It is hard to know where to start with this topic. The murder of George Floyd has amplified the conversations about racism in general and systemic and institutionalized racism in particular. African Americans are not alone when it comes to being affected by prejudice and discrimination. This is not said to marginalize their suffering but to make the point that we commonly suffer from misperceptions that lead to prejudice and discrimination. It is something that is woven into the fabric of our culture. We all are subject to having bias but when we resist acknowledging it problems arise. We are then unable to change our behavior.
Explicit bias is basically the attitudes and beliefs we hold about people or groups that we are aware of. Often we do not have much evidence to support our beliefs. As an example consider a Professor who believes women do not belong in engineering. He is aware of his belief, can verbalize it, but maintains it and treats female students differently damaging their ability to succeed. Implicit bias is attitudes and beliefs that we are not aware of. These are very tricky to deal with simply because we are likely to deny, sometimes fervently, they exist. Bias is often attached to race as we have seen by the high incidence of police brutality against African Americans. Many of the officers likely do not even know they hold prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes that influence their behavior. It is part of the society they grew up in. These biases are learned and can be unlearned. Moving on to another example the research literature on how white teachers treat black students is humbling. We are not as enlightened as we like to think. On all levels of education, including college, there are some real concerns ranging from how much encouragement is offered black students as compared to whites to outright discrimination.
When I was a student at SUNY Geneseo, a very white school at that time, a great Psychology Professor told us about the YAVIS Syndrome. She explained the perfect therapy client, or student, was described as youthful, attractive, verbal, intelligent, and successful. I wonder if implicit in that statement was the term “white”. Now this is nothing new to most but in this case it was quantified and given a descriptive acronym. Simply stated if you are likable you tend to do better overall personally and professionally. But beauty is constructed differently by various cultures and there is no one standard. Unfortunately this likability can be related race and gender. You may like or dislike someone more or less based on your explicit or implicit bias. In an article from the Harvard Business Review: “According to research by Katherine DeCelles and colleagues African American and Asian job applicants who mask their race on resumes seem to have better success getting job interviews” https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews. This is deeply disturbing but not new information. It has been documented numerous times.
Then there are the effects of stereotypes and the self-fulfilling prophecy that comes with them. Ray Rist in his groundbreaking study on student social class and teacher expectations, published in 1970, remains an important and relevant study today. The problem is we instantaneously form opinions about people that we have just met based on race, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, political affiliation, or even their favorite baseball team. You can almost hear the neuronal connections in our brains crackling as they follow well-worn paths that have been triggered by the stimuli we have encountered; that stimuli being a person and whatever we focus on about them. We then engage selective attention and we are locked into the perception we have formed discounting any contradictory information.
It is very difficult to make the effort to listen, nonjudgmentally, with the express intent of understanding someone else. We are full of distortions. It is a wonder that we can accurately understand anyone due to all the noise, or misperceptions, we have going on in our heads. But with time and practice we can restructure those schemas and reduce the bias that limits people’s potential and sometimes costs them their lives. Now is the moment to commit to joining the conversation and resolving to change our behavior so we can eliminate the structural violence that causes so much harm.