What Happened in the Ramble
The Ramble is a heavily wooded area in New York City’s Central Park. Located between 73rd and 78th Streets, it’s mostly known for its winding pathways and abundant wildlife. Spanning 36 acres, it’s easy for a “rambler” to forget that it is situated in one of the world’s largest cities, surrounded by streets and avenues that form perfect right angles at their intersections.
On the morning of Monday, May 25 – while much of the country was on holiday but not going anywhere because of a deadly pandemic, two strangers had a fateful meeting in the Ramble. Christian Cooper is a tall Black man with broad shoulders. You can’t see from looking at him that he is a Harvard graduate or a former editor and writer with Marvel Comics – but on the morning of the 25th, his binoculars might have given strangers a clue that he, like many others who visit the Ramble in the morning, is a bird-watcher. Amy Cooper (no relation) is a thin white woman with dark hair. That morning, she was wearing yoga pants and a face mask, and was accompanied by Henry, a cocker spaniel. At the precise moment that Christian and Amy met, Henry was running free, without a leash.
Christian was the first to speak. He asked Amy to please leash her dog, and pointed to the sign that mandated all dogs in the Ramble be leashed. Amy refused, saying that her dog required exercise and other parts of the park were too dangerous. Christian beckoned the dog with a treat – he says that this is a tactic he often employs with stubborn dog owners who understandably get nervous when strangers in the city feed their dogs. Usually, a dog owner will relent and leash their dog. Amy yelled, “Get away from my dog!” – and that’s when Christian began to film the encounter on his phone.
Amy Cooper and dog.
The resulting video was posted on Twitter later that morning by Christian’s sister Melody. It depicts Amy rushing toward Christian, asking him to put his phone down and when he refuses, threatening to call the police. “Then I’m taking pictures and calling the cops,” she says. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” And then, she proceeds to do just that.
Christian’s video account quickly went viral. Within 48 hours, Amy Cooper had lost both her dog and her job.
For the past eight years, I’ve facilitated countless workshops on the topic of Implicit (or Unconscious) Bias. In them, participants explore the ways in which our lived experiences and the stereotypes we’ve absorbed often effect what we see and how we react in ways we’re not consciously aware.
Many of the people I’ve worked with enter my workshops with a healthy degree of skepticism. They don’t see themselves as biased, and before we can begin our work together, I often need to spend a fair amount of time nudging them toward acceptance of this fact. This happens by defining bias in neutral terms, letting them experience what it’s like to make very quick decisions, and by talking a bit about the human brain.
Implicit bias work is built around a simple but revelatory premise – that human beings actually have two brains. Literally, of course, there is but one brain housed within my skull, but it’s a very complex and mysterious organ, with many parts and pieces – and two separate and distinct thinking systems which lead to two entirely different ways that human beings make decisions.
As defined by Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman[1], System One is an automatic thinking machine, which processes a high degree of emotional data (especially fear) and can create judgments about the people and situations I encounter in a very short time, often less than a second. System One contains the amygdala, which serves to locate threats in my environment. It’s a part of my brain that I don’t have much control over, but it does a fairly good job of keeping me alive and safe. According to Kahneman, System Two is a more deliberate brain, which processes more logical and analytical data, a bit more slowly. Unlike the automatic brain, System Two can create, innovate, learn new things, and it more or less does what I want it to do. Bias, we’ve learned, comes from System One but can be mitigated by System Two.
As I guide my clients, often for the first time, through the mechanics of Unconscious Bias, I often feel as though my primary job is to alleviate them of guilt. This isn’t just because I want them to enjoy the workshop experience, but because guilt can vastly inhibit learning in this area. Only by being open and curious to the workings of my baser, more automatic thinking system can I develop the tools to counteract it. I may never be rid of my brain’s penchant to employ bias, but I can – with some effort – learn to make better, fairer, more equitable decisions. If I locate a bias that is especially harmful, I can – with greater, more sustained effort -- reprogram my brain with messages that are aligned to my values.
And yet, the cynicism around the topic of Unconscious Bias persists. While many white people still take umbrage at the mere suggestion that they hold a privileged place in society (because to do so would force them to confront the myths that racism is a thing of the past and their successes in life cannot be solely attributed to work ethic) – many others bristle at the notion that harmful actions should be forgiven based on their oppressor’s good intentions.
Amy Cooper, after all, says she was afraid. A strange man in the park tried to feed her dog, and she was frightened. In 1995, Daniel Goleman[2] introduced the concept of the Amygdala Hijack, wherein overwhelming fear can cause a fight or flight response that I have virtually no control over. So if Amy Cooper was experiencing an amygdala hijack, is she really to blame? And if the rest of us have never threatened to make a false report to the police on an innocent man, are we biased ourselves?
Here are some lessons that can be learned from what happened last week in the Ramble.
1) The presence of overt bias does not negate the omnipresence of Unconscious Bias. A close examination of the video in Central Park raises serious doubts about Amy Cooper’s claim that she acted out of fear. First, she approaches him, with pointed finger, demanding that he put his phone down. At this point, she has Henry by the collar, and the dog is in no danger of eating anything she wouldn’t want him to. When he keeps filming, she lodges her threat – “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” She only moves a few feet away as she dials and adopts no defensive posture as she dials. She says, “Excuse me” when dialing 911 takes a little longer than she planned. After making her initial complaint – using the phrase “African-American” not once, but twice – she raises the pitch of her voice considerably to repeat the lie. Presumably, she adopts a higher register to imitate someone whose life or safety is being threatened, all while at a safe distance from Christian Cooper, her alleged “assailant” – meanwhile, he hasn’t moved from his original spot.
I cannot say with absolute certainty that Amy Cooper was not afraid. But what I see, upon careful examination (and re-examination) of Christian Cooper’s video, is a woman acting from entitlement. She, not he, is behaving in a physically threatening manner, and is making wildly untrue claims to the police. As someone with a fair amount of knowledge about the history of policing of Black people in this country, what I also see, quite clearly, is a white person making a credible threat on a Black person’s life. At the very least, she was hoping that Christian Cooper would be so terrified by the prospect of the police looking for an African-American suspect that he’d flee the scene – but she also knew, at some level, that he could have been arrested, cuffed, detained or killed, simply because he asked her to leash her dog.
This act of overt bias in no way disproves the kind of implicit biases that pop up hundreds of times a day. This severe and aggressive act does not negate the series of micro-aggressions that people of color (and other marginalized groups) experience every day. It’s true that my tendency to interrupt women more often than I interrupt men, or my well-meaning habit of doing things on behalf of people with physical disabilities without asking, is not as serious as a threat to someone’s body or life. But these kinds of micro-aggressions can, over time, derail careers and inhibit people from creating valuable relationships with those who are different from them. They have a high cost, albeit a cumulative one. The fact that you’re not an Amy Cooper does not mean that you have nothing to learn about your own biases.
2) In any event, good intentions do not negate harmful impact. Often, when people from dominant groups (white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, temporarily able-bodied, Christian, etc.) are caught saying or doing something that diminishes someone with a non-dominant identity, the response is a quick, “But I didn’t mean it that way.” And … sometimes, the person’s intent is an important piece of context. But it never negates the impact of such actions. Reparative action must always be taken – sometimes, this is as small as a sincere apology and a genuine promise to do better. Sometimes, the response needs to be bolder: a change in policy or process that prevents the automatic brain from further disenfranchising those who are already marginalized. Sometimes, when pervasive harm or violence is perpetrated on others, punitive consequences are necessary.
In the case of Amy Cooper, it actually matters very little if her intentions were pure, or even neutral. She threatened a man’s life, and wrought severe emotional distress on every person of color who saw the video. Her employer knew that their brand would be severely tarnished should she retain her position as Vice President, and she was fired. This was done not simply to punish a bad actor, but to protect an entire company; as such, I believe her termination was justified. Sometimes, the consequences can go too far; per many credible sources, Amy Cooper has been receiving death threats in the days that followed her interaction with Christian Cooper. This is something I certainly don’t condone. And, I’ll be honest: were she charged with filing a false report or something more serious, I would not be overly sympathetic. It would be valuable, I believe, for all white people who are witness to this story to see that heinous actions result in swift justice.
3) Racism – all isms – are both individual and structural. The most frightening aspect of the Amy Cooper story is not that a white person weaponized her privilege to threaten an innocent Black man’s life. As disturbing as that is, what’s even scarier is the fact that what she did was possible. Therefore, it’s not enough that Amy Cooper is punished for what she did on the morning of Monday, May 25 in the Ramble. For true justice to emerge, we need to change the culture – not only to one where such an act is not just morally repugnant, but simply and practically ineffective. In order for us to approach this goal, each of us need to examine our own attitudes about race: what we believe, what we’ve been taught, what we’ve watched on the news or at the movies, and most importantly what we do, how we react, and where white supremacy continues to benefit us, even if we disown any participation in it. There is much to do in our broader society, but the work starts with ourselves, by lowering our defenses to discover how society’s ills have crept into the darker corners of our minds. Sometimes, these discoveries provoke guilt, even shame. What I’m suggesting is that these moments of embarrassment can be managed if we commit to simultaneous compassion and honesty, with ourselves and others.
In short: if you were shocked by what you saw Amy Cooper do, it’s not an endpoint. It’s just the beginning.
[1] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[2] Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ. New York: Bantam
