86 Patrick M. Whitehead
video plays a seriously important role in understanding what may have
happened. In addition to determining what was an otherwise inscrutable
skin-color of the suspect, it also resolves the illusion of color-constancy:
when a color appears to remain the same in shadows as it is in the direct
sunlight—a phenomenon that has been described by psychologists for over
100 years.
Supplying the race of the suspect is not an arbitrary detail. Like the
alleged sex, which narrows down the suspect pool by approximately half,
the suspect’s race in this region narrows the pool nearly by half once more.
This allows law-enforcement to zero in more specifically on the suspect.
Perhaps more importantly, the profile fits neatly into the political and racial
ideology in the American southeast—namely, that black^2 males are to be
feared.
Through the middle of the 20th century, the United States still upheld
the Jim Crow “separate but equal” laws. These kept persons of color
separate from white persons in matters of education, transportation,
housing, service, legal representation, and so forth. While many areas of
the American south struggled with desegregation during the Civil Rights
movement, few cities could admit to being as distinguished in this regard
as Albany, GA. It was here during the infamous Albany Movement (1961-
1962) where Martin Luther King Jr. was twice incarcerated, and left only
after admitting the movement had failed.
Rather than living in a post-Civil Rights and post-racial world, racist
ideology continues in the form of an expectation about fundamental
differences between white persons and persons of color. It is only upon the
background of this ideology that the aforementioned article is able to assert
that the suspect in the gas-station parking lot shooting was black. To make
any ideologically-invalidating assumptions would have required more
careful journalism. The racist ideology may be seen as follows: if an
observer has already decided in advance that it is more believable that a
shooting suspect is black, then he or she will have to overcome this bias in
(^2) Editor note: The reader should understand that the words race, white, black, etc., have no
scientific or biological basis. ‘Race’ is a social construction, but racialization (a function of
perception) and racism are real in an empirical sense.