Perception is not just an objective recording of external stimuli. While intuitively it would appear that all witnesses to an event should report seeing and hearing the same series of actions, in reality each viewer interprets what he or she sees through the lens of personal biases and beliefs that lead to differing descriptions of that event. Eyewitness accounts of incidents, traditionally considered to be the gold standard of evidence in court cases, are now understood to be vulnerable to the selective perception and schematized interpretation of the individual observer. The impact of personal biases such as racism, sexism, and ageism may cause significant variation in how individuals perceive and remember an event. As understanding of the impact of individual belief structures on perception has grown, social scientists, criminologists, and other analysts have become increasingly aware of the effect that systemic social biases have on the treatment of certain groups in our society.
Judith Butler uses the verdict in the Rodney King case to address the phenomenon of the skewing of visual evidence according to schema-based reading by the viewer in her essay Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia (1993). King was an African-American motorist whose severe beating by several white Los Angeles police officers was captured on tape in 1992. The officers were later acquitted by a jury that consisted of ten white members, one Filipina woman, and one Hispanic man. Their acquittal triggered riots in parts of Los Angeles in protest of the seemingly unambiguous racism involved. The video, captured by a bystander, showed an unarmed King on the ground being beaten with batons by several officers and pleading for them to stop. Most members of the jury, apparently, determined that King was being aggressive in the video and that the officers were acting appropriately in using severe force. One juror commented after the trial that she thought King was in “total control” during the beating (Butler, p. 15). The strength of the influence of the white paranoid schema is clearly illustrated by her interpretation. The video of the King beating clearly shows a helpless unarmed man lying prone while he is being beaten. The only movements he makes are defensive, such as curling his body up to avoid blows and raising his hand, palm out, to ward off blows. The fact that someone could watch this and interpret his behavior as aggressive and threatening is a perversion of the objective visual representation in the video caused by race-based schematization. In a white paranoid reading of the video, “…he is hit in exchange for the blows he never delivered, but which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about to deliver” (Butler, p. 19). An observer with a strong bias will always attribute negative motivations, and perhaps even see negative behavior where none exists, in accordance with his or her preconception of what constitutes typical behavior for a member of a particular group. In the King video, many of the jurors attributed the violence to King rather than the police officers because this fit their schematic expectations.
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Another example of this reaction to stereotyped belief structures is portrayed in Ryan Coogler’s film Fruitvale Station (2013). Based upon an actual case, a young African-American man is fatally shot by a San Francisco transit policeman after a fight occurs among passengers on a BART train. The majority of the film is spent tracking the young man’s movements during the day preceding his death. The audience comes to sympathize with him and his struggle to deal with the obstacles in his life, which makes the tragic miscommunication between him and the armed officer painful to watch. The frequent deaths of young minority men in our culture at the hands of law enforcement officers are due, in part, to an inability on the part of the enforcers to view situations objectively and to exclude individual biases that shape expectations of behavior.
- Butler, Judith. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, Routledge, 1993, pp. 15-22.
- Fruitvale Station. Directed by Ryan Coogler, The Weinstein Company, 2013.
