What would you do?

        A few days ago in class we talked about the Harvard English professor who got arrested for entering his own house because African-American racial stereotypes prompted a neighbor to call the police. Recently I began watching an episode of the ABC show "What would you do?" where producers set up staged scenarios to see how everyday people react to situations. In one episode, they set up an actor playing a bike thief attempting to steal a bike in the middle of a busy park. I was happy to see that people were for the most part reacting, although not every person that walked by called out the thief. The white actor playing a bike thief was then replaced by an African-American actor. The police was called several times and people were far less hesitant to call out the actor. Their reactions were immediate and powerful. When asked about their super-speedy reactions in the interview after they'd been told it was just a set-up, every single reactor said that their quick reaction to the thief had "nothing to do with race."
          My problem with this is that it is obvious that none of these people are telling the truth. Racial steryotypes still exist in America. If there were no racial biases, the white actor and the African-American actor would have elicited the same reactions from onlookers. Ignoring the fact that racial steryotypes exist does not help solve the problem. This experiment was meant to demonstrate that Americans subconciously have a different reaction with different races. If the reactors would have admitted afterwords that race could have played a part in their reaction, then we could move on to the next step of correcting America's misrepresentation of African-Americans.

If you have never seen the show, click here to see the episode mentioned, and I encourage you to look at the other episodes.