Implicit Bias Quotes

Systems do not maintain themselves; even our lack of intervention is an act of maintenance. Every structure in every society is upheld by the active and passive assistance of other human beings.

While implicit bias is always at play because all humans have bias, inequity can occur simply through homogeneity; if I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they provide an advantage to which I feel entitled.

Our lack of understanding about implicit bias leads to aversive racism.

The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in and they stop seeing evidence that doesn’t fit it.

No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism.

Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalized. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten. For anyone who is used to jarring up against a world that has not been designed around them.

Implicit bias lives in split seconds. It is the unconscious shorthand that our brains use to help us make a quick judgment about a stranger.

Implicit bias is not a new way of calling someone a racist. In fact, you don’t have to be a racist at all to be influenced by it. Implicit bias is a kind of distorting lens that’s a product of both the architecture of our brain and the disparities in our society.

When we meet someone, we form a first impression (“He seems like a really nice guy”), frequently with no apparent information on which to base it. This is because attributes of the person evoke in us something we’ve previously categorized as familiar and positive. The opposite can happen (“This guy is a complete jerk”) if some attribute taps into a previous negative experience. Our brain catalogs vast amounts of input from our family, community, and culture, along with what is presented to us in the media. As it makes sense of what it’s stored, it begins to form a worldview. If we later meet someone with characteristics unlike what we’ve cataloged, our default response is to be wary, defensive. In turn, if our brains are filled with associations based upon media-driven biases about ideal body type, or racial or cultural stereotypes, for example, we will exhibit implicit biases (and maybe overt bias).

The implicit bias of white supremacy is alive and well in the United States of America and is a bipartisan value that is perpetuated by nearly every US citizen (or at least every US citizen who owns, or hopes to own, land).

You cannot discover lands already inhabited. That process is known as stealing, conquering, or colonizing. The fact that America calls what Columbus did ‘discovery’ reveals the implicit racial bias of the country—that Native Americans are not fully human.

Many authors, professors, pastors, and social justice leaders and organizations (both Christian and secular) who are considered to be on the forefront on the racial dialogue frequently use the term “white privilege.” However, the word privilege suggests that the inequality that favors white people is actually a blessing which they must learn to share. The term white privilege perpetuates an implicit bias. Whiteness is neither a privilege nor a blessing to be shared, it is a diseased social construct that needs to be confronted.

A flawless delusion is more appealing to the human mind than a flawed reality.

Extract and expel implicit biases from your work life. Don't taint our visitors with your bias and views. Allow them to form their own conclusions where it's developmentally appropriate.

For people of faith and conscience, these issues about implicit racial bias and the realities of white privilege in our society are not just political matters; they are moral and religious questions.

Most striking, perhaps, is the overwhelming evidence that implicit bias measures are disassociated from explicit bias measures.45 In other words, the fact that you may honestly believe that you are not biased against African Americans, and that you may even have black friends or relatives, does not mean that you are free from unconscious bias. Implicit bias tests may still show that you hold negative attitudes and stereotypes about blacks, even though you do not believe you do and do not want to.46 In

Implicit [in the psychiatric literature] is a set of normative assumptions regarding the father's prerogatives and the mother's obligations within the family, The father, like the children, is presumed to be entitled to the mother's love, nurturance, and care. In fact, his dependent needs actually supersede those of the children, for if a mother falls to provide the accustomed intentions, it is taken for granted that some other female must be found to take her place. The oldest daughter is a frequent choice... The father's wish, indeed his right, to continue to receive female nurturance, whatever the circumstances, is accepted without question.

In addition, the distortion of actual crime statistics vs. media coverage, shows that news outlets portray black Americans being depicted as suspects or criminals at a rate that exceeds actual arrest statistics for those same crimes by a whopping 24 percentage points- a disparity which reveals a horrific implicit bias in reporting.

One of the hardest things to grasp about implicit bias and racism is that your beliefs and values do not always drive your behavior. These beliefs and values are stored in the highest, most complex part of your brain—the cortex. But other parts of your brain can make associations—distorted, inaccurate, racist associations. The same person can have very sincere anti-racist beliefs but still have implicit biases that result in racist comments or actions. Understanding sequential processing in the brain is essential to grasping this, as is appreciating the power of developmental experiences to load the lower parts of our brain with all kinds of associations that create our worldview.

The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism. “Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.

The fact that America calls what Columbus did 'discovery' reveals the implicit racial bias of the country - that Native Americans are not fully human.

No conviction is beyond scrutiny, for even the strongest of convictions may hold the most despicable of biases, which if left unchecked, can destroy an entire society.

Life is one big prejudice unless you question everything.

Spare the biases, spoil the society.

If a language or culture makes you squeamish or afraid, it means you gotta wash your heart with soap and sanity.

Perception is all about assumption, Our brain hasn't evolved to observe reality. Biases prevent the observation of biases, unless, You are hellbent to expand across comfort and luxury.

Ideologies get corrupt in time, because humans following those ideologies cannot help but foster an implicit, i.e. subconscious hatred towards other humans following different ideologies.

The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.

Despite the fact that there are many honest and capable police officers in our States, with the persistent events of brutality and incompetence in mind I am compelled to say that the US police department is one of the most unfit, brainless, gutless and backboneless police forces in the world. Defunding such police force won't do any good, we must legislate compulsory regular clinical counseling for each and every officer of the law.

If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.

A police officer oblivious to their errors and shortcomings is no different from the Gestapo. Such police may be suitable in Nazi Germany, Imperialist Britain, Confederate America or the Amazon jungle, but they have no place in a society of civilized beings.

Like it or not, we all carry the past of our country. The unresolved conflicts of race and class lay coiled, ready to erupt, unless we set our minds to an honest reckoning with that past and a search for solutions grounded in genuine truth and justice. Unlike the cursing anonymous voice on a telephone, or the menacing face, or the billy club that split John Lewis's head in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, implicit bias is hard to see; implicit bias is a silent snake that slinks around in ways we don't notice.

This implicit and explicit bias that Fleming draws our attention to exists not just within professional tennis but also in homes, at schools and educational institutions, in businesses, in spiritual spaces, on the internet, and in every space where white supremacy exists.

[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately . . . But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And . . . we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.

I’ve learned this deeply from friends and leaders in the black community. Previously unaware of systemic injustice, my implicit bias, and my knee-jerk reaction to black pain or outrage, I’ve since discovered that “Yeah, but . . .” or “Well, I’m not . . .” or “Okay, but what about . . .” or “No, it didn’t . . .” is the opposite of love. Love means saying to someone else’s story or pain or anger or experience: “I’m listening. Tell me more.” Love refuses to deny or dismantle another’s perspective simply because I don’t share it. At its core, love means caring more

Fatigue also depletes frontal resources. As the workday progresses, doctors take the easier way out, ordering up fewer tests, being more likely to prescribe opiates (but not a nonproblematic drug like an anti-inflammatory, or physical therapy). Subjects are more likely to behave unethically and become less morally reflective as the day progresses, or after they’ve struggled with a cognitively challenging task. In an immensely unsettling study of emergency room doctors, the more cognitively demanding the workday (as measured by patient load), the higher the levels of implicit racial bias by the end of the day.[27

A 2012 study found that anti-black attitudes and racial stereotyping rose, rather than fell, as some might have hoped, in Obama’s first term. The percentage of Americans who expressed explicit anti-black attitudes ticked upward from 48 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2012, but the percentage expressing implicit bias rose from 49 percent to 56 percent. The study found that higher percentages of white respondents now saw African-Americans as violent, irresponsible, and, most especially, lazy, after his victory, despite, or perhaps because of, the studiously wholesome black family in the White House headed by two Ivy League–educated parents.

Biases continuously try to keep us from recognizing and understanding those biases. For example, racial biases keep us from understanding racial discrimination, just like religious biases keep us from understanding religious discrimination and cultural biases keep us from understanding the inhuman habits in our cultural traditions.

Microassaults involve misusing power and privilege in subtle ways to marginalize students and create different outcomes based on race or class. In the classroom, a microassault might look like giving a more severe punishment to a student of color than his White classmate who was engaged in the same behavior. Or it might look like overemphasizing military-like behavior management strategies for students of color. With younger children, it looks like excluding them from fun activities as punishment for minor infractions. Microinsults involve being insensitive to culturally and linguistically diverse students and trivializing their racial and cultural identity such as not learning to pronounce a student’s name or giving the student an anglicized name to make it easier on the teacher. Continually confusing two students of the same race and casually brushing it off as “they all look alike.” Microinvalidations involve actions that negate or nullify a person of color’s experiences or realities such as ignoring each student’s rich funds of knowledge. They are also expressed when we don’t want to acknowledge the realities of structural racialization or implicit bias. It takes the form of trivializing and dismissing students’ experiences, telling them they are being too sensitive or accusing them of “playing the race card.”

. . . I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. 'After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision,"' psychologist Joshua Aronson says. 'But how on earth could she know that? What my [and others] research . . . show[s] is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say "I don't know" more often.

Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia, has administered hundreds of thousands of online tests designed to detect hidden racial biases. The tests find not only that three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white, anti-Black bias, but also that nearly as many Hispanics and Asians share that pro-white, anti-Black bias.5 Furthermore,

He – and it implicitly is a he – doesn’t need to concern himself with taking care of children and elderly relatives, of cooking, of cleaning, of doctor’s appointments, and grocery shopping, and grazed knees, and bullies, and homework, and bath-time and bedtime, and starting it all again tomorrow. His life is simply and easily divided into two parts: work and leisure. But a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work every day, at times and locations that are wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centres, doctors and grocery stores, simply doesn’t work for women.

Stagnation & Expansion (The Cognitive Sonnet) There is not one but two imaginations, One causes stagnation, another expansion. It's okay to have a little bit of stagnation, But stagnation as life causes degeneration. A stagnant mind raises cognitive defenses, To guard the stagnation against radical ideas. An expansive mind brings down their defenses, To expand perception by embracing new ideas. Stagnant minds revolting against new ideas, Are like impressionable kids throwing tantrum. It's not their fault that they despise expansion, Ascension takes a huge toll on minds in stagnation. So when stagnant souls laugh at your expansion. It is sign that you're moving in the right direction.

By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused. ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’ This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.

It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.

You say, you don't have any prejudice! Let's put that to test, shall we! Read the following phrases, pausing a few seconds after each. Hallelujah! ¡Viva la libertad! Shabbat Shalom! Allahu Akbar! Black Lives Matter! We're Here, We're Queer! My body, my decision! Now bring your faculty of reason into action, and think, which of the terms induced a negative emotional response in your mind? It's nothing out of the ordinary, it's just common animal nature. How your brain got conditioned to react in such a way that's a different matter. The main thing is, your brain just reacted exactly like the brain of pavlov's dog every time it heard the bell. The only difference is that, a dog doesn't have further brain capacity to question such conditioning, but a human does.

In your own mind, what do you usually think about at the end of the day? The fifty things that went right, or the one that went wrong? Such as the driver who cut you off in traffic, or the one thing on your To Do list that didn’t get done . . . In effect, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. That shades implicit memory—your underlying feelings, expectations, beliefs, inclinations, and mood—in an increasingly negative direction. Which is not fair, since most of the facts in your life are probably positive or at least neutral. Besides the injustice of it, the growing pile of negative experiences in implicit memory naturally makes a person more anxious, irritable, and blue—plus it gets harder to be patient and giving toward others. But you don’t have to accept this bias! By tilting toward the good—toward that which brings more happiness and benefit to oneself and others—you merely level the playing field. Then, instead of positive experiences washing through you like water through a sieve, they’ll collect in implicit memory deep down in your brain.

this individualist nation we like to believe that systemic racism doesn’t exist. We like to believe that if there are racist cops, they are individual bad eggs acting on their own. And with this belief, we are forced to prove that each individual encounter with the police is definitively racist or it is tossed out completely as mere coincidence. And so, instead of a system imbued with the racism and oppression of greater society, instead of a system plagued by unchecked implicit bias, inadequate training, lack of accountability, racist quotas, cultural insensitivity, lack of diversity, and lack of transparency—we are told we have a collection of individuals doing their best to serve and protect outside of a few bad apples acting completely on their own, and there’s nothing we can do about it other than address those bad apples once it’s been thoroughly proven that the officer in question is indeed a bad apple.

As the US Justice Department explains in their report on the Ferguson PD, “the lower rate at which officers find contraband when searching African-Americans indicates either that officers’ suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is less likely to be accurate when interacting with African-Americans or that officers are more likely to search African-Americans without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. Either explanation suggest bias, whether explicit or implicit” (US DOJ 2015, 65).

As the US Justice Department explains in their report on the Ferguson PD, “the lower rate at which officers find contraband when searching African-Americans indicates either that officers’ suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is less likely to be accurate when interacting with African-Americans or that officers are more likely to search African-Americans without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. Either explanation suggest bias, whether explicit or implicit” (US DOJ 2015, 65). Recent research by Stanford scientists suggests that this is also a problem in North Carolina (Simoiu, Corbett-Davies, and Goel 2017). The authors, using hierarchical statistical models that leverage geographic variation in stop outcomes, find that officers have a much lower search threshold when interacting with black and Hispanic motorists.

Bias is implicit and unconscious; I don’t expect to be aware of mine without a lot of ongoing effort.

Bias is implicit and unconscious; I don’t expect to be aware of mine without a lot of ongoing effort. • Giving us white people feedback on our racism is risky for people of color, so we can consider the feedback a sign of trust.

This defensiveness is rooted in the false but widespread belief that racial discrimination can only be intentional. Our lack of understanding about implicit bias leads to aversive racism.

Whether bad or good, whether justified or unjustified, our beliefs and attitudes can become so strongly associated with the category that they are automatically triggered, affecting our behavior and decision making. So, for example, simply seeing a black person can automatically bring to mind a host of associations that we have picked up from our society: this person is a good athlete, this person doesn’t do well in school, this person is poor, this person dances well, this person lives in a black neighborhood, this person should be feared. The process of making these connections is called bias. It can happen unintentionally. It can happen unconsciously. It can happen effortlessly. And it can happen in a matter of milliseconds. These associations can take hold of us no matter our values, no matter our conscious beliefs, no matter what kind of person we wish to be in the world.

Exclusion by those at the table doesn’t depend on willful intent; we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion. While implicit bias is always at play because all humans have bias, inequity can occur simply through homogeneity; if I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they provide an advantage to which I feel entitled.

Once we understand the power of implicit bias, for example, we know that we must deepen rather than close off further reflection. Although deeper reflection won’t free us of unconscious inequitable treatment of others, it will get us closer than will outright denial.

A human mind that has a hold over its prejudices is like the fabled philosopher's stone, everything it touches turns to gold, whereas a savage mind which is run by its prejudices is like an infectious disease, wherever it goes it causes death and destruction.

The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids.

A key step to becoming an ally is empathy - opening your eyes to the reality of the less privileged and acknowledging that despite your best efforts, you may have implicit biases and prejudices.

Research studies have found that the vast majority of whites who hold implicit and explicit racial biases against African Americans strongly support voter ID laws, which are the purported legislative answer to massive, rampant voter fraud. However, researchers have also found that whites who hold implicit biases are convinced that their advocacy for voter ID is not based on racism but rather on ensuring election integrity. Thus, the language of election integrity created an acceptable post-civil rights race-neutral cover to allow the myth of massive rampant voter fraud to continue to do damage.

Much of what is said in the name of “social justice” implicitly assumes three things: (1) the seemingly invincible fallacy that various groups would be equally successful in the absence of biased treatment by others, (2) the cause of disparate outcomes can be determined by where statistics showing the unequal outcomes were collected, and (3) if the more fortunate people were not completely responsible for their own good fortune, then the government—politicians, bureaucrats and judges—will produce either efficiently better or morally superior outcomes by intervening.

All too often, there is an implicit assumption that the cause of some disparity is located where the statistics on that disparity were collected. Thus, for example, the under-representation of women in Silicon Valley is assumed to be caused by something that happens in Silicon Valley, and the higher prices charged by stores in many low-income neighborhoods are assumed to be caused by those who run those stores. This implicit assumption has been embedded in the law of the land by the Supreme Court of the United States, which has treated disparities in the employment, pay and promotions of people from different groups as evidence of discriminatory bias by employers under its “disparate impact” standard.

The students on campuses with such a [Confederate] statue had higher levels of implicit racial bias. This finding speaks to the haunting effects of historical expressions of racism. Not only do these statues cause pain for many black students and faculty; they may help to sustain implicit anti-black bias.

And when it comes to implicit bias—that is, the bias we unconsciously act on—anti-fatness is getting significantly worse. “It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time.”4 While body positivity seems to be everywhere, it doesn’t appear to be changing our deeply held, deeply harmful beliefs about fatness and fat people.

Stereotypes die hard, but they must, otherwise people will.

As long as law defends the people against inhumanity, it may be entitled to the approval of the people, but the moment it turns against people, whether willingly or driven by subconscious biases, then it is the duty of the people to stand up with unarmed, nonviolent determination and fire such lawkeepers and lawmakers.

What Eric Knowles, Brian Lowery, and Rebecca Schaumberg found was that respondents who held strong implicit biases were less likely to support Obama and more opposed to his healthcare plan, usually citing policy concerns. Like Tesler, they also tried attributing the same plan details to Bill Clinton and found that the link between healthcare opinion and prejudice dissolved. “In sum,” they wrote, “our data support the notion that racial prejudice is one factor driving opposition to Obama and his policies.

When we know not we are inhuman, there is no question of being human.

We can never be too cautious of our biases!

The road to a civilized world goes through the dark woods of biases.

Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide. What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.

Biases are nature's algorithm for the preservation of life, but unlike mechanical algorithms, nature's algorithm in human neuroanatomy is accompanied by the capacity to defy that predominant algorithm and write new ones with acts of self-regulation.

Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious; I don’t expect to be aware of mine without a lot of ongoing effort. Giving us white people feedback on our racism is risky for people of color, so we can consider the feedback a sign of trust. Feedback on white racism is difficult to give; how I am given the feedback is not as relevant as the feedback itself. Authentic antiracism is rarely comfortable. Discomfort is key to my growth and thus desirable. White comfort maintains the racial status quo, so discomfort is necessary and important. I must not confuse comfort with safety; as a white person, I am safe in discussions of racism. The antidote to guilt is action.

The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women don’t get paid for it.

The purpose of reason is not to turn this world cold, but to rid it of biases - of prejudice.

Packing off every opera and orchestra administrator to implicit bias training will not produce a single competitively qualified black musician.

Implicit in paranoia is a doubting attitude, which is itself the effect of fear on the mind. When paranoia is dominant, everything is questioned by a Six through the lens of doubt. This questioning is not an open examination, an actual indecision, or a careful weighing of the facts of a situation, but rather a biased one. There is a skepticism about it, a predisposition to disbelieve, a suspiciousness. This bias is, of course, based on the cynical perspective that the world is a dangerous place filled with self-serving people who would just as soon undercut you as support you, and that this is the bottom line of reality.

Implicit bias suggests that the bias is present but not “plainly expressed”—sometimes even unintentionally expressed. Racism, on the other hand, is an actual overt set of beliefs about the superiority of one race over others. In

You could say that racism is embedded in the top, “rational” part of your brain, whereas implicit bias involves the distorting “filters” created in lower parts of the brain.

Implicit bias is much more difficult. You may truly believe that racism is bad, that all people are equal. But those beliefs are in the intellectual part of your brain, and your implicit biases, which are in the lower part of your brain, will still play out every day—in the way you interact with others, the jokes you laugh at, the things you say.

But while Boler’s and Tin’s products may give women better information about their bodies, the same can’t be said for all new tech, wearable or otherwise. In the tech world, the implicit assumption that men are the default human remains king. When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a ‘comprehensive’ health tracker. 15 It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum (nope, me neither) and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker. 16

We all create our own version of the world that has distortions. As I said, the brain’s shortcuts in processing information make us vulnerable to bias. Everybody has some form of implicit bias—some distortion of the world—that’s based on how and where they grew up. Imagine the odds of having every single culture and every single religion and every single ethnicity become part of your “safe and familiar” catalog—let alone being exposed to all that in the first few years of life. And so we need to acknowledge that we all carry some of these things around.

There are many things that can be done to reduce the rates of police shootings, such as implicit bias training, de-escalation training, community policing, and more accountability for officers. However, these things can only help so much when police officers know that anyone they come into contact with might have a gun on them...In every encounter with a civilian, an officer may fear the presence of a gun. This fear changes their behavior, just like it would for any one of us--leading them to be more guarded, more fearful, and more defensive.

These implicit biases shape their behavior in ways they are not even aware of. The research suggests that about 70 to 80 percent of whites fall into this category.” These autonomic responses contribute to disparities in hiring, in housing, in education, and in medical treatment for the lowest-caste people compared to their dominant-caste counterparts and, as with other aspects of the caste system, often go against logic. For example, a pioneering study by the sociologist Devah Pager found that white felons applying for a job were more likely to get hired than African-Americans with no criminal record.

This is especially poignant when one thinks about social fragmentation. So-called “interracial” adoption is a lovely thing in basic human terms. Yet not long ago, Ibram Kendi tweeted this amid media coverage of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of “black” children (two from Haiti): Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.19 Kendi then argued that adopting such children in no way makes someone “not a racist”: And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.20 A writer for Christianity Today, Sitara Roden, spoke of her own adoptive background in a positive way, but also agreed with Kendi’s perspective on bias: This is a conversation I’ve had with my own white family. Just because I am not white and a part of their family does not mean their implicit biases are any less real. How you view the nonwhite person in your family, that you might have raised, is bound to be a different valuation than

This belief that black people and people of color are more dangerous, unpredictable, and violent is not something that I believe most police officers (and other Americans) even know they believe. But they do believe it deep down. This implicit bias against people of color is so insidious that not even people of color are exempt from having it, which is why, yes, even police officers of color can show bias against civilians of color. Implicit bias is the beliefs that sit in the back of your brain and inform your actions without your explicit knowledge. In times of stress, these unexamined beliefs can prove deadly. And a large portion of police encounters with people

We [the West] had chosen not to look, but the Chinese had to pretend they had not seen, a far harder task. In Britain, convenience, implicit bias and power differentials were enough to produce the distortions and erasures. In China, explicit orders and self-censorship did the work.

Consider a conversation I had with a white friend. She was telling me about a "white) couple she knew who had just moved to New Orleans and bought a house for a mere twenty-five thousand dollars. "Of course," she immediately added, "they also had to buy a gun, and Joan is afraid to leave the house." I immediately knew they had bought a home in a black neighborhood. This was a moment of white racial bonding between this couple who shared the story of racial danger and my friend, and then between my friend and me, as she repeated the story. Through this tale, the four of us fortified familiar images of the horror of black space and drew boundaries between "us" and "them" without ever having to directly name race or openly express our disdain for black space. Notice that the need for a gun is a key part of this story--it would not have the degree of social capital it holds if the emphasis were on the price of the house alone. Rather, the story’s emotional power rests on why a house would be that cheap--because it is in a black neighborhood where white people literally might not get out alive. Yet while very negative and stereotypical representations of blacks were reinforced in that exchange, not naming race provided plausible deniability. In fact, in preparing to share this incident, I texted my friend and asked her the name of the city her friends had moved to. I also wanted to confirm my assumption that she was talking about a black neighborhood. I share the text exchange here: "Hey, what city did you say your friends had bought a house in for $25,000?" "New Orleans. They said they live in a very bad neighborhood and they each have to have a gun to protect themselves. I wouldn’t pay 5 cents for that neighborhood." "I assume it’s a black neighborhood?" "Yes. You get what you pay for. I’d rather pay $500,00 and live somewhere where I wasn’t afraid." "I wasn’t asking because I want to live there. I’m writing about this in my book, the way that white people talk about race without ever coming out and talking about race." "I wouldn’t want you to live there it’s too far away from me!" Notice that when I simply ask what city the house is in, she repeats the story about the neighborhood being so bad that her friends need guns. When I ask if the neighborhood is black, she is comfortable confirming that it is. But when I tell her that I am interested in how whites talks about race without talking about race, she switches the narrative. Now her concern is about not wanting me to live so far away. This is a classic example of aversive racism: holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs. Readers may be asking themselves, "But if the neighborhood is really dangerous, why is acknowledging this danger a sign of racism?" Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race. White people will perceive danger simply by the presence of black people; we cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crimes. But regardless of whether the neighborhood is actually more or less dangerous than other neighborhoods, what is salient about this exchange is how it functions racially and what that means for the white people engaged in it. For my friend and me, this conversation did not increase our awareness of the danger of some specific neighborhood. Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs about black people. (p. 44-45)

Structural bias refers to policies or practices of societal institutions, such as corporations that discriminate against workers or hospitals that discriminate against patients. It is frequently intertwined with implicit bias.

Let’s take a moment to think of how that implicit bias plays a role in an interaction between an inexperienced white cop in a confrontation with a Black teenager late at night. It’s a matter of state-dependent functioning. Under threat, the reasoning part of the brain starts to shut down, and the more reactive, emotional parts of the brain take over. Say you’re the white cop and you feel threatened and you have a gun. If the lower, more reactive parts of your brain start to dominate your cognitions and behaviors when you feel under threat, and your brain has a whole catalog of Black men as threatening criminals, you are much more likely to engage in fear-based behavior—yelling, escalating, pulling a trigger—with a Black teen than with a white teen. Your brain isn’t filled with a catalog of threatening white teens.

Implicit bias suggests that the bias is present but not “plainly expressed”—sometimes even unintentionally expressed. Racism, on the other hand, is an actual overt set of beliefs about the superiority of one race over others. In the U.S., racism is the marginalization and oppression of people of color by systems created by white men to privilege white people.

Many heads nodded vigorously as expected. Having worked among brilliant engineers all his career, the thought processes of his audience were a known quantity and Adan knew how to reinforce their implicit biases. Acknowledging how the old system was broken and then talking about iterating across different possible ideas until an optimal solution was identified was designed to hit all of their logical pleasure centers.

First, I said, we in law enforcement need to acknowledge the truth that we have long been the enforcers of a status quo in America that abused black people; we need to acknowledge our history because the people we serve and protect cannot forget it. Second, we all need to acknowledge that we carry implicit biases inside us, and if we aren’t careful, they can lead to assumptions and injustice. Third, something can happen to people in law enforcement who must respond to incidents resulting in the arrest of so many young men of color; it can warp perspectives and lead to cynicism. Finally, I said, we all must acknowledge that the police are not the root cause of the most challenging problems in our country’s worst neighborhoods, but that the actual causes and solutions are so hard that it is easier to talk only about the police. I then ordered all fifty-six FBI offices around the country to convene meetings between law enforcement and communities to talk about what is true and how to build the trust needed to bend those lines back toward each other. It is hard to hate up close, and the FBI could bring people up close.

Most striking, perhaps, is the overwhelming evidence that implicit bias measures are disassociated from explicit bias measures.45 In other words, the fact that you may honestly believe that you are not biased against African Americans, and that you may even have black friends or relatives, does not mean that you are free from unconscious bias. Implicit bias tests may still show that you hold negative attitudes and stereotypes about blacks, even though you do not believe you do and do not want to.46

Other research has shown that occupying a superior position also increases implicit bias.

This thought experiment is a version of philosopher John Rawls’s concept of the “veil of ignorance,” which posits that only a person ignorant of his own identity is capable of a truly ethical decision. Few of us can assume the veil completely, which is precisely why hidden biases, even when identified, are so difficult to correct. Still, applying the veil of ignorance to your next important managerial decision may offer some insight into how strongly implicit biases influence you.

the fact that you may honestly believe that you are not biased against African Americans, and that you may even have black friends or relatives, does not mean that you are free from unconscious bias. Implicit bias tests may still show that you hold negative attitudes and stereotypes about blacks, even though you do not believe you do and do not want to.

Implicit bias has been demonstrated and replicated through numerous studies. One of these studies is a study that showed people two faces: Tony Blair and Barack Obama. Participants were asked the simple question, “Who is more American?” Ostensibly, this is a silly question because Barack Obama is American and Tony Blair is British, but during implicit tests people were quicker and more willing to associate Tony Blair’s face with “American”.

Humans start out, much like other primates, relying on a massively parallel system of cognition, made up of a set of domain-specific heuristics that have evolved as a way of addressing particular problems that presented themselves with some frequency in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. All primates engage in social learning (whereby, instead of engaging in trial-and-error learning, they look to the behavior of conspecifics for clues as to the best strategy). Humans, however, hit on a particular heuristic-imitation with a conformist bias-that has significant adaptive value. In particular, the fidelity of the copying strategy is sufficiently great that it enables cumulative cultural change, and thus creates a cultural inheritance system.28 It also creates the preconditions for genuine rule-following to emerge, and hence for the development of norms-implicit-in-practice. This creates the possibility of semantic intentionality, and propositionally differentiated language (whereby the meaning of propositions becomes independent of their immediate context of use). Thus language develops, initially, as an external social practice. However, the enhancement of our cognitive abilities associated with this "language upgrade" leads individuals to increased dependence on language as a tool for planning and controlling their own behavior. Thus the intentional planning system develops as the seat of conscious, rational action. Theories of rational action (such as decision theory) are not psychological theories that attempt to model underlying "springs of action." They are essentially expressive theories, which attempt to work out the normative commitments that are implicitly undertaken whenever we act on the basis of our beliefs and preferences. Thus they are part of the toolkit that is provided to us by the language upgrade.

Privilege theory offers the liberal multicultural subject a phantasmatic reality. It gives that subject the tools to name society’s bad apples: they are easily discernable; they are those who don’t check their privilege, blind to the social and cultural power that they undeservedly enjoy. And if privilege theory calls on you to curtail the pleasures of your own privilege, to willingly renounce your culturally given claims on the world, you are rewarded with “libidinal profit,” with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment,” an enjoyment-in-sacrifice or enjoyment-inconfession. Suffering—the feeling of guilt from realizing that you can never fully eradicate your privilege (again, privilege theory concedes that “one can no more renounce privilege than one can stop breathing”), that you are enjoying the fruits of an impure liberalism, that you’re taking up the space of someone more deserving, and so on—and exhaustion— the emotional cost for your unflinching vigilance in naming racism and denouncing prejudice wherever it appears—ironically become signs not of your defeat but of your self-enlightenment, moral righteousness, and true commitment to social justice. There is thus a kind of illicit satisfaction—an unconscious enjoyment—not only in exposing the blind spots of others, in the rhetorical disciplining of others, but in your own self-discipline, in your perceived suffering and exhaustion as well, amounting to an abstract testimony to the heroism of whiteness (“another self-glorification in which whiteness is equated with moral rectitude,” as Butler puts it) and the progress of multicultural liberalism: it’s not perfect, but we’re getting there . Along the way, privilege theory redeems its practitioners: since its biopolitical logic tends to individualize racism— check your privilege—your self-check exempts you from the charge of racism. It is fundamentally the problem of individual others (typically that of the less educated, white blue collar workers), concealing society’s “civil racism,” the pervading, naturalized racism of everyday liberal life. In contrast, psychoanalysis compels the liberal multicultural subject to confront a starker reality. For psychoanalysis, the routinized and ritualized call to check your privilege appears too convenient; it enables the liberal multicultural subject to diminish his or her guilt ( I ’m doing something personally about implicit biases) without needing to take on the sociopolitical framework directly. If privilege theorists are pressed, they will gladly confess that they know that it is not enough to denounce the unearned privileges of others without simultaneously attending to the networks of power relations that sustain such advantages. And yet in their active scholarly activist lives, they act as if it were enough, displaying the psychoanalytic structure of fetishistic disavowal (I know very well, but all the same). They maintain a split attitude toward antiracism. They know very well that denouncing white privilege is necessary but not sufficient, yet they don’t really believe that this critico-gesture does not accomplish the task at hand. Privilege theory, we might say, “wants social change with no actual change.” Rather than addressing the social antagonisms immanent to capitalism, it misapprehends the framework (and its enablement of racism). Privilege theory typically only sees social structures as the sum of their individual parts, their individual consciences. At its base level, it provides you with the fantasy of intervention and action; it offers you criticism without critique . For the proponents of privilege theory, social change follows the gradual and predictable path of reform.