Columnist Bill Nemitz’s apology (Oct. 15) to Portland Charter Commission member Shay Stewart-Bouley for spreading defamatory rumors was heartfelt and appropriate. His analogy to a clueless speeding ticket was almost there. More apt would be that he drove through the crosswalk and didn’t see a Black woman stepping into the road. And, it turns out, this is a very real phenomenon.

White drivers are much less likely to notice and stop for Black pedestrians at crosswalks, and much more likely to hit them, researchers found in a study released in 2015.

If I told a Portland driver, with a Black Lives Matter sticker, that they blindly drove through an intersection and just missed hitting a Black woman, they would be horrified, embarrassed and truly sorry. But like with Nemitz, that’s only the first step. The real work is confronting the psychology of these quick decisions where we stop for a white woman to cross or worry first about a white person’s due process and then drive right into the Black woman who our brains never processed.

These implicit biases don’t make you a bad person. They make you human in America. But we can all do better, and I look forward to Nemitz’s columns as he does this work.

Andrew Schmidt
Portland

Related Headlines


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.

filed under: