Chapter 5 - Assumptions, Expectations, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Summary

My wife broke her arm in 2023, and one of our many doctor visits involved an emergency room trip when an urgent care doctor suspected circulatory damage. I was in line to go through security behind a young Black woman. The (white) security guard stopped her before she entered the screening machine and asked whether she had any guns or knives. She said no. He stared at her and made her go through the screening machine very slowly.

Then, it was my turn. As I emptied my pockets, the guard glanced at me and waved me through the screening machine without saying anything. When I collected my things, I noticed that the guard had picked up a book and appeared to be absorbed in it. He had not even watched as I passed through the checkpoint.

While I will never know what that guard was thinking, either about the Black woman or about me, it's reasonable to think that the question the guard asked her—but not me—followed from an assumption. He thought there was a chance that she was armed, but not that I was. As with all those police officers who did not pull me over, I was understood to be innocent until proven guilty—a courtesy not extended to the woman in front of me.

In Chapter 3, I listed assumptions that can inform whether someone receives the benefit of the doubt or has it withheld from them. Many of those assumptions fall into one of three clusters: competence, morality, and dangerousness. This chapter discusses assumptions about competence, trustworthiness, and innocence. It then addresses self-fulfilling prophecies, which are circumstances in which acting on an assumption changes reality such that the assumption becomes true even though it was not initially so.

Competence

I’m white, so I’m expected to be smarter.

Men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise.

I was highly educated. I spoke in the way one might expect of someone with a lot of formal education. I had health insurance. I was married. All of my status characteristics screamed ‘competent,’ but nothing could shut down what my blackness screams when I walk into the room.