Summary: Part II: Where We Find Ourselves 

Chapter 3: A Bad Dude 

In Chapter 3, Eberhardt examines one extreme outcome of unchecked racial biases: police shootings of unarmed Black men. She focuses on the case of Terence Crutcher, who was shot in 2016 by Tulsa police while returning to his car. Like the widely publicized cases of Tamir Rice and Philando Castile, Crutcher became a symbol of racial injustice in policing. Yet, Eberhardt reminds the reader, Crutcher also left behind a grieving family who were deeply affected by his death. Eberhardt interviews Crutcher’s twin sister, Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, to learn more about the Tulsa Police Department’s response to the shooting of her brother. 

Eberhardt also asks how social psychology can help “shed light on fatal police–community encounters.” She suggests several specific research questions, offering examples of prior experiments for each. Eberhardt asks first whether “the association between black people and crime . . . can influence what we see and what we ignore,” citing a study on subliminal priming to show that this is indeed the case. Next, she considers studies that show how people are biased to overestimate the size and strength of Black men and more likely to interpret their movements as threatening. The latter, Eberhardt points out, has implications for police practices such as the NYPD’s “stop, question, and frisk” policy. In still other experiments, participants were quicker to identify weapons in images showing Black people, including a higher rate of false positives, and quicker to act on that identification. Eberhardt suggests that these biases cannot be easily unlearned, though they can be overridden through training. 

Chapter 4: Male Black 

Next, Eberhardt considers the broader issue of racial profiling, using her experiences with the Oakland Police Department as an illustration. She notes that in the late 1990s, some Oakland officers actively persecuted Black citizens by planting drugs on them or provoking physical confrontations, effectively fabricating crimes to prosecute. In less egregious but more widespread cases, officers disproportionately stopped, searched, and handcuffed Black individuals even when no arrest was ultimately made. Eberhardt describes how even officers not raised in the United States come to internalize anti-Black biases and to associate the description “Male Black” with criminality. She also cites the story of a Black officer on the Oakland police force, LeRonne Armstrong, to show how anti-police sentiment arises in overpoliced communities. Eberhardt observes, however, that basic changes in officer training and conduct can minimize bias incidents and improve police–community relations. 

Chapter 5: How Free People Think 

The next chapter brings together several more examples of how bias influences policing. The first comes from Eberhardt’s own experiences in graduate school, when a routine traffic stop turned into an allegation of assault. As a researcher, Eberhardt has found that these discretionary stops not only disproportionately penalize Black and low-income people but also often escalate, resulting in a significant proportion of fatal police encounters. Her research also shows that when officers behave respectfully in their initial interactions with motorists regardless of race, traffic stops are far less likely to escalate in this way. Fairly simple rules of conduct can prevent bias from leaking into routine encounters between police and the public. 

Eberhardt next looks at disparities in incarceration rates and sentencing severity. She observes that parole rules often deepen racial inequality: Black people with criminal records are less likely than their white counterparts to be able to find employment and reestablish themselves financially. To show the “real lives behind all the statistics,” Eberhardt describes her experience teaching psychology to inmates at San Quentin State Prison. She tells of her initial efforts to choose topics “relevant” to inmates before she realized that they, like her Stanford students, wanted to understand psychology in general—not just the parts that dealt with criminal justice. Finally, Eberhardt discusses the role of racial bias in applying the death penalty. She presents experimental evidence to show that men deemed “stereotypically black” in appearance are more likely to receive a death sentence when convicted of killing a white person. 

Chapter 6: The Scary Monster 

In the last chapter of Part II, Eberhardt considers the legacy of racial bias—and often of overt racism—in her own discipline of psychology. She describes the many historical attempts to establish a racial hierarchy “scientifically” that put those of African descent at the bottom. Theories such as polygenism, which held that different races were essentially distinct species, held sway for many years, and IQ testing “institutionalized bias” by assigning scores to supposedly inherent qualities. Eberhardt then turns her attention to the “black-ape association,” a 19th-century stereotype that psychologists have found persists around the world. She notes that beyond crude jokes and offensive caricatures, associations between a racial group and nonhuman animals have real, sometimes unconscious effects on our judgment. For instance, experiments show that when subjects are primed with such stereotypes, they proceed to rate violent treatment of Black people as more justified. 

Analysis: Part II: Where We Find Ourselves 

In Part II, Eberhardt moves from the universality of bias to the uneven nature of its effects. Part I provided both experimental and anecdotal evidence that implicit bias is everywhere; now, Eberhardt shows how some kinds of bias lead to systemic injustice in policing. The examples given in this part span the entire spectrum of law enforcement and criminal justice, the areas that are Eberhardt’s specialty as a social psychology researcher and educator. Bias, she shows, shapes individual police–community encounters such as traffic stops (Chapter 3), distorts broader police–community relations (Chapter 4), and influences criminal sentencing (Chapter 5). Throughout, Eberhardt reinforces her key message that refusing to acknowledge bias—whether in routine police work, in the courtroom, or in the classroom—allows it to play a harmful and largely unquestioned role in decision-making. 

Broadly speaking, the role of Part I is to prepare the reader for an open-minded and non-defensive consideration of bias—hence Eberhardt’s care to distinguish between implicit bias and overt racism. In Part II, Eberhardt gives extensive examples to show how implicit bias can facilitate structural or systemic racism, the uneven treatment of different racial groups. She also demonstrates that overtly racist beliefs and rhetoric such as the “scientific” hierarchy of races and the black-ape association can seep into the thought processes of people who may not harbor explicit prejudices or consciously engage in discrimination. Thus, naming and rejecting the most egregious forms of explicit bias is one way of limiting the harm caused by implicit bias. In Part III, Eberhardt will note several more areas where progress is being made and propose some further solutions.