Seeing Race 87perception in order to see a suspect as anything other than black. The
implicit burden of proof would not be on determining the skin color of the
suspect (assuming, of course, that this is a relevant detail), but in
determining that the skin color is not black. The skin color is black unless
proven otherwise.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began in the summer of
2013, and was based on the social perception that black persons suffer
unevenly from systematic racism and are targeted unequally by the use of
state force. The movement followed a series of incidents where police had
shot and killed black boys and men—a notable example being 17 year-old
high school student, Trayvon Martin, in 2012. Recent examples are also
not hard to come by. In Early March, 2018, Stephen Clark (22), a young
black father of two, was shot eight times in the back by Sacramento police
who thought he was holding a gun (but turned out to be a cell phone). Days
later, a Houston deputy shot and killed Danny Ray Thomas, a 34 year-old
black man who had a history of psychopathology. In the introduction to the
20-year anniversary edition of her book Why are All the Black Kids Sitting
Together in the Cafeteria (2017), psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum
spends the first 70 pages listing statistics that suggest that the problems she
described in 1997 haven’t gotten any better.
In response to BLM, a white nationalist movement that called itself
“White Lives Matter” (WLM) emerged, arguing that white persons also
deserve protection from the law. WLM is based on the perception that
racism is not a continuing problem, and that it would be unfair to grant
special consideration to one race while not also extending it to others. It is
worth mentioning at this juncture that the concept of race was invented and
not discovered. Its invention occurred within the context of colonialism,
and must be viewed within that context (See Omi & Winant, 2014). The
dilemma is twofold, and may be stated as follows: a) is there
discrimination based on the invented concept of race; and, if so, b) is this
discrimination an individual issue (which varies person to person), or is it a
national one?
It is in light of this dilemma that we may now turn our attention
towards the discipline of psychology, and how well it prepares students for