Implicit Bias

 

     I recently watched a TED talk by Dushaw Hockett, founder and Executive Director of Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity and listened to a podcast by Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Both of these advocates spoke on implicit bias and how we need to approach the systematic racism that we have faced in this country for so many years. Implicit bias is a term used to describe the attitudes that we have towards people or the stereotypes we associate towards them without our conscious knowledge. 

    During Dushaw Hockett's talk, he spoke about the three characteristics that make a bias implicit. The first is that it operates on the subconscious level so we do not know we have the bias. The second characteristic is that it runs contrary to conscious beliefs. For example, a person could consciously say they are wanting to help others while subconsciously doing harm in the process. Finally, implicit bias is triggered through rapid and automatic mental associations and stereotypes that we make between people, objects and ideas. He also gives three reasons why focusing on implicit bias is important and how it can help move this country forward. Hockett states that an implicit bias gives an expanded diagnosis of the challenges we face in this country and gives the analogy that, if we get the diagnosis right, we will get the treatment right. Secondly, implicit bias is both predictive (a person can take any implicit association test and receive a result that predicts discriminative behavior) and preventive (there are emerging and promising strategies that suggest we can do things to reduce bias). As a country, we need a preventive approach around issues of bias. Finally, implicit bias helps reduce the shame and shaming that is associated with addressing issues of bias. One of our biggest challenges is that we engage in self-shaming and we intentionally and unintentionally shame others. Implicit bias addresses this because it asks how we align our actions and behavior with our consciously-held beliefs. 

    Sherrilyn Ifill's podcast focused on whether we can retrain our brains to see others differently. She says that, although it is possibly, it will take a very long time because racism is deeply engrained our society. We tend to make our own interpretations of people are based on the associations we've learned to link with different groups. This is something that we need to work on changing as a society, but it will take a lot of time and a very intentional effort. 

References 

Change, A. (2018, April 19). A Lesson In How To Overcome Implicit Bias. NPR.           https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/04/19/604070231/a-lesson-in-how-to-overcome-implicit-bias 

We all have implicit biases. So what can we do about it? | Dushaw Hockett | TEDxMidAtlanticSalon. (2017, September 18). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKHSJHkPeLY