Our brains try to suss out whether bad situations happened by accident/error or through malice. That’s an important thing for us to do. There are people who will take advantage of us and hurt us and it’s important to detect those people.
We want to successfully detect malice in other people. We want to make as few mistakes in that regard as possible. If I am a very privileged person (say a white male who has enough money in the bank to float some minor catastrophes, but obviously there are lots more categories of privilege) there is a very good chance that I ought to be more accepting of false negatives than I am in order to generate fewer false positives. Thinking other people are malicious when they aren’t makes our lives worse and probably means acting like an asshole.
If I am a visibly gender-non-conforming black person I have a lot less lee-way to accept those false negatives. In that case if I live in a major city and ride transit, it’s likely the case that every single day a person sees me who would physically assault me for being who I am if they had the chance. Noticing those people has a higher priority.
So when I watch Katherine Ryan’s standup and Ryan says that men are like dolphins, “Fun to enjoy on vacation, but why would you let one in your house?” I can have a laugh knowing that even if Katherine Ryan saw me as a man, Ryan wouldn’t kill me and that no one watching that routine would be inspired to kill me by it.
But when a Black person interacts with police they have to decide whether they are more likely to die if they run away than if they stay put and behave politely. They have to try to guess whether these are cops who are making a mistake or cops who want to kill a Black person to watch them die today, like the cop who killed George Floyd. Telling them that they need to adjust their malice detectors to allow more false negatives isn’t fair, and applying a more lenient malice-detector isn’t helpful.
Hanlon’s razor is some good advice for significant number of people, and it might be a great tool for you to live a better life. But it’s basically advice to turn a dial down, and you can’t give that advice when you don’t know where other people’s dials are set or why.
