Delusional Confirmation Bias 101: “This is why he takes a knee…”

This is the story that came up on my newsfeed.  See the headline?  Almost every comment on the thread mentions something along the lines of, “This is why Kaepernick takes a knee”.   Did these people click beyond the headline, have reading comprehension issues, or thinking comprehension issues?  Here is the story:

Police stopped, drew guns and handcuffed a black teenager on suspicion that he was robbing two white women he was in a car with, before it emerged that one of them was his grandmother and the other was giving them both a ride home from church.

The incident took place in Wauwatosa, in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, on Sunday, after a bystander told police that he had witnessed what looked like a robbery of two white women in a blue Lexus vehicle. Police officers stopped the car and told the 18-year-old man, whose name was not given, to step out with his hands up, go on his knees and enter the police vehicle, before one of the officers approached the Lexus and soon realized the mistake.

“This is my grandson,” one of the women is heard telling the officer who asked her if she was OK, according to dashcam footage of the incident, broadcast by local NBC-affiliate TMJ4. “We’re on our way home from church to my house.”

The officer can be heard apologizing for “that guy not knowing what he was talking about,” referring to the man who had driven by the police vehicle to alert officers that the young man in the women’s car was “robbing them right now.”

“I’m sure he saw two old white ladies in a car with a black kid and he made some assumptions,” the woman can be heard saying, before the officer informed her that the man in question was black himself. “Oh my God. Then it’s even worse,” the woman exclaimed. The woman assured the officer that the teenager was no threat to either of them, telling the officer that her friend had known him since he was very young.

“It’s all good, he’s her grandson,” one officer is heard shouting to the squad car, before the young man was released.

The police officers said they could not locate the bystander who had alerted them to question him formally on what led him to suspect the young man was robbing the two women.

So those people pontificating “this is why Colin kneels” are essentially claiming Kapernick’s whole animus for not standing during the National Anthem is based upon a distorted media-driven narrative of false reporting on racial prejudice and persecution based upon skin and ethnicity.  Because the “witness” who reported to the police what he saw or thinks he saw going on in the car, happens to be black himself.  And who’s to say what drove him to that perception, which turned out to be mistaken?  Was it based upon racial prejudice against his own skin color (victim of institutionalized racism)?  Or movement and actions going on inside the car that could have led him or perhaps anyone to wonder?  We will never know because we weren’t there to witness what he witnessed at the moment he witnessed it; nor does it appear that anyone will be identifying the witness to us anytime soon.  So we don’t know what kind of a person this witness is.  Leaving the door wide open for media fueling and fanning and feeding the frenzy of racial animus and the false narrative of racial oppression.  Confirmation bias, based upon flawed information.

This wasn’t a case of police brutality or racial prejudice.  They were right to investigate.  And based upon the article, the police behaved professionally.

Yet so many of those comments suggest that this is why Colin Kaepernick kneels.  And why he’s awarded a multi-million dollar contract in “a country that oppresses black people and people of color,”