When testing the instincts of police officers, subjects in Josh Correll’s test revealed that they usually saw young black men as threatening, but they did so much less often than civilians did. “’We’re more likely to shoot a black man with a wallet,’ Semien (a former officer) says, ‘and we’re less likely to shoot a white man with a gun.’”

With this background, we must ask why we perceive young black men the way we do (and other types of people as well) and how we can make better judgments.