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My 'Implicit Bias' Against Black People

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

In case you missed the vice presidential debate -- and who didn't? -- the most memorable moment in my view came when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence sounded shocked, shocked, at the very idea that a black police officer could be biased against black people.

I've got news for you, governor. A lot of black people don't like black people all that much.

I know. I'm one of them.

I don't dislike all black people. Most of us are fine, once you get to know us.

When people tell me they are surprised to hear that I don't like black people, I remind them of how little black people were exposed until recent decades of positive images of themselves in media and elsewhere.

I think my condition began at age four. My parents broke the news that I could not go to the amusement park near our southern Ohio home because it did not admit "colored people."

 

I didn't know it at the time, but it was the beginning of my re-education in being a part of an underprivileged class of Americans. Almost everywhere I looked, I saw images of white people achieving things and black people singing, dancing or getting arrested.

The world has changed a lot since then, thanks largely to the hard-won victories of the civil rights revolution. But black self-hatred is not dead, even in this era of a half-black president, it has merely diversified.

That's why I was disappointed to hear Gov. Pence, Republican Donald Trump's running mate, take offense with Democrat Hillary Clinton's suggestion during her first debate with Trump that everyone has "implicit bias," including black police officers.

The "bad-mouthing" of police by people who "use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism," Pence said in his debate with Clinton's running mate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, "really has got to stop."

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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