3. Social Location
It's not just how close one is to something that matters. The place from which we're looking -- the point of view -- matters too. In the image below, both of the men are perceiving and interpreting their reality accurately, yet their understanding of what is "true" is different because their point of view is different.
As with distance, this is as true in regard to differences in social location as it is for physical location. Thus, gender, race, religion, social class, sexual orientation, political ideology, and many other social categories that shape our experiences give us all different points of view, which, in turn, determine, how we see (and make sense of) the same events.
Notably, these categories are not independent of each other. Rather, each particular combination represents a different social location and, therefore, a different point of view. This is why respectability politics are more likely to be asserted by folks like Bill Cosby, Charles Barkley, and the handful of other Blacks who have the good fortune to either be part of the top 1% or realistically aspire to get there.
Cosby and Barkley aren't wrong in the way that neither of the two cartoon characters above is wrong, and politics of respectability have a place in the public discourse. But let's be clear that they see their reality from the point of view of their social location and those who are located elsewhere are likely to have a different experience of race, especially in the context of policing. And they aren't wrong either.
4. Projection
When the situation is not ambiguous, there is not a whole lot of interpretation that needs to happen. But when there is ambiguity, a person can only determine what he/she sees by imposing (i.e., projecting) his/her self onto the content.
This is the theoretical principle behind projective tests, like the Rorschach (ink blot) and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). That is, what a person sees in an ink blot reveals quite a bit about the person and nothing at all about the blot, because the blot is so ambiguous that it could be practically anything. Get enough ink blots and the data points start to cluster into themes (e.g., insecurity, aggression) that reveal something important about the person's personality.
Situations such as the one in Ferguson are ambiguous enough to function like an inkblot. Often, we see not so much what is actually there but what we (often unconsciously) expect or want to be there. That is, when the situation is sufficiently ambiguous, rather than seeing another person, we see some aspect of ourselves. And we respond accordingly, not unlike the artist in the image below.
The appeal of this illusion is the discovery that the rabbit's self-portrait can, indeed, accurately represent the duck. But just as the "paint myself" strategy is unlikely to work for every studio session with every subject, projection is similarly unlikely to represent reality accurately in most circumstances.
The problem is that projection is an unconscious and, therefore, unintentional process. As a result, it is difficult to intentionally overcome it. But difficult is not impossible. They key seems to be to understand ourselves well enough to predict what we are likely to project onto others. Tools developed by psychologists, such as the Implicit Association Test, can help us do that by revealing to us our implicit biases, including racial biases, which we have (often unintentionally) picked up from society.
This is important because implicit biases tend to impact our behavior in all sorts of ambiguous situations. In the case of police officers, it is the best explanation for why officers report seeing a gun instead of the innocuous object (e.g., phone, soda bottle) the person was actually carrying. The consequences, as described in this piece in Mother Jones, can be tragic.
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