Diversity at Work

By Sally Lehrman

Does your organization identify alleged criminals by race? There seems to be a fresh push to do so, based on the view that omitting race is "politically correct silliness," as someone e-mailed me. Race is always pertinent, I've heard from readers, because it helps "conjure up an image."

It's that image that interests me, an image that ought to give us pause.

Eyewitness reports aren't always reliable [PDF], as crime reporters well know. No matter who we are, we often match memory to our expectations. A simple hairstyle change -- from an Afro to slicked-back black "Hispanic" hair, in one recent study -- can shift our perception of someone's facial features to match.

There's plenty of criminal justice data that call into question race descriptions, especially considering how much the descriptions can vary by geography, by generation and by the particular genes handed down from mom and dad. I attended a meeting this month where forensic anthropologists bemoaned the trouble they had with race. While they can usually estimate ancestry from a skeleton, there's no guarantee that it will match the "race" described by a sheriff, the family or even a missing person herself. A "Hispanic" for forensic purposes in one case, for instance, turned out to be "African American" to a sheriff.

Think about it: In crime stories, we try to describe the purported culprit based on a glimpse caught during a confusing, emotional moment. How sure can we be that our sources are right? And if they're wrong, what difference does it make?

Those who worry about "PC" policies probably anticipate a vague argument here about racial stereotyping. Stereotyping, though, is not just a theory or a misinformed way of thinking. It has consequences in the real world.

African Americans show up in crime stories more often than any other topic, and then disproportionately as the accused [PDF], not the affected. Maybe it's not surprising, then, that white people exposed to our work automatically tend to associate crime with black people. They'll even conjure up a black suspect where none exists.

In one study in Los Angeles, researchers slightly altered a regular television news story to include a mug of a black suspected perpetrator, a white one, or none at all. When audiences weren't offered a picture, 44 percent remembered seeing the mug of a black man. And when they did see a mug of a white person, they didn't remember seeing any perpetrator at all.

Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki detail the impact of news on stereotyping with depth and precision in their 2001 book, "The Black Image in the White Mind." But even their arguments are theoretical for most white people –- until we sit with a black or Hispanic family and listen to parents talk with their sons about how to respond if caught "driving while black."

Again, if you're white, you may think these families are paranoid. They're not. They reap the harmful effects of the images we sow. 

In 12 states, whenever someone is arrested in California for a crime, his or her DNA goes into a databank. Now this person and all his or her relatives are formally a potential criminal in every other crime checked against the database.

As long as you're not a criminal, does it matter to be listed among them? Well, DNA labs do make mistakes. Journalists in Washington, North Carolina, Virginia and Texas investigated performance and reported a surprising number of DNA sample mix-ups and other lab errors.

The Society of Professional Journalists' Ethics Code asks journalists to be "honest, fair and courageous." Is news coverage fair when we put a whole category of people under suspicion? We should "minimize harm," the code continues. What are the consequences, we must ask, of the images we conjure?