Open Letter to Editors
The current situation surrounding Police brutality and the resulting loss of life is tragic and calls upon each of us to do our part. We are all witnessing Black Americans losing their lives due to systemic racism in our society. As a retired Professor at Bethune- Cookman University for 39 years, I have had the honor of watching young black men and women develop into leaders of our community. I have also suffered with them as many of my students were unjustly targeted by a law enforcement system that was sworn to protect them. Yet how do we reconcile this uncomfortable truth with another truth that law enforcement personnel are placed in harm’s way every day and the grand majority of them have done nothing but uphold their civic duty while protecting us? This seeming contradiction is at the center of our pain and threatens to divide our American soul.
Everybody is talking about this issue but what can we do as a society to address this chronic problem? Given my background in biology, I have some ideas that might help reduce this problem
Discrimination is innate and all living systems have developed this ability which allows them to face challenges and survive. All humans discriminate, but racism is power dependent. We humans follow our survival instinct which is embedded in our intense tribalist nature. We show implicit bias against people from outgroup and this bias comes from our fear system operated by the Amygdala and other related neural circuitry of the brain. fMRI studies revealed Black face evokes fear among people by triggering activation of Amygdala in both African-American and Caucasian racial groups. Amygdala detects threats and controls the body responses necessary to cope with the threat via fight or flight response during non-conscious state automatically before the conscious stage kicks in.
When a white police officer encounters a black young man wearing a hoodie, his amygdala non-consciously alert the innate implicit bias, which triggers fear response and pushes the officer in a fighting state that culminate into using lethal force. If the officers are regularly exposed to black faces during their police training periods, then amygdala would be habituated to black faces which will suppress or temper the non-conscious activation of fear response activity and prevent a lethal response.
Reduction of fear factors among groups is the essence of humanity. We must learn how to live together. We can control our innate fear activation by in group-outgroup habituation via extensive civil interaction among us.
Sincerely,
Shukdeb Sen
Author of Black Education in White America