Columnist Richard Bogartz: Why cruelty instead of compassion?

I read about Lolade Siyonbola, the female dark-skinned graduate student at Yale who was working on a paper and fell asleep in a common room.

Another female student found her, told her “You’re not supposed to be sleeping here. I’m going to call the police.” And did.

I began to wonder what the opposite of compassion is. My first thought was indifference. Too mild. Then came the idea of cruelty. That seemed better. Calling the police because someone has fallen asleep in the wrong room was closer to cruelty than indifference. Indifference would have produced walking away.

I then recalled the stories of the two dark-skinned men in Starbucks in Philadelphia being confronted by police because they hadn’t ordered anything, and the four women, three dark-skinned, who were departing from an Airbnb in Rialto, California, and were confronted by police who had been called by the woman across the street who found their failure to smile and wave suspicious.

It would have been easy to attribute these cruelties to racism and await the next sicko event. But I wondered what sort of thought was in operation between sighting the dark-skinned people and calling the police. Understand that I don’t know the answer. That does not prevent me from composing a story — dare I dignify it by claiming I am generating a hypothesis?

My guess is that the first response is a low-level fear that is often not at the level of awareness. The unconscious accompanying commentary might be “Black people are scary. You never know what they might do. To you. After all, look how many of them are in prison.” And, of course, no countervailing thought occurs about who police choose to arrest and, way more importantly, who prosecutors choose to sock it to.

“How to remove them and return to safety? If there is a handy rule that they are or might be violating, or even if there isn’t, go for it. Call the police. You can always count on them to handle fearsome black people the way they should be handled.”

So what is going on at the level of awareness? There it is more like “I am a good law-abiding citizen or rule-abiding employee. My duty is to follow the rules and see that others do also. Oh look, some black people breaking the rules.”

And so we get these cruelties done in the name of law and order, rules and regulations.

Where was the compassionate response, “Oh, here is a fellow student, worn out from working so hard, catching some much needed sleep. I should be careful not to wake her.”

Or at Starbucks, where was the needed harmless indifference of, “Oh, a couple of guys not ordering. Probably some good reason. In any case, no harm, no foul.”

Or with the AirBNB ladies, where was, “Just another group of bnb folks loading up and leaving. If they don’t wave and smile, I’ll have to get my consolation somewhere else. Nothing out of the ordinary here.”

I submit that if the person or persons seen to be committing any of the “infractions” above had been light-skinned, the unconscious inner commentary might have been more like, “Ho-hum, nothing out of the ordinary. All’s white with the world. Time to move on to the next whatever.”

I don’t doubt that most dark-skinned people in this country grow up knowing about these cruelties. The rest of us hear about abstractions such as racism without enough details of the cruelties.

It is a wonderful horror that these everyday realities are being exposed. My guess is that it is still not enough exposure. We all so desperately need to understand that the quality of black lives matter, not merely the existence.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if complainants like the ones described above would have available to them, before they acted, the question, “If that was a white person, would I be doing this?”

Richard S. Bogartz is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.