Implicit Bias Summary

The past couple of classes we’ve spent a great deal of time discussing implicit bias. Implicit Bias lies at the heart of why people of color are pulled over at twice the rate of white people. Pulled Over perfectly illustrates the impact implicit bias has on decision making in the real world. The authors argue that the overarching directive to search for suspicious behavior as opposed to specific violations leads to the activation of police officers implicit biases. They argue that investigative stops, or stops in which the intent is to uncover illicit behavior that was not necessarily inherently obvious, utilizes practices that are built upon racially motivated and discriminatory beliefs. Even if individual officers themselves do not exhibit …show more content…
The authors do a good job humanizing what could be seen as an abstract concept. Humanizing this issue is particularly important, especially for white people for whom this issue has little effect. I found the books research into the perceived legitimacy of police stops particularly interesting. Specifically the idea that, “levels of investigatory stops of African-Americans, in turn, encourage these drivers to bring to their encounters with police expectations of unequal and intrusive treatment, and to leave the stops deeply distrusting the fairness of the police and doubting their own equal status and liberty in society. The comparative freedom of whites from the stops encourages them to view police stops as legitimate form of traffic enforcement” (50). This finding makes perfect sense and seems so utterly obvious, yet it is precisely the reason reform has come far to slowly and has drastically altered the lives of far too many people. It’s easy to be in support of changing a system that is obviously discriminatory if you, or those around you, fall victim to it on a regular basis; however, for those who have no exposure and arguably benefit, even unknowingly, from the system there is little incentive to disrupt the status