Jen Russum

I love that pregnancy shot.. Nothing better then knowing a small little life is being carried inside there :)

That first Ferguson link is thoughtfully and heartfully composed. But his logos claims have a fundamental flaw that Christian academics have a responsibility to voice in these conversations.

Remember that blue-eyed brown-eyed kid classroom study, where the teacher purposefully ran an experiment by treating blue-eyed children as superior? Her formerly equal class started performing according to eye-color. This has been repeated in racial and gender priming of college students, too--African Americans or women performed as equals, unless they were reminded of their minority stereotype, in which case they under-performed.

This is systemic bias in response to power structures--and absolutely, it's evidence of learned helplessness on the part of the minority.

The crucial missing part:

We must make it crystal clear that it's not just minorities reinscribing this system of power. The large-scale studies on our behavior show it's people *with* power actively pushing down minorities in an unconscious way. And if it's unconscious, we can't leave this conversation to sin and love discourse. We also need to talk about this in terms of power relations.

A double-blind study where faculty evaluated identical CVs differing only by name (1/2 were "John" and 1/2 were "Jennifer") found John received a higher salary, more mentoring hours, and was rated as a higher performing candidate than Jennifer (even by the women faculty).

See: Ta-Nehisi Coates' fabulous essay on how segregation and race-based exploitative mortgages etc. factor into what's going on.

Despite the best of our politically correct intentions, our actions demonstrate unconscious, systemic mistreatment of minorities. We can't talk about sin and love and "results" without looking at the environment creating those results. Otherwise it's like the blue eyed classroom study. The pastor's stats aren't logos; he's just providing data that needs to be meaningfully unpacked and situated.

Tamir Rice (the 12yo boy shot in 1.5 seconds for his toy gun, who did not receive an opportunity to put his hands up) is a perfect example of why the evidence on unconscious bias must be at the center of the conversation.

Based on large-scale trends, Tamir Rice's black skin positioned him as at risk for triggering the police officer's unconscious race bias in ways that a white boy would not trigger the race bias. You could have a perfectly loving, minority-affirmative officer whose unconscious is primed just like the women faculty who shoved down the women applicants. It's *partly* a conversation on love and sin, but it's not enough to stop there. We must talk about the systems of power that we live in.



Sources:
Steele, Claude M., and Joshua Aronson. "Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans." Journal of personality and social psychology 69.5 (1995): 797.

Moss-Racusin, Corinne A., et al. "Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.41 (2012): 16474-16479.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/nov/26/cleveland-video-tamir-rice-shooting-police