A few years ago my wife and I went to Ireland for vacation. It was our first time over there and it was great. I can’t wait to go back.
We had a wonderful time, especially in Galway where my family is from. One thing that I noticed was how often people stopped us and asked for directions. This happened with enough frequency that I was curious. So, the next person who stopped me and asked for directions, I asked them why they asked me. They all said it was because I looked Irish.
Hard to Tell….
One of issues that Rhymes Over Beats is passionate about is unjust convictions due to misidentification.
According to data assembled by The Innocence Project, 70% of the people who were ultimately exonerated were convicted because of misidentification.
42% of the time it was racial. A person from one race misidentifies a person of another race.
I have no data to back this up, but I’m willing to bet that if a black person were asked to describe another black person they would say something like ‘they were light skinned,’ or ‘they were very dark.’ A white person would just say they were black. And if a black person were asked to describe me, they wouldn’t exactly call me ‘the Irish guy.’
The inability to recognize that cross-racial identification is not reliable leads to unnecessary convictions. It is demonstrated by the large number of exonerations where the reason for the conviction is a mistaken eyewitness identification of a person by a person of another race.
These are Our Stories
This is why it is one of the issues dealt with in the plot of a hip hop musical Freedom that Rhymes Over Beats is developing.
In the musical, the white witness only sees black. Initially she identifies a black police detective as the criminal; later she identifies the next black person she sees – a person the audience knows is innocent.
Dry statistics don’t change people’s hearts. Put a face on those statistics and tell a story around a person’s experience. Allow other people to feel how they feel.
This is what the art of theater does.
Join us. Create work with us that will help people when they are sitting on a jury to give the proper weight to cross-racial identification.
Help us prevent more innocent people from being unjustly convicted.