Reasons, Conditions, and the Possibility of Choice
by
Charles Lamson
If you throw a piece of chalk out the window and it falls to the ground, it would be reasonable to say that gravity caused it to fall. To understand why this happened, you might read a physics book. You would not ask the chalk to explain why it fell. On the other hand, if you threw yourself out of a window and fell to the ground, we would want to know why. Most people would not accept "gravity" for an answer, if you could answer at all.
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Our actions are not caused by natural forces (the way that gravity causes chalk to fall). Does it make sense to say that heat causes people to go to the beach? Even though a lot of people might go to the beach when it gets hot. so to say that the weather caused them to go would be silly. People can choose other ways to cool off. or they choose to do nothing at all. Chalk cannot make choices. So it is fair to apply the language of causes to chalk and other inanimate objects. We should be wary, however, of applying this language to humans.
One time in class a student and his teacher read in a textbook for another class that race causes criminal defendants to get longer sentences. The student meant that black people who are convicted of crimes, tend to get longer jail and prison sentences than whites, who are convicted of similar crimes. He was right about the pattern. Black people do tend to get longer sentences, on the average, for the same crimes, everything else being equal. But it was misleading, the teacher said, to say this pattern was "caused by race."
Being sociologically mindful, we would try to understand this pattern by looking at who is doing what to whom. Being sentenced to jail or prison is not something that just happens (like rain falling on one's head). Judges make decisions about these matters, so then we must ask why do judges give longer sentences to black people. Does race cause them to do it? Not really. No more than heat causes people to go to the beach.
As we all do, judges make decisions about people's character. And one sign of character upon which judges rely, perhaps unconsciously, is skin color. Michael Schwalbe contends on page 119 of The Sociologically Examined Life that:
In our kind of racist society, African features are often taken as signs of bad character. Judges (most of whom are white) may thus decide that blacks need or deserve harsher punishment than whites. But it is not a defendant's race that causes a judge to see things this way. The problem, rather, is a body of racist beliefs that affect how judges think and choose to act.
In Conclusion
We should not attribute the harsher sentences merely to ideas in judges' minds. Here too, there is a web of causality. To explain the pattern of harsher sentencing, we would have to know, for example, why judges feel pressured to appear tough; how images of black people have been shaped by the media; and why many white people (not only judges), persist in seeing skin color as a sign of character. We should also keep in mind that, unlike gravity, all of these social causes are changeable.
*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, MICHAEL SCHWALBE, PGS. 118-120*
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