When the Ferguson shooting happened, Dr. Daniel Riew wasn't in St. Louis. He was in India. Dr. Riew is a world-renowned spinal surgeon, and he had been teaching a class at the New Delhi Spine Society. 

As a twenty-year resident of St. Louis, he paid close attention to the news from Ferguson -- a town he had never even heard of before this incident. 

I asked Dr. Riew about the character of St. Louis. "It has elements of both a Midwestern city as well as a Southern city," he said. "You don't see a lot of socializing" between people of different races. His family is the only non-white family in their neighborhood in Ladue, an inner-ring suburb.

He is well aware of the distance between his life and those of the residents of Ferguson. If you were living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he said, it is as if these events were taking place in Harlem. You are close by yet worlds apart. But like many of us, he was drawn into their stories and felt a strong sense of empathy for the community.

He understood what the protests were about. As a Korean American he understood the roots of racism. "As Asian Americans," he said, "we will never blend into society the way that others do." But at the same, "Asians don't get pulled over by the police for driving a fancy car in a nice neighborhood." 

In many ways he saw civic activism as an even more urgent cause for the black community than for ours. African Americans face hidden prejudices from society in ways that leave them feeling more disempowered. "In some ways I want to see more African Americans running for city council in Ferguson -- and joining the police force as well."

UCLA Professor Jerry Kang is a nationally-known expert in a field that explores the unconscious prejudices that reside in all of us. He is a walking encyclopedia of studies done by social scientists showing "how good people can allow bad things to happen" - beyond our conscious control. 

As the entire world began to dissect what took place during the few seconds when Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown six times, I thought about what Professor Kang might have to say about that moment in time and the human brain. 

"It is so painful to think about," he said, that at times he tried to stay willfully ignorant. Perhaps it is because he is so well-aware of study after study showing that at an unconscious level, the average person sees African Americans as less human; is less able to detect when an African American is smiling in a photo; is more likely to think that a black male with his hand in his pocket is reaching for a gun. 

Even African Americans. Our brains are machines, and none of us are immune to society's messages. "We are fallible machines... if we constantly associate blacks with criminality," he says, "then even if we're acting in good faith, we are going to be prone to stereotypes."

Given the glaring racial divide in Ferguson and the underlying stereotypes that lie beneath our consciousness, what Professor Kang worries about is the huge rift in perceptions between those who are doing the policing and those who are being policed.

 
"I think about Saigu [the LA Riots]," he said, "and about how this can explode in a bunch of different ways."