A University of Maryland professor of sociology recently told a webinar audience that police in the United States have the same reaction to snakes and spiders as they do to “Black individuals in close proximity.”
Rashawn Ray, head of UMD’s Social Justice Alliance and Anti-Black Racism Initiative, cited his own implicit bias research for the comparison during the discussion “Rotten Trees: Racism and Bad Apples in American Policing,” The Pitt News reports.
Ray (pictured) had worked with UMD’s Lab for Applied Social Science and Google to “create an immersive virtual reality experience that explored racial preferences and bias” and which “curat[ed] specific experiences [and] routinely changed the race of the characters involved.”