I’d like to tell you that this isn't about me, but any conversation that begins with "This isn't about me" is inevitably about the person.
It is about me.
I am a racist and will likely struggle to overcome my unconscious racial preferences throughout my life.
Now that that’s out of the way on this Martin Luther King Day, I’d like to talk about what I believe racism is and why I feel it’s so important to talk about my own racism.
The Implicit Association Tests (IAT)
The Implict Association Tests are a series of psychological tests for unconscious bias that can be taken online at Harvard University.
The test for racial bias was developed by Anthony Greenwald at the University of Washington. Shankar Vedantam writes about it's development in his book The Hidden Brain.
The test is an association game. The initial test was a series of positive and negative words like “beauty,” “love,” “nasty,” and “ugly” and a series of insects and flowers. Not surprisingly, he found it very easy to associate roses and tulips with positive words and cockroaches and beetles with negative words.
What he found was that his unconscious mind would group the positive words very quickly with certain flowers and insects and that there would be a delay in connecting these words against how his unconscious mind felt they should be connected. It took longer to associate roses with negative words or cockroaches with positive words. This revealed a bias.
He went further though. He then replaced flowers and insects with typically Caucasian names like Adam and Chip and typically African-American names like Alonzo and Jamal. Since he didn't consciously associate these names with either positive or negative words, he assumed the speed of association would be the same.
Greenwald was wrong. He found that he effortlessly associated black names with words like “evil” and “poison” and white names with “dream” and “heaven”. He was also horrified. He contacted a colleague, Mahzarin Banaji, at Harvard University. Without telling her what the test was about, he asked her to play. Her results were similar to Greenwald’s.
Banaji knew she wasn’t racist. She taught classes teaching other people how to watch out for prejudice. She thought it must be due to whether someone was right-handed or left-handed. So they changed the order in which names were presented. It made no difference.
Banaji described this experience to the Washington Post:
I was deeply embarrassed. I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me.
Many years ago when I first took the test I felt the same way. Like Banaji, I taught about racism and multiculturalism. I’d spent years studying the issue, how could I be a racist?
I took the test again with similar results. Just before writing this article I took the test again. My results were unchanged from when I first took the test in the mid 2000s:
27% of people have a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American and 70% have a slight, moderate, or strong preference.
Only 17% of people have little to no automatic preference between Black and White.
This didn’t make me feel much better when I first received my results. What I learned, however, is that this is unconscious bias. Our unconscious biases, formed very early on are very difficult to change.
Fortunately, change can happen and is much easier to affect at the conscious level.
A little bit about me and perhaps my unconscious biases
I grew up in a small town in upstate New York. There was one black student at my elementary school. We never really spoke because we didn't have the same group of friends. When I’d go out to play my mom would warn me to stay away from the older kids. By older kids, she largely meant delinquents and older black kids. The kind of kids who could cause trouble. I didn't know any of these kids, but it was rumored that they came across the river to our tiny village from the larger city of Schenectady. My mom told me where these kids hung out, in Central Park, and I was never allowed to go there.
I remember asking my Dad once why we never visited New York City even though we lived two hours away. His response was that there was too much crime in New York City. Somehow every year while he was watching the U.S. Open Tennis tournament, there would be some story about a tourist who was robbed or killed and my Dad thought this was all there was to NYC. When he said too much crime, this was code for too many black people.
Most of this wasn’t apparent to me until I grew older and we moved to Cincinnati. Cincinnati was ten times the size of Schenectady and 100x bigger than the village of Scotia where I grew up.
I still remember shortly after we moved here driving down to Tri-County Mall with my mom and sister one afternoon and pulling into a parking lot. Instead of getting out to go to the store, however, we waited in the car as my mom locked the doors until a black man passed. “Mom,” we asked her, “Why did you lock the doors?”
She said something like: “You can never be too safe.” By this time, however, both my sister and I knew what this meant. It meant black people are scary. Even in broad daylight at the mall.
When we’d visit my grandparents in Western New York, one of the topics that inevitably came up among the grown-ups was how the black people were moving in and taking over. My grandfather called them “the coloreds”.
The year Obama ran for President, my grandfather had moved home with us because he could no longer take care of himself. He asked me one day what I thought about someone like Obama running for President. “A Harvard graduate?” I chided him. “No,” he said, “One of them.”
I did know. But I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of playing the “us vs. them” game. So I constantly reaffirmed the things we have in common rather than talking about our skin color differences. After a couple attempts to bait me into these conversations, my grandfather would usually give up.
Why this is important
I feel it’s important to tell this story for a couple reasons.
First, statistically, the odds are pretty good that you have racial prejudices. 70% of people who take the test show a preference for white faces on the racial bias test. Even a large percentage of minorities.
Even the two people who invented the test Anthony Greenwald of Washington and Mahazarin Banaji Harvard have spoken of their dismay at discovering their own pro-white scores on test.
Second, it's often easier for a white person like myself to talk about racism with other white people if for no other reason than we're both white and it is less likely to be perceived as an attack.
This is one of the reasons why I feel it's important for white people to speak up about racism. It shouldn't just be black people talking about racism.
Third, a conversation that starts with “I am a racist” is a completely different conversation to have than “You are a racist.”
“You are a racist” is an accusation. The speaker is morally in the right and the accusation is that the accused is not. According to the statistics from the IAT test, it is far more likely than not that this situation is also not true.
Even if it’s true, is it helpful? Is calling someone a racist more likely to lead to a desired result?
I would argue that it doesn't. I think the situation that we want to be in is to all be on the same side working to change things. If I’m calling someone a racist, we are on different sides. If I acknowledge my racism and talk about my own struggles to overcome it, we are on the same side.
In my experience teaching about microinequities, I've found that the second conversation leads to much better results. People tend to think that you’re going to preach at them about what is right and what is not. The last thing they expect is for someone to talk about his own biases.
When I’m teaching, I usually open by talking about unconscious biases other than race or gender because I don’t want to alienate anyone in the room. Later, however, once the class has become comfortable with talking about unconscious biases, I will often talk about my own experience when it comes to race or gender.
I won't ask others in the class to share because I don't want to put anyone on the spot. But I will talk about myself.
I’ll talk about how moving to Cincinnati was a great experience for me because I literally grew up in a completely white environment. I’ll talk about how we frequently overcome unconscious biases consciously and with practice.
The trick I've found is to shift the conversation to how biases like these manifest in society.
As Jen Graves wrote in a great article “Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Race”:
White people in Seattle are more likely to own rather than rent. White people are more likely to have health insurance and a job. White people are more likely to live longer. White people are less likely to be homeless. White people are less likely to hit the poverty level. White people are less likely to be in jail. White kids are nine times less likely than African Americans to be suspended from elementary school (in high school, it's four times higher; in middle school, it's five times, according to the district's data). Nonwhite high-school graduation rates in Seattle are significantly below white graduation rates—even if you're Asian, regardless of income level.
What I’ve found is that when I talk about my own biases, how 70% of people in the United States have them, and then talk about how biases like these manifest in statistics like the above, we are all more likely to be on the same side.
We are all people looking to solve a problem rather than people accusing other people.
At this point, we can start to have a conversation about how to make things better. Recognizing my own racial prejudices and being able to talk about them was one of the keys I've found to having better conversations.
The word “racist” is so loaded that often any talk about whether something or someone is racist inevitably shuts down the conversation. As Riz Rollins writes: “'Racist' is now a conversation stopper almost like that device where you can skew a conversation by comparing someone to Hitler.”
The one exception to this rule seems to be when you talk about your own racism, your own inherent biases.
One of the ways to talk about racism is by talking about it as unconscious bias, by admitting to your own bias (if indeed you have one and statistically it’s quite likely), and by using tests like the IAT test. Even for people like the inventors of the test, it opened their eyes.
Mine too.
Affecting change
I know that corporations can affect change within their organizations by teaching classes about microinequities .
According to David Hunt, founder of Critical Measures and one of the nation’s leading experts on cultural competence and diversity in the health care field, the following are keys to battling bias in the workplace:
- Enhance understanding of the psychological basis of bias.
- Replace negative mental images of the target group with positive mental images.
- Increase positive contacts with socially dissimilar groups.
- Increase affective empathy and perspective taking toward outgroups.
- Work with target group members to achieve common tasks/goals.
- Replace tolerance behaviors with acceptance and appreciation behaviors. (Shift from micro-inequities to micro-affirmations.)
- Get 360-degree diversity feedback from diverse members of your work-team.
From everything I've seen and experienced, Mr. Hunt and I share very similar beliefs.
I believe we need to both teach about racism in order to help people consciously deal with it and, at the same time, change the messages and images and associations that we present to our children so they will grow up without the same set of unconscious biases.
The conversation that starts with “We all have unconscious biases” is much different than “You are a racist.”
While I wouldn't suggest trying this with a group unless you feel very comfortable facilitating group sessions, there might be someone you know well enough to talk about your own results on the IAT, to talk about hidden biases, and to suggest taking the IAT.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.