It was front page news, until it wasn’t; a white person playing the race card on a Black man in New York City’s Central Park on Memorial Day.
The viral video of George Floyd’s tragic death at the hands of cops in Minneapolis bumped Amy Cooper, the white person, off her moment of notoriety. The story merits revisiting.
Start with what happened. The video of the exchange as recorded by the male in the story, Christian Cooper (no relation to Amy) is on his Facebook page. It’s a quick and telling view.
Mr. Cooper had asked Ms. Cooper to restrain her dog as it ran loose in a “dogs must be on leash” area reserved for bird watchers in Central Park. When she didn’t, he started recording her. She is seen calling 911 and telling the dispatcher that “an African-American man is threatening her” and the dog.
“Please send the cops immediately,” she says breathlessly.
So what happened?
At a conceptual level, let’s give the benefit of doubt and say there was panic. Whether she realized she was busted for having her dog terrorize birds in a “dogs on leash zone” or in fact the sight of an unexpected black male at 8 AM on a quiet Memorial Day freaked her out.
Most likely her amygdala – her “reptilian brain” kicked in with its predictable response; fight, freeze or flee. It’s a natural evolutionary response that likely saved us on the Savana of Africa millenniums ago but causes us a host a problems in modern society. When the stress response kicks in adrenaline surges, heart rate ramps up, hearing degrades, your vision narrows and is reduced. You go into survival mode; you don’t think so clearly.
One of the counters to that stress response is to slow things down. Had she paused, Amy Cooper would have noticed that her would-be assailant was out of place and out of context. Chris looks like a version of CNN’s Van Jones – well groomed, neatly dressed, and fashionably bespectacled Chris Cooper looks like what he is – a professional Black male out birdwatching.
And while rape or mugging can happen at any time, 8 AM in a well-lit summertime Central Park open area on an active walking path seems unlikely.
Slowing things – Amy Cooper is never physically close to Chris Cooper until she approaches him – would have given her time to quiet things down, dampen the stress response, and pull things together. Breathing in deeply a few times in would have been a good tactic.
And then in the video you can see that Amy Cooper pulled out her inner Karen – leaning on white privilege to make her point. First she told Chris Cooper she would call the police on an “African-American male” who is threatening her and then she made the call, repeating the phrase.
Privilege, particularly white privilege, is better covered elsewhere rather than here. But it’s helpful to note that it’s a learned behavior; you gain conditioned responses and expectations that you have through years of experience and social messaging. Myelination, the same formation of synapses in your brain that drives learning, generates by hard coded default, a host of your behaviors. Someone who grows conditioned by privilege behaves in ways that reflect that conditioning; you expect it.
“There’s a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet,” Amy Cooper says on the phone to police. “He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” She even managed to get semi-hysterical tho’ Chris Cooper had kept his calm and distance and posed no apparent harm.
Exec coaching – my work – is about helping clients find their own resourcefulness to reach their goals. Some of the time it involves “unlearning” – changing mindset and behaviors that might have served you well before but are inappropriate, unhelpful or downright dangerous now.
Privilege, including white privilege, is one of those behaviors.
Unless you’ve been under a rock – Amy Cooper has undergrad and grad degrees from Penn so is presumably educated – you know the well chronicled history of how awful things often happen to Black males (and females) when police get called. From Emmet Till to Michael Brown, bad things happen. People die. Ask George Floyd’s family.
“Encounters with police involve far greater risk for black people — men especially — than for people of most other races, even when unarmed, researchers find. ‘A substantial body of evidence shows that people of color, especially African Americans, are at greater risk for experiencing criminal justice contact and police-involved harm than are whites,’ according to a 2019 study” according to Institutional Investor.
Watch this short video if you want a more personal sense of how police encounters can play out; well worth viewing. Learn.
And if you’re a privileged 6′ 5″ tall, well-educated white guy like me, what do you do to be your better self and avoid being like the Amy Cooper’s of the world?
Here are a few thoughts.
First recognize that we are all a product of images, experiences, media, and family as to how you see and experience people. It’s like a muscle – if your built up mindset for example is that women are inferior and subservient, you likely act that way. If you think Black males present danger, you’ll act that way too.
Second, one antidote, if you want one as a white person, is to work your other mindset muscles. Like strengthening a weak muscle, develop them. Have multiple friends, experiences, and exposures that cement a belief that Black people (and other people not like you) are allies, are accomplished, and are people to seek out when you need help. And not just “a” as in singular black or brown friend, but many. If you don’t know anyone, find them. Like gay people, they are everywhere if you really look with your authentic self.
Third, be an ally; contest words and actions that are racist. Call them out. Work on being an anti-racist; see and read Ibram Kendi‘s work for a start. Develop that muscle.
Fourth, all of this work in progress for many of us (white people). None of us are better than others but it’s no accident that my son, almost 18, has a number of African-American adults in his world, even in a city like San Francisco where the black population has dwindled to 6% They are my friends, my colleagues, and my allies – and he will grow up having a richer, positive sense of a diverse set of people than if he just watched TV and got his mindset from what his more economically privileged setting and social media would tell him.
Are (we ) white people all Amy Cooper? Only if you want to be.
Life Back West is an occasional set of writings focused on ways people, teams and organizations can be both more effective (doing the right thing) and more efficient (doing the right thing well). More about my 30+ years of work coaching execs, start up and leadership teams can be found at the “About J. Mike Smith and Back West, Inc.” sidebar at the Back West blog. Now welcoming new and known clients.