[Music]
I'm in the Oakland Police Department to
deliver an implicit bias training I two
years earlier had been invited by the
city and by a federal monitor to come in
to help the Oakland Police Department
with their reform efforts so there's
some terrible things that happen that
had to do with race and racial profiling
and you know false arrests and who you
name it so they wanted to bring in what
they call a subject matter expert to
analyze the data and to see you know to
what extent there were racial
disparities there and their enforcement
activities I've been there and we
analyzed the data I worked with the team
of Stanford researchers to do that and
we were about to release a report to the
public on our findings and so there was
you know pretty significant racial
disparities and so I was you know trying
to sort of figure out sort of what the
best course of action was in terms of
preparing the department for the results
and so for example 28% of the population
as a whole in Oakland as
african-american but we found that over
60% of the people who were stopped were
african-american and we found you know
similar disparities in terms of searches
and terms of handcuffing and arrests and
so forth so I had a sense of how the
department would respond you know to
this and so I was thinking also that I
had some sense of how the community
would respond and and that was to sort
of demand the department take you know
some action and that would include
training on an you know an implicit bias
and so because I'm a researcher who
studies this I thought one suggestion
might be for them to get this training
and I definitely did not want to give
them this training after the report was
released because I figured you know I'd
already lost them at that point and they
wouldn't be there and present and
listening and so forth so I decided I
wanted to do the training beforehand and
so I go in and I'm sort of trying to
train the whole department within a
couple weeks a period before the reports
release and so I have my first session
and I have a hundred and thirty two you
know uniformed officers sitting there in
the auditorium so they're waiting for me
to take the stage so they had on
bulletproof vest and they had utatte
faces and sort of their eyes were
distant and I I knew I had a problem
right on my hands and I could feel a
chill in the room so I started in and I
started sort of talking you know with
the slides and I would talk about bias
and I was you know sort of trying to
connect with them but whatever I did I
just couldn't make a connection and I
you know try jokes they didn't work and
demonstrations that didn't work and I
tried showing videos that you know
really sort of got people engaged in
other settings nothing and so I decided
to stop and just to tell a story and the
story I told was about my son who was
five years old at the time and we were
on an airplane together and right so
he's looking all around and he sees a
man on the plane and he says hey that
guy looks like daddy
and so I look at the guy and he doesn't
look anything like daddy I mean nothing
you know what is he talking about so
then I started looking around on the
plane and I noticed he was the only
black man on the plane and I thought
okay you know I'm gonna have to have a
talk with my five-year-old about how not
all black people look alike right I'm
like all right you know so I'm trying to
think you know how am I gonna have this
conversation and the language that a
five-year-old can understand but before
I launch them into the lecture I thought
you know children see the world
differently from adults and they see
people in a way that's different you
know they haven't been trained across
years to kind of see people in certain
ways and so maybe
there was some resemblance there that I
just wasn't seeing I decide I'm gonna
give it a shot I'm gonna look at this
guy and look for any resemblance and so
I look at him I look at his height and
he's about four inches shorter than my
husband nothing there and so I look at
its weight nothing there I look at his
facial features nothing I look at his
skin color
you know nothing there and then I look
at his hair and he has these long
dreadlocks flowing down his back and my
husband's bald alright so I'm all ready
to give him the talk and before I could
say anything he looks up and he says I
hope he doesn't rob the plane and I said
what what did you say and he said it
again he says well I hope he doesn't rob
the plane and I said you know daddy
wouldn't rob a plane and he says yeah
yeah I know and I said well why would
you say that and he looked at me with
this really sad face and he said I don't
know why I said that
I don't know why I was thinking that
we're living with such severe racial
stratification that even a five-year-old
can tell us what's supposed to happen
next so I stood there in this auditorium
and the Oakland Police Department and I
I told that story and you know hoping
again for a connection and I want to
just read just a little bit from the
book of what happened when I looked out
at the crowd I took a deep breath and
when I looked back out at the crowd in
the auditorium I saw that the
expressions had changed their eyes had
softened they were no longer uniformed
police officers and I was no longer a
University researcher we were parents
unable to protect our children from a
world that is often bewildering and
frightening a world that influences them
so profoundly
so insidiously and so unconsciously that
they and
we don't know why we think the way we do
[Applause]
[Music]