8/15/17

Black Lives Matter -White Lives Matter:
Not the same thing at all.

Being upfront: I think most law enforcement folks are great.  I have friends who are police officers.  Heck, I have KIN who are police officers.  They have my upmost respect and support.

However…

One of my political psychology professors at UCLA back in the 1990s was a guy named Jim Sidanius.  He was a proponent of what’s called social dominance theory. SDT postulates that human societies are stratified with a superior class, the hegemony, and at least one subordinate class. The hegemony then reaps the benefits of the resulting unequal distribution of wealth, status, education and so on.

If you’re part of the hegemony here in the U.S., for example if you're a middle class white guy, most of this may be invisible to you. That bears repeating:  If you’re part of the power structure, you may not be aware of it.  You may think that everyone in the country has equal access to education, good jobs, upward mobility and so on.  All they have to do is exercise some gumption.  If they don't, that's on them. However, if you’re part of the underclass, like many women or people of color, you live in a very different world.

The institutions of society – education, justice, religion, etc. – have many functions, but they also act in part to preserve the power of the hegemony. Law enforcement, as one of these institutions, provides for the safety of the citizens and retribution for criminal behavior.  However, they may also act as agents of the overclass. Nowhere is this more clear than in the stunning differences we have begun to see on a regular basis between a police report of the shooting of a person of color and the video that shows what happened.  A clear example is the shooting of Chicagoan Laquan McDonald in 2014.  The police report said that he lunged at officers with a knife.  Yet the dash-cam video, which the city sat on for a year, shows McDonald walking away from officers when he was shot in the back multiple times. 

Is this an isolated incident? I can’t be the only person who wonders now how many other shootings of the underclass have been filed away as justified when video footage might have revealed something quite different.

And then Black Lives Matter became a movement.

But wait: Don’t white lives matter too?  Of course they do.  All lives matter.  But when you capitalize it as a movement, it’s something else entirely.  Thus, when a white person states that White Lives Matter, it's about stating membership in and supporting the hegemony and the unequal distribution of the benefits of our society. Blue Lives Matter is about respecting people who do a difficult and sometimes deadly job. And Black Lives Matter is about justice. 

Surviving a Trump Presidency

7/7/17

Surviving a Trump Presidency

The day after the 2016 election, I wrote a blog on how to survive under a Trump presidency.  It ended with this story:

A priest, a rabbi and a minister were stranded on a desert island that was rapidly submerging under the incoming tide. The priest sank to his knees and prayed to the Virgin Mary to intercede with god. The minister clasped his hands together, looked towards heaven, and vowed to change his ways. When they were done, they turned to stare at their Jewish brother who was sitting in the water, concentrating on each new wave. 

“What are you doing?” they asked.  

“Learning to breathe underwater,” he replied.

Unlike the Creature from the Black Lagoon, we can't grow gills. So what to do?  Here’s some excellent advice from social worker Robin Chancer who offers a two-step plan.

STEP ONE:

Come to terms with what happened. Stop fighting the pain.  Trump got elected.  We now have a president who views the world through a pathological narcissism that can be truly frightening.  It is what it is. He is not as bad as some of us thought he would be. He’s worse.

But instead of wallowing in the agony, she suggests that we accept the pain and then move on to focus on action. Accept what is AND aim to change it. 

STEP TWO:

Mindfulness, the Buddhist concept of focusing on now rather than replaying the past.

“Each time the tapes of despair and anger play in your mind, doggedly shift your focus. The mind will wander, again and again. Each time it happens, we notice the anxious thoughts, and shift our focus back."

If the Trump budget reduces the block grants that help fund Meals on Wheels, note that volunteerism is up by 500%.  Maybe volunteer to help. If funding has been cut to public broadcasting, maybe send them a little money to help them along. They will be grateful for any donation, no matter how small.

Mindfulness also requires that we not focus on the future.  That’s territory for both optimism and pessimism. Pay attention instead, Chancer says, to what we can do here and now. For me, that means phone calls and emails to my vulnerable Republican senator as important votes come up. 2018 is next year.  I’ll work on that next year.

You can find Chancer’s whole blog here. It's really excellent advice.

As Bernie Sanders said, despair is not an option.

5/28/17

Face Off!

We make instant judgements all the time about people based only on what they look like.  That can be really misleading.  Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy was an attractive charmer as well as a kidnapper, rapist, murderer and necrophile. Sadly, for all the women he harmed, you sure couldn’t tell from his smiling face.

But what if you could tell which people were more likely to be violent, just by looking at them? That would be handy. And it turns out you can. Sort of. 

Look at the two guys at the top of this blog. Just off the top of your head, which one do you think is more likely to take a swing at someone? If you said the guy on the left, you’d be right.  He’s the white supremacist who was just arrested for murdering several good Samaritans on a Portland commuter train this past week. The guy on the right is hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky. Yes, hockey players are violent by profession, but Gretzky is less violent than many.

So what’s different in their faces? Gretzky, the guy on the right, is smiling while the guy on the left is posing for his mug shot and is probably not too happy about it, but that's not all.  The very shape of their faces hints at the possibility of violent behavior. Here's how:

Back in 2008, Canadian researchers Justin Carré and Cheryl McCormick wanted to know if there was a relationship between facial structure and aggressive or violent action. The answer was yes, but only in men.  And the relationship is this:  Men whose faces are broader are more likely to be violent than those whose faces are narrower.   

To measure this, they compared the width of the face to the height (from upper lip to eyebrow). Here are some images from their study.

They found the broader the face (the higher the ratio), the more likely the person was to be aggressive in a game situation. Being Canadians, they then looked at hockey players. They found the broader the face, the more time the player spent in the penalty box, whether they were college players or professional members of the National Hockey League.

I’ll get to the actual data below, but right now let’s look at what other scientists have found since 2008, using the same measuring guidelines.  Researchers discovered that men with broader faces are more socially dominant. They are more likely to retaliate to perceived slights. They are more likely to act in their own self-interest, even if it means violating the trust of another. And so on.  It seems to be tied to testosterone. In general, the broader the face, the higher the level of testosterone, which might be the underlying element that explains what’s going on.

BIG WARNING:  Lots and lots of things contribute to a person’s violent behavior besides testosterone: Did he just lose his job? Was he abused as a kid? Did his sweetie just leave him? Was he drinking? Was he raised in a culture of violence?  Was he just involved in a high speed police pursuit? You can’t only go by faces.  These factors are important, too.  Also, while this relationship between face metrics/testosterone and violent behavior has been found over and over again, it only explains a relatively small part of why a person might act out. As tempting as it might be, I recommend that you don’t go taking selfies with folks and then running to find a ruler to see how they measure up.  This will solve no problems and win you no friends.

But we can certainly take a look at some famous people, right? So let's go back to those two guys at the top, the racist and The Great One, and draw some lines of our own.

The ratio for the guy on the left is 2.2.  If he played hockey, that would make him one of the more violent hockey players in the League.  The ratio for Gretzky on the right is 1.6.  His lifetime average penalty minutes is around 1/3 of a minute a game.  Twenty-three seconds. Just saying...

The Data:

Here are some of Carré and McCormick’s original data.  (Yes, I love me some graphs!) This first one, using college students, compares the face width-to-height ratio with how aggressive they got in a gaming situation that encouraged competition. The broader the face (bigger numbers along the horizontal axis) the more aggressive they were in the game. Notice that the broadest face score for the college students was 2.10

Now let’s look at college hockey players.  The horizontal line again shows the face width-to-height ratio (bigger number = broader faces), but this time the vertical line represents real world violence, in this case minutes in the penalty box.

 And here’s the data for all the players in Canadian NHL teams.

You'll notice that the trend line, that diagonal line across the graph, isn't very steep. That means the relationship isn't a very strong one.  (Tricky statistical stuff coming up. You've been warned!)  This is because the shape of the face/testosterone only accounts for about 15% of the reasons that these people are acting violently.  If I knew more about hockey, I could probably suggest some of what the other 85% of the reasons are, but I would guess things like their experiences playing hockey as kids, how much they get paid or praised for slamming someone, whether their sweeties go to their games and cheer them on, and so on.  

On the other hand, that 15% is very, very robust: Just about the same amount shows up in study after study. That means we need to pay attention, that it's important.  Something to keep in mind.

Ted Bundy