Following up Masha Gessen’s article in The New Yorker, here’s an NYT column on the apparently burning issue of just how big a threat white racists are to poor Dzhokhar Tsarnaev over his not looking white enough.

Is the Defendant White or Not?

JAN. 23, 2015

By NOUR KTEILY and SARAH COTTERILL

Nour Kteily is an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Sarah Cotterill is a doctoral student in the department of psychology at Harvard.

AS jury selection continues in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the defendant in the Boston Marathon bombings, so does debate about what would constitute a fair and impartial jury.

Questions have been raised about the race, gender, age and religiosity of prospective jurors; about the effect of holding the trial in Boston; and about the legal requirement that the jurors be open to the possibility of sentencing the defendant to death.

But recent research of ours suggests that another, largely overlooked factor may also play an important role in the trial: whether the jurors perceive Mr. Tsarnaev as white. …

Which individuals were less likely to “grant” the Tsarnaevs whiteness? In our initial questionnaire, we focused on two ideological outlooks that have been well studied by political psychologists: the belief that some groups of people are superior to others (“social dominance orientation”) and the belief in the importance of following traditions and respecting authorities (“right-wing authoritarianism”). We found that participants who scored high in either outlook were less likely to perceive the Tsarnaev brothers as looking white, effectively steering the brothers into “outsider” territory.

We also found that such whiteness perceptions had the potential to play an important role in the outcome of Mr. Tsarnaev’s trial. The lower that individuals rated Mr. Tsarnaev as looking white, the more willing they were to punish him severely. In a case like Mr. Tsarnaev’s, where guilt is widely presumed and where the outcome will most likely fall on one side of the line between life imprisonment and death, this finding seems especially relevant.

One implication of our research is the need to expand what factors play a role in determining jury makeup. If your tendency to perceive a defendant as more like “us” or “them” is reliably predicted by certain of your ideological beliefs, and if those beliefs can influence factors critical to the impartiality of the legal process, then jury screening questionnaires should measure them.

In an increasingly multiracial world, trying racially ambiguous defendants will become only more common. Just as we ask potential jurors questions like “Do you go to church?” we need to ask questions like “Is having a decent respectable appearance still the mark of a lady?” (one of many questions used to gauge right-wing authoritarianism) and “If certain groups of people ‘stayed in their place,’ would we have fewer problems?” (social dominance orientation).

By using such information, courts can better take into account the broader ideological balance of a potential jury.