“Most people just tell me to get over it, as if it’s that easy,” said Sashana, a recent college grad. She hates when coworkers bring their dogs to work. “No one bothers to ask if anyone’s bothered by it.”
Sashana is black, and I asked her if she believed the commonly held stereotype that African Americans are more afraid of dogs than white people. “I wish that were true,” she replied, “because then I could go over to more of my friends’ houses.”
But sociologist Elijah Anderson did find some evidence of racial differences, at least among working-class whites and blacks. In his book Streetwise, about a diverse urban neighborhood in Philadelphia, he noticed that “many working-class blacks are easily intimidated by strange dogs, either on or off the leash.” He found that “as a general rule, when blacks encounter whites with dogs in tow, they tense up and give them a wide berth, watching them closely.”
Kevin Chapman, a clinical psychologist at the University of Louisville, noticed the same anxious behavior among many African Americans that Anderson found. Chapman also discovered that nobody had explicitly investigated the incidence of cynophobia in African American populations. So in 2008, he and several colleagues conducted the first of two studies looking at the prevalence of specific fears across racial groups.
Compared to non-Hispanic whites, they found that “African Americans in particular may endorse more fears and have higher rates of specific phobias” — particularly, of strange dogs. When we spoke, Chapman offered two possible reasons. First, many dogs in low-income urban areas are trained to be what he calls “you-better-stay-away-from-our-property” guards. Being wary of those dogs makes sense — many of them are scary. In addition, Chapman told me, there’s “the historical notion of what dogs have represented for black folks in America.” In the antebellum South, dogs were frequently used to capture escaped slaves (often by brutally mauling them), and during the civil rights era police dogs often attacked African Americans during marches or gatherings.
As Chapman and his colleagues wrote in their 2011 study, many African Americans were psychologically conditioned to fear dogs when the animals were used as tools of racial hostility toward the black community. That conditioned fear is transmittable through families, he explained, and has contributed hugely to a community-wide fear of canines.
But though it seems that African American history has fostered a fear of dogs among some blacks, cynophobia mostly affects people who are conditioned to fear dogs and are predisposed to anxiety. When coupled, Chapman explained, environmental conditioning and genetic predisposition are “powerful enough to make someone develop a significant or substantial clinical fear of anything.” And people who are that afraid — who have what Chapman calls “a legit phobia of dogs” — don’t discriminate between canines, regardless of how their fear is conditioned.
