Stereotypes of larger Black men still persist at the Derek Chauvin trial

During the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, Chauvin’s defense attorney Eric Nelson has repeatedly pointed to Floyd’s size.

Nelson raised size again Tuesday, when he confirmed with a police instructor that officers are trained to consider size difference for use of force. He first brought it up during opening statements in late March.

“You will see that three Minneapolis police officers could not overcome the strength of Mr. Floyd,” Nelson said. “Mr. Chauvin stands five-foot-nine, 140 pounds. Mr. Floyd is six, three , weighs 223 pounds.”

In the conversations around victims of police brutality, pointing to a victim’s size to justify or disregard the violence has become a feature, not a bug. Prominent examples include Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, and Michael Brown. But why is size so often mentioned in these cases?

Anna Mollow, a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based disabilities studies expert who sees similarities in the cases of Barbara Dawson and Tamir Rice, said in a recent interview this reflects forms of oppression that are familiar in our society.

“I would, indeed, say that the defense’s comments about George Floyd’s size do draw upon, and do recirculate, stereotypes of Black people as possessing superhuman physical strength,” wrote Mollow, “while at the same time calling up dehumanizing stereotypes about Black people’s supposed moral and intellectual inferiority — for example, the notion that they need to be brought ‘under control,’ as Chauvin said of Floyd.”

A 2017 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed that non-Black participants misperceived young Black men as larger and more capable of harm than young white men. In another study in 2018, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill researchers who analyzed one million NYPD police stops found that tall Black men are more likely to face unjustified attention from law enforcement. Meanwhile, height may benefit white men professionally, but it can read as threatening for Black men.

The 2017 study’s findings highlighted the role of size: “Judgments of size fed into biased perceptions of harm capability, and these harm perceptions mediated the link between size perception and force justification.”

Mollow, who has researched how violence impacts larger, disabled Black people, said that victims like Floyd are in a double bind. There is one narrative that casts the victim as “innately sick,” Mollow said, while at the same time, another myth suggests that larger Black people have “superhuman strength.”

“It’s very illogical and contradictory,” said Mollow, who noted that courtroom discussions of George Floyd’s health and size have played out in similar fashion. “That system of a double bind is one of the ways that oppression can really be reinforced because you can’t escape it. Either you’re too weak or you’re too strong, but somehow it’s always your fault.”

Mollow expanded in an email on how these stereotypes are both racist and ableist: “The assumption that there is such a thing as mental ‘inferiority’ and the assumption that people who are deemed mentally disabled need to be punished or controlled, are fundamental elements of ableist ideology.

“Drug addiction, as well as the physical pain that led George Floyd to be prescribed the opioids to which he became addicted, are disabilities,” wrote Mollow, who researched disability studies while earning her doctorate from University of California–Berkeley in English. “They are not moral failings, and they certainly don’t justify or excuse the violent, inhumane treatment that Derek Chauvin inflicted upon George Floyd.”

Ben Brooks, a diversity and inclusion expert who was one of the first Black officers to enlist in the Pennsylvania State Police in 1961, said that bias, in general society, isn’t well understood. People use bias to detect danger, Brooks continued, and for some, their danger detectors don’t respond fairly to Black people.

“The story they have in their head is that person is dangerous,” said Brooks, who founded Major Ben’s Consulting Agency in Collegeville, which consults for law enforcement and other areas of the justice system.

Both Mollow and Brooks look back to slavery to explain why fears persist. Brooks points to the image of the “big Black buck.” Mollow said that during enslavement, the myth of superhuman strength was another way to dehumanize Black people.

“In order to do something so horrible and genocidal to so many people, you have to come up with a justification for it,” Mollow said. “Some of the justification for that was that supposedly Black people could work in fields all day and somehow didn’t suffer in the same way and had this excessive strength.”

Brooks said that bias can be applied positively or negatively. Bias applied positively is humanizing; bias applied negatively to a particular race is dehumanizing.

“We can dehumanize [someone] we feel no responsibility to show respect,” Brooks said. “And we unconsciously, do those things, and we don’t recognize or realize it.”

Officers approaching a larger Black person in any situation fearfully would already be against Brooks’ advice, who noted that how Chauvin treated Floyd wouldn’t align with training.

“If you approach [an] individual with dignity, respect, and self worth, then you’re on an even keel,” he said. “But when it’s anything other than that, that means psychologically the temperature rises.”

Empathy, he said, is critical for officers: “When you can approach members of the public with an empathic approach, you’re more likely to make an emotional connection and see them on a human level.”

Mollow noted that it was important to be mindful of how different forms of oppression, like racism and sizeism, intersect. Thinking that way, she said, invites more space for self-criticism for everyone across groups, rather than thinking confrontationally: “It’s more about continuing to really explore the way that we might be perpetuating forms of oppression without realizing it, and then to explore the ways that we can work together and change that.”