'Price We Pay' talks to focus on cost of bias

The university’s MLK Committee is continuing its series of year-long events to celebrate the life and legacy of the slain civil rights activist with the presentation of two lectures on Wednesday, Nov. 5, that will focus on “The Price We Pay: Crack, Cops and Cost of Bias.”

Speakers will be Phillip A. Goff, associate professor of social psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles, and the co-founder and president for research for the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA; and Carl Hart, associate professor at Columbia University and author of the recently published “High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society.” 

Hart, who researches drugs, behavior, race and society, has also published nearly 100 scientific articles on neuropsychopharmacology, the study of the neural mechanisms that drugs act upon to influence behavior. Goff researches how race impacts criminal justice factors such as whether youth offenders are treated as adults, and how/when force is used.

Goff will speak on “The Science of Preventing the Next Ferguson: Race, Policing and American Democracy,” at noon in University Center Room 303.

At 4:10 p.m., Hart will speak on “High Price: Thinking about Drugs with a Social Conscience,” in Linderman 200. His talk will be followed by a book signing.

Challenging standard narratives

The bridging of the two lectures by Hart and Goff speaks to the MLK Committee’s continued investment in highlighting and bringing together the interconnected dimensions of identity based topics and inequality – such as, “the war on drugs” – “bias and policing” – that we often tend to separate in the larger public discussion of them, according to Monica Miller, assistant professor of religion studies, a member of the Africana Studies faculty, MLK Committee member and one of the organizers of the event.

“We have a neuroscientist challenging standard narratives of pathology around drugs and addiction, often raced and classed in many ways, in a manner that brings attention to the conditions of societal existence and constraint that produce limiting contexts and options for those most vulnerable – those who might come to use drugs at some point in their life,” Miller says.

“Important here, and uncommon, is Dr. Hart’s contextualization of ‘the war on drugs and addiction’ from multiple angles – societal/structural, historical, empirical, policy and so on. In doing so, he disrupts the all-too-easy singular narratives of addiction that often paint and portray its victims as irrational and unable to make choices and decisions for themselves. In other words, drugs, Dr. Hart argues, aren’t as irresistible by their users as one is often led to believe. As he beautifully demonstrates in High Price, meth and crack addicts, for example, in his studies, will often choose cash incentives over and against the drugs themselves.”

Miller says that Hart “moves beyond the moral-panic and exaggerated journalistic claims of ‘blame-the-victim’ tropes that more often than not are grounded in ideological sentiments, rather than, empirical data. As Hart poignantly reminds us, she says, “emotional hysteria that stems from misinformation related to illegal drugs obfuscates the real problems faced by marginalized people.”

Similarly, moving beyond the journalistic towards the empirical, Goff will speak about the “science” of how to challenge social ills, such as policing and bias, most notably expressed in the recent case of Ferguson, Missouri victim Michael Brown and others.

Here,” adds Miller, “two seemingly disparate issues of inequity (drugs/addiction, and policing), are connected in thoughtful and important scholarly ways at the seams of a fragmented and divided American society.”

According to Gordon Moskowitz, chair of the psychology department, co-chair of the social justice scholars faculty group, and MLK Committee member and co-organizer of the Nov. 5th event, what makes Goff’s work fascinating is that “it allows us to focus both on discriminatory actions of the racist individual as well as subtler forms of bias that exist without hate, animus, or overt contempt."

These less obvious actions may not be derived from a desire to discriminate, but in the aggregate can lead to what Moskowitz called “entrenched disparities” in a society that arise from small differences in how we explain the world as a function of race.

“A 14-year-old African American boy may be more likely to both be construed as engaging in criminal behavior and perceived as older than a white 14-year-old engaged in the same behavior,” he said. “This exaggerated sense of his actions and his age then lead such a boy to be treated more harshly. This disparate treatment often occurs not because of an officer’s overt dislike for the color of the boy’s skin, but because of a subtle perceptual bias that merely leads him to see the boy as a man, and as threatening.  Dr. Goff’s work examines these dynamics.”

A slate of provocative programming

The MLK Committee, which is continuing a focus on social justice issues with a particular emphasis on the prison industrial complex, kicked off the academic year with a talk by Jasmine Rand, the attorney who represented the Trayvon Martin family, who spoke on “Sexualizing Race, Gendering Sex: Stand Your Ground, Trayvon Martin and White Female Sexuality in the Prosecution of Black Men.”

That well-attended event was followed by “Rap Sessions,” with featured Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, that was moderated by hip hop artist and activist Jasari X and included  Carlito Rodriguez, award-winning writer/Producer of BET documentary 50 Shots on Police Brutality and Sean Bell; Michael Skolnik, political director for Russell Simmons/editor-in-chief of Globalgrind.com; Niaz Kazravi, NAACP National Director of Criminal Justice, and Bakari Kitwana, executive director of Rap Sessions.

A highlight of a year’s worth of programming is expected to be a talk by highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar Michelle Alexander, the New York Times best-selling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander will be Lehigh’s MLK speaker at a celebration slated for 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 28, in Baker Hall.

In addition to the MLK Committee, the “Price We Pay” talks are being co-sponsored by Africana Studies, cognitive science program; the Council for Equity and Community; the English department; the Health, Medicine and Society program; the Office of Multicultural Affairs;  the psychology department; the Social Justice Scholars; the sociology/anthropology department; the South Side Initiative and the Office of the Vice President and Associate Provost for Research and Graduate Studies.