In Ferguson, after months of waiting, heartbreak and debate, we expect to finally have some answers when we soon learn if Darren Wilson will be indicted for the shooting death of Michael Brown. According to the media, police are planning a militarized response to anticipated protests. Community activists are booking tickets to be on site when the grand jury’s decision is announced.
The stage is set for conflict.
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But, what ultimately will come of these months of protest and the inevitable confrontation following the grand jury decision? Indicting and convicting Darren Wilson may seem like justice, but is it the endgame? What is the strategy for what comes next?
The hard truth remains that in a democracy you must convince enough people of the rightness of both your cause and your remedy. For racial justice activists, this task is immensely challenging given how our brains process race in the midst of existing racial polarization.
Ferguson feels to some like our generation’s Birmingham. But in a more complex time that many would like to think of as “post racial,” with a black president, attorney general, and captain in the St. Louis County police, many are legitimately ambivalent about the role race may have played in the death of Michael Brown. Protests that don’t recognize and speak directly to this ambivalence can polarize rather than unify outrage.
Photo essay: How the crisis in Ferguson unfolded, in photographs
What role does social psychology play in this dynamic? Our perceptions of Michael Brown as victim or as perpetrator are colored by implicit biases as well as how American society has historically talked about black men. We know that narratives or stories, more than data or facts, help our brains interpret human emotion and behavior. When we have little personal contact with particular groups of people, narratives about these groups take on greater importance. The distorted stories we are told about black men and boys as more likely to be engaged in criminal activity, disinterested in educational achievement, and rebellious against authority chillingly connect to the claims of fear by those who killed Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis and John Crawford.
Racial anxieties — the worry that we will be treated differently because of our race — has long been a burden for people of color. In the Perception Institute’s soon-to-be-released report, “The Science of Equality: Addressing Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat in Education and Health Care,” we detail research showing that whites are increasingly experiencing that burden as well. The worry that they will be assumed racist, or that their responses or statements will suggest they are racist, can lead whites to avoid engaging difficult questions and interracial interactions.
Related: From Emmett Till to Michael Brown, a story as old as America itself
Our challenge as activists is to overcome the implicit biases and racial anxieties that interact to diminish opportunities to expand public empathy. Our protests can no longer ignore what we know about how our brains operate. I am not suggesting that we avoid truths to make white people feel comfortable about race, but instead, that we use this information to be strategic about how we tell our truths.









