It's About Race. It's Not About Race.
It's a familiar moment in many mock trials or focus groups where the key players on each side are of different races, but race wasn't explicit in whatever interaction led them to be opposing each other in court. (Many trials -- employment disputes and criminal prosecutions are two common categories -- answer this description.) After the jurors have talked through some of the other issues, we ask them: "What does race have to do with this, if anything?"
Often a white juror's hand goes up first. "Nothing," the juror says, and explains why things would have been the same regardless of race. Others give their views, and then a black juror speaks. Race had everything to do with it, that juror often says.
You can't know from the mock trial alone whether you're seeing a pattern, but you can start keeping an eye out for the deeply different ways that black and white Americans often perceive and explain the world. This morning, for example, when the Washington Post and ABC News released a new poll on issues shaping the election (article here, poll results here; you may need a free subscription), most readers looked for clues as to who the next president might be. Jury watchers, though, might have gone straight to these questions:
Having fully absorbed those answers, our jury watchers might then spend some time thinking about how to understand this one:
Race matters. It even matters to whether someone thinks it matters.
(Photo by Santa Rosa OLD SKOOL at http://www.flickr.com/photos/santarosa/300475023/; license details there.)
