John McWhorter on a recent study on interactions between the police and the general population:
“Police stop” by San Diego Shooter is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A fascinating, and depressing, new study will be celebrated as revealing the subtle but powerful operations of racism. It also reveals, however, the pitfalls in the way we are taught to address that racism these days.
The study shows that police officers tend to talk in a less friendly way to black people they stop than white ones. People were played slivers of body-cam audio of the officers talking to citizens, with the content of the exchange disguised. People could tell with dismaying regularity what color person the officer was speaking to simply by the tone of voice. It wasn’t that officers outright sneer at black people. Rather, their tone with whites tends to be more pleasant, to have a hint of cheer, whereas with black people it is more impersonal, flat, unwarm.
The study also shows how these things fashion a vicious cycle. People tested who had negative experiences with cops and/or less trust in them processed even the exchanges the cops had with white citizens as less positive than other people tested did. That is, their life experience has implanted in them a distrust of the cops, that can anticipate actual interactions with them – and certainly, of course, unintentionally pollute them.
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This study reminds me of something else that goes in the other direction. To whites, subtle things about black communication, including vocal tone, can come off as threatening when no threat is intended.
I once happened to hear two 30-something black men talking about a misunderstanding one of them had had at work. They were just unwinding, but there was what many might process as a tinge of impending battle in their voices, inflections and gestures. “Man, I wanted to ‘Mmmph!’ [jab of the arm, click of the tongue] Gimme a break! An’ I was like … [putting on a challenging glare] don’t even start.”
No black listener would assume these guys actually meant the hints at violence literally. However, outside listeners can hear this way of talking as edgy. Kelefa Sanneh’s term for this twenty years ago, writing about rap and its lyrics, was perfect: a certain “confrontational cadence”.
Yes, all people trash-talk. But this particular way of talking has a special place in black American culture. No, that’s not stereotyping: sympathetic black academics have documented it. CUNY’s Arthur Spears, today one of the deans of the academic study of black American speech, has written about what he calls “directness”. Speech “that may appear to outsiders to be abusive or insulting is not necessarily intended to be nor is it taken that way by audiences and addressees,” Spears noted. He then quoted a father-child exchange: Father: “Go to bed!” Little boy: “Aw, Daddy, we’re playing dominoes.” Father: “I’m gonna domino your ass if you don’t go to bed now.” Notice how awkwardly this, or Eddie Murphy’s routine about the mother throwing the shoe in Delirious, would translate into the world of Modern Family.
This “confrontational cadence” can inflect even casual exchanges between black and white people. Aspects of black intonation, steeped in a lifetime’s experience in a language culture that values performative aggression as a kind of communal élan, can sound cranky, disrepectful, and even aggressive to a white person. It is all but impossible that this does not color encounters between black people and white cops; I highly suspect a study like the first one I mentioned would reveal it.
