantly white, approached me at some point over the next day to express shock and dismay at Miller’s behavior. These expressions made me feel better, as they buffered my sense that Miller had breached protocol. Of the six to eight white people who approached me, only Anne stated that she felt the panel was “racialized.” All agreed that Miller’s behavior was highly unusual and unprofessional, but most people simply labeled him “rude” or a “jerk.” To me, it felt like something more. I turned the underlying facts over again and again in my head, trying to understand what had happened and, most importantly, whether I deserved Miller’s rebuke or whether he had discriminated against me. In my effort to make sense of this disturbing encounter and work through my anger, I told several friends, family members, and associates about this experience. I attempted to recount the experience as accurately as possible, although of course I cannot claim to view the event “objectively.” The night of the panel I went to dinner with several professors who write about race. Everyone in this group (two African Americans, one Latina, and one Asian American) suggested that they agreed that Miller’s behavior constituted racial discrimination and some offered similar stories of mistreatment.
The following Monday, I told two white male associates. Both were shocked that I felt discriminated against because of my race. One said that he would understand my perception had Miller said, “Professor Robinson submitted his paper on ‘Black People’s Time.”’” The other accused me of “insisting that everything is about race.” I also told a white male professor. In telling the story this time, I recalled a fact that had escaped my memory. One of the white panelists had submitted her paper at 7:33 PM, well after the noon deadline and several hours after I had submitted mine. But she was not publicly chastised for lateness. The white male professor was not persuaded by this fact that there was a racial element. “Maybe he’s just a jerk,” was his response.
I received different reactions from my two close white friends, Jack and Joel. In telling the story to my friend Jack over brunch, I concluded with my perception that the experience was racially discriminatory. Jack responded that, “it very well might have been racial.” He was open to my interpretation, but apparently not convinced. By contrast, Joel was certain that the experience was racially discriminatory. That these are my only close white friends is telling. First, I have selected them as close friends in part because they have never said anything to me that I regarded as racially offensive. For each close white friend, I could cite dozens of potential white friends who alienated me (almost always unwittingly) with racialized remarks. Second, because of the closeness of our friendships, I often lean on Jack and Joel for support regarding professional, personal, and romantic challenges, and they likewise lean on me. Given the mutually supportive nature of these relationships, I wondered if my friends felt pressure to shutter their skepticism and express support because they thought that was what I needed in the moment rather than cold, hard analysis of the incident.
My perception of the encounter with Miller and the listeners’ reactions to my telling of it yielded an important insight. It seemed that the listeners were interpreting the same set of facts through two radically different cognitive frameworks. Race appears to explain this phenomenon, which I call “perceptual segregation.” The reactions of people of color were very consistent. Including my professional colleagues and my family members, I told approximately eight people of color, most of whom were African American. My story seemed to resonate deeply and immediately. Those in academia had experienced humiliating treatment at the hands of white colleagues and students. For some in this group, it seemed that just hearing the story caused them to relive their own painful experiences with racial discrimination. No one challenged my interpretation of the incident as discrimination. It is of course possible that some of these people were acting in the capacity of a sympathetic colleague or friend and withheld skepticism about my perception of discrimination. They did not, however, say anything to suggest that they were withholding. I also believed that as people of color they likely felt that they had more latitude to challenge me than Jack and Joel may have felt.
Despite their empathy, no person of color said “I’m sorry” or other similar words of apology. To be sure, they were all very troubled that this had happened to me, but only white people seemed to feel the need to apologize. It was as if only white people had the power—and perhaps the obligation—to apologize for one of their “own.” As noted above, although the white people almost uniformly apologized, the vast majority of them did not suggest that they perceived the incident as discriminatory. An additional racial distinction was that while most of the white people were surprised to hear my story, the people of color tended to respond not with shock but with a sigh of weary recognition. Although there seemed to be a racial correlation in how the listeners interpreted my story, a minority of white observers (Anne and Joel) thought it probable that Miller had racially discriminated against me.
Given the same set of asserted facts, the white listeners tended to focus on difficult-to- answer questions that did not appear to preoccupy the people of color. For instance, some whites asked, “Maybe Miller is sharp with everybody, not just blacks?” I later learned that Miller had rubbed people the wrong way during a second panel that he chaired, although I was not told the race and gender of the participants. Miller’s mistreatment of some of the white female panelists on my panel, in combination with the curt tone of his email, might be understood to support the view that he is generally unpleasant. Maybe Miller had just had a bad day, and anyone whom he perceived to cross him that day would have inspired the same criticism. Maybe I had in fact horribly breached the norms of the conference, and as a result, Miller’s rebuke was justified.
I wrestled with these questions in mulling over the incident and discussing it with various friends. Colleagues informed me that the conference’s norms regarding the submission of papers were loose and that I had not violated them. In my view, then, the incident was simply a misunderstanding that was blown out of proportion and likely exacerbated by race. Since most emails I receive are from people on the West Coast, I assumed that “noon” meant noon my time, Pacific Standard Time (PST). It never occurred to me that Miller might expect the paper by 9 AM PST, which was noon Eastern Standard Time (EST). Miller, however, apparently assumed EST time. Surely there was evidence, including the email sent to all panelists, that Miller was uptight. But I did not view the evidence of potential gender discrimination, or of Miller’s being a “jerk,” as contradicting the interpretation that he discriminated against me. From my perspective, the fact that Miller had mistreated women made it more likely that he had a problem with blacks, not less, as racism and sexism are often intertwined. At an unconscious level, he may have regarded a (perceived) late submission by a black professor as a more serious violation than one from a white professor. The key fact convincing me of this interpretation was my discovery that one of the white professors had submitted her paper after mine but was not publicly criticized for lateness. Although I regarded this differential treatment of “similarly situated” panelists as sufficient proof of racial discrimination, I was surprised to learn that it did not convince some white listeners. [end of Robinson excerpt]
A Note on How This Changes Minds
This narrative is powerful in many ways; I’ll briefly highlight one here. I have taught this article multiple times to my law students in Employment Discrimination, and I’ve seen the ways that reading this narrative dramatizes to some students the very concept at the heart of the paper: People perceive the same story differently, on average, along lines of race and also gender.
Robinson builds his argument on empirical social science data, but white students often absorb the central concept through their own experience of responding to his story. His choice to mention only late in the story the “comparator” (a concept that Professor Suzanne Goldberg has also importantly elaborated) gives white students the chance to notice their own doubts until that moment, confirming through their personal experience as readers precisely the theory and data Robinson will later explicate in this well-crafted work of scholarship. [Elizabeth Emens, 6/15/20]
Reflections from the Author Today
This article argues that whites and blacks are predisposed to disagree about racial discrimination because we have different incentives and information about race and racism. Most white people were raised to avoid thinking and talking about race and racism. Such "colorblind" behavior, whites are taught, makes them good, upstanding people. From the perspective of most blacks, the failure to engage racism is a manifestation of white privilege. Black people have to engage race because failing to do so can lead to discrimination and even death. The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has upended this racial order in surprising ways. For the first time in memory, whites are learning that being silent about race feeds racism and implicates them in the problem. As one slogan states, "white silence = violence." Thus, many mainstream white people have expressed support for Black Lives Matter on social media and marched at protests. According to some studies, the protesters in major cities, such as New York, were majority white. Yet this fresh eagerness among whites to discuss race and confront racism carries new perils. After a lifetime of carefully avoiding race in order to appear non-racist, many white people--let's call them baby anti-racists--lack the education necessary to have this conversation. They are ill-prepared to talk about race in a way that does not reproduce white privilege and aggravate their relationships with black people and other anti-racist people of color. [Russell K. Robinson, 7/3/20]