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Black Lives Matter demonstrations have once again erupted across North America as communities demand accountability for the deaths of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Tony McDade, D’Andre Campbell, and the many other Black people who’ve perished at the hands of law enforcement.
At these rallies, protesters are putting their lives on the line in more ways than one for the cause of justice. Not only are they at risk of bodily harm as police fire tear gas, rubber bullets, and even live rounds into the crowds—in a time of pandemic, they also run the chance of contracting COVID-19, an illness that has already claimed a disproportionate number of Black lives.
There are many influences that contribute to anti-Black police violence and to racial gaps in health outcomes, including structural factors like residential segregation, socio-economic inequality, and disparities in incarceration rates.
But there’s also a persistent myth that motivates both anti-Black violence and health care discrimination in the Western world: the idea that Black people are somehow superhuman.
The Superhumanization Bias
Called the superhumanization bias, this misconception manifests itself, first, in the notion that people of African descent have access to mystical knowledge or extrasensory perception. This has led to a common feature of American film and literature: the trope of the Magical Negro.
The Oracle, a "Magical Negro," employs her clairvoyance to guide white hero Neo in The Matrix.
The superhumanization bias also leads to the belief that Black people have special physical abilities. A study published in 2015 asked white internet users in the United States who was more likely to have skin thick enough to withstand the pain of burning hot coals, to be strong enough to lift up a tank, or to be capable of surviving a fall from an airplane without breaking a bone—a white person or a Black person? Respondents chose the Black person the vast majority of the time.
While many studies focus on white research subjects, there’s evidence that Black people and other people of color also see Black individuals as stronger and tougher than their white peers.
Why Being Seen as Superhuman Isn’t a Privilege
Being thought of as stronger, faster, and more intuitive than other people might sound like a good thing, but it doesn’t add up to higher respect for the Black community.
In fact, in the 2015 study, the same subjects who thought that Black people were capable of superhuman feats rated them slightly less capable of everyday tasks, like walking a dog or choosing a ripe avocado, than their white counterparts. The study’s authors concluded that the superhumanization bias arises from “long-held stereotypes about toughness, aggression, physicality, and sexuality” instead of a positive belief in Black people’s competence.
In an interview with Slate, sociologist Matthew Hughey explained that when Black Americans started to excel in sport at the turn of the 20th century, “commentators began to emphasize white cognitive superiority in contrast to the supposedly savage and unbridled physical superiority of blacks. Accordingly, a popular culture narrative of ‘black brawn’ versus ‘white brains’ emerged.”
The myth of the exceptional toughness of Black bodies, though, dates back at least as far as the 18th century, when the transatlantic slave trade was at its peak.
An 1811 treatise on the medical care of slaves, published in London by an anonymous doctor identifying himself as “A Professional Planter,” claimed that although “the knife of the anatomist… has never been able to detect” anatomical differences between Black Africans and white Europeans, Africans possessed “sensibilities, both of their minds and bodies... much less exquisite than our own.” These dulled senses, the writer continued, made slaves “able to endure, with few expressions of pain, the accidents of nature”—in other words, well-suited to the brutality of life on a West Indian plantation.
Impacts of the Superhumanization Bias on Policing
Records from across North America show that police officers more often resort to violence in interactions with Black people. In Minneapolis, for instance, where 46-year-old African American George Floyd was killed by law enforcement officers on May 25, municipal police are seven times more likely to use force against Black residents than white residents.
As a direct consequence, Black people run a disproportionately high risk of being killed by police. A 2019 research paper projected that, in the United States, about 1 in 1,000 Black men will be killed by police over the course of their lives; by comparison, the lifetime risk for white men is about 1 in 2,500.
Officers rarely stand trial for these incidents, and they’re convicted more rarely still. When the victim was Black—even if they were unarmed, even if they were just a child—jurors frequently conclude that police were justified in using lethal force.
Why? Partly due to the misconception that Black people are preternaturally strong and fast and therefore unusually dangerous—so dangerous that a trained police officer could be excused for launching a preemptive attack.
The Superhumanization Bias and COVID-19
The superhumanization bias leads not only to the perception that Black people are physically threatening but also to the mistaken belief that they are hardier and less susceptible to illness.
In his 1811 treatise, “A Professional Planter” described African slaves as resilient against fevers, immune to nausea, resistant to sexually transmitted infections, and impervious to pain.
Today, a startling number of medical professionals still harbor misconceptions about the biological differences between white and Black bodies. In a 2016 study, behavioral scientist Kelly Hoffman, Ph.D., surveyed 222 white medical students and residents from across the country and found that half of them endorsed at least one false belief about how Black and white bodies differ: 8 percent agreed that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive, 15 percent agreed that a Black person’s blood coagulates more quickly, and a shocking 34 percent agreed that Black skin is literally thicker than white skin.
Not surprisingly, doctors who hold these false beliefs about human biology make less accurate treatment recommendations for Black patients. They take fewer lifesaving measures. They underestimate their Black patients’ pain and fail to provide adequate pain relief.
These treatment disparities have shaped patient care during the current coronavirus pandemic. According to a pilot study by Rubix Life Sciences, medical professionals have been six times more likely to provide treatment and testing for white Americans with COVID-19 symptoms than Black Americans showing symptoms.
The result is a massive racial gap in the coronavirus mortality rate.
African Americans are dying of COVID-19 at 2.4 times the rate of white Americans. As of May 26, 1 in 1,850 Black Americans had lost their lives to the disease. In five states that have experienced severe COVID-19 outbreaks—Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York—more than 1 in 1,000 Black residents have died.
Beyond Bias
What makes the superhumanization myth so challenging to overcome is that, generally speaking, it’s an implicit bias. This means that it may affect the behaviors and snap judgments of people who don’t consciously subscribe to racist views because this is the way our society has taught us all to view the world.
As Kelly Hoffman, the researcher who cataloged doctors’ false beliefs about Black patients, explains: “What’s so striking is that, today, these beliefs are not necessarily related to individual prejudice. Many people who reject stereotyping and prejudice nonetheless believe in these biological differences.”
So how can we overcome a type of racial bias most of us don’t even know we hold?
In its page on COVID-19 in racial and ethnic minority groups, the CDC recommends that health care facilities implement standardized protocols for COVID-19 testing and treatment. Those might include, for example, testing any patient who presents with two or more known symptoms of the virus or hospitalizing any patient whose chest x-rays show signs of pneumonia.
Because standardized protocols limit the role of individual judgment in the health care process, they increase the likelihood that patients with the same symptoms will be treated the same way.
Reducing personal discretion can also have a positive impact on policing. An article from UC Berkeley points out that when the U.S. Customs Service introduced a policy restricting the criteria for searches, not only did the number of searches decrease, but also hit rates increased dramatically, and racial disparities declined.
As in health care, instituting specific policies that define how law enforcement officers can interact with civilians, which forbid certain tactics and lay out strict criteria for the use of force, would cut down on the number of opportunities officers have to make judgment calls that are informed by their own unconscious biases.
While we work on re-imagining our institutions and creating new, anti-racist systems, instituting standardized protocols in health care and policing is an interim measure that could check the devastating effects of implicit bias on the Black community.
