Does experiencing harm make you biased and untrustworthy? Some think so
Afew years ago the Washington Post attached a note to the bottom of a news feature on San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin and his then incarcerated father, declaring that the journalist, Deanna Paul, “has a parent who was formerly incarcerated”. The implication was that she was or could be biased. It seems like a gratuitous exposure of a private history and perhaps humiliation for the journalist that proceeded from the widespread assumption that a person who has experienced something firsthand emerges with prejudice or bias. This often comes up in jury selection – for example, the idea that someone who has been sexually assaulted will not be impartial in a trial about sexual assault (which given that about 20% of women, by conservative statistics, are survivors of sexual assault, would disqualify a lot of us, and a lot more women than men). But the opposite may be true.
I came across the example about Paul’s byline when I was reading Clio Chang’s reporting in New York magazine on the case of another Washington Post reporter, Felicia Sonmez, who was “told that, by speaking up about her alleged assault, she had acted like an ‘activist’ and had ‘taken a side on the issue’, which in their view meant her reporting on assault could open the paper up to accusations of bias”. What is the other side than the victim’s side in sexual assault? Is it siding with the perpetrator? Is it not believing the victim? And how far do we extend this idea that to have experienced a thing is to have become biased? Its premise seems to be that someone who has not experienced a thing is not biased.
I don’t buy it. A person may be more sympathetic to others who’ve undergone the experience, but they may also be more insightful: empathy is not our great social failing; obliviousness is. Someone who’s had a parent incarcerated may understand the criminal justice system and its failings and, well, injustices better than someone who’s lived their whole lives at a remove from it. A 2015 report declared that “44% of Black women and 32% of Black men have a family member in prison”, which would mean that by the standards levied on Deanna Paul that a lot of Black women would be considered too biased to be potential jurors or journalists, so their perspective is more likely to be excluded.
Through that kind of exclusion, you begin to build the feedback loops that reinforce certain norms that are themselves biases or prejudices. There are many prejudices about those who’ve gone to prison, but good reporting and analysis in recent decades have exposed how unfairly that arrests, convictions and prison sentences are allocated; they go disproportionately to nonwhite and poor people in this country.
We don’t gather our prejudices from our experiences. We gather them from the society around us. Direct experience may dispel them. But one of the social prejudices these bad decisions about journalists and jurors reflect is the idea that the majority, the unaffected, are neutral. Neutrality itself is often a fiction – the idea of standing somewhere that is nowhere, rather than that we all have a position, a location, in relation to almost any topic.
For example, ours is a society that had innumerable ways of blaming victims of sexual assault – why didn’t she resist, what was she wearing, why did she go there – and many among us tend to be dismissive of every sexual assault that doesn’t conform to the stranger with a gun leaping out in a dark alley scenario. It has also been routine to treat men as more reliable and objective than women, which when it comes to sexual assault means perpetrators might be believed more than victims. A victim of sexual assault might have shed these prejudices to better understand how it can and does happen.
Alexandra Brodsky, a civil rights attorney at Public Justice and author of the book Sexual Justice, told me: “Ignorance of pervasive sexual abuse is, itself, a distorting bias, one that fools people into thinking that violence is rare, or that it is only committed by obvious monsters, or that it always appears in real life as it does in TV. Sexual abuse does not render its victims hysterical or unreliable; it endows them, terribly, with deep expertise. Besides, something tells me prospective jurors don’t freely admit when questioned that they’ve committed-sexual harm. It cannot be that they, but not survivors, have the power to decide cases.”
During the Weinstein trial last year, Mother Jones noted, the “difficulty of finding a dozen people who can weigh evidence of sexual violence without bringing in their personal biases and experiences”. But we all bring our biases with us, and those who have not experienced something may well hold strong opinions about it, and those may well be based on stereotypes, prejudices, or illusions that actual experience undermines. You could make a case that those who have been wealthy all their lives are at best ignorant about poverty and its causes and consequences, but we’re more likely to hear that someone who’s been on government assistance or homeless is biased in covering economic issues than someone who was born into luxury.
I’ve seen the same argument used to suggest Black jurors are not impartial on matters of race. But why would anyone assume white jurors are unbiased, unless they suffer from the racist delusion that racism is a myth or whiteness is itself some kind of neutrality? Alas, many do. In the trial of the three white men accused of gunning down Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, the defense attorneys have claimed the jury could be influenced by the presence of Black civil rights figures and preachers in the court. They said nothing about the influence of a white judge and white attorneys, including themselves. Though the county in which the trial is held is more than a quarter Black, 11 of the 12 jury members are white.
We have, in other words, prejudices about who is prejudiced.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses