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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Spare the biases, spoil the society.

Life is one big prejudice unless you question everything.

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

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,

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

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.

Computational model: history is the on-chain population; all the rest is editorialization. There’s a great book by Franco Moretti called Graphs, Maps, and Trees. It’s a computational study of literature. Moretti’s argument is that every other study of literature is inherently biased. The selection of which books to discuss is itself an implicit editorialization. He instead makes this completely explicit by creating a dataset of full texts, and writing code to produce graphs. The argument here is that only a computational history can represent the full population in a statistical sense; anything else is just a biased sample.

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.

Few of us are immune from ... implicit bias; we all carry stereotypes and assumptions about people who are different from us.

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

When he took the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measures unconscious bias, his scores revealed him to have essentially no unconscious bias.

The fundamental fact of human nature is, we are a septic tank of prehistoric biases. Sectarianism comes to us far too easily, for we are all fundamentally racist.

The end of racism starts with the recognition of racism.

We Are All Racist (The Sonnet) If we are still uncomfortable to face, The roots of racism, how can we uproot racism! Unless we recognize our tendency for division, How can we ever be the cause of universalism! The fundamental fact of human nature is, We are a septic tank of prehistoric biases. Sectarianism comes to us far too easily, For we are all fundamentally racist. Cruelty is the mainspring of survival in the wild, So our brain leans more towards cruelty than kindness. Millions of years of conditioning won't vanish overnight, We must self-regulate with our newly developed conscience. The end of racism starts with the recognition of racism. We are civilized only when we recognize our uncivilization.

Remove the ism, you got race. Remove the race, you got the human. Remove the man, you got who? Remove the who, and you got no clue. Now we can start, without any predominance. Let us discover life, in its full magnificence.

Sickness acknowledged is sickness half treated.

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.

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.

There also are systemic processes within society overall and implicit bias within organizations that may impact our children due to their race.

We can never be too cautious of our biases!

To achieve legitimacy, mitigating implicit bias should be a part of training at all levels of a law enforcement organization to increase awareness and ensure respectful encounters both inside the organization and with communities.

When you define your culture by attributes (humility, curiosity, collaboration…), you create a lens for determining cultural fit beyond someone “feeling” right. You allow candidates who don’t look or sound like you to identify with your culture and feel a sense of belonging; and you help your hiring managers to identify those candidates with a lens that circumvents their implicit bias. And that actively prevents a monoculture from taking hold.

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.

What I could do was be kind and try to develop their curiosities and interests. I could create a safe and loving space, surrounded by books, and mostly I succeeded, though I am certain my own implicit biases and naivete, impacted how I showed up to the community. I did my best with what I had, how and where I had been raised, and who I had become as an adult.

When we take biases as common sense, that is the end of all common sense.

Perception is not observation, Perception is prediction. The brain doesn't care about observing, It only puts forward a self-serving illusion.

Upon conscientious acts of self-correction civilization unfolds. Animals gotta live by instincts, we can't choose the same road.

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.

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.

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.

Us/Them edges can be softened when implicit biases are made explicit. Doing so need not eliminate that bias—after all, you can't readily reason yourself out of a belief that you weren't originally reasoned into. Instead, revealing implicit biases indicates where to focus your monitoring to lessen their impact.

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.

Last, it is clear that color blindness may be seen as part of a strategy to internally combat recognition of implicitly held biases.

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”.

Third, although formal education and training seems effective in combating explicit bias, it appears to have less success in ameliorating implicit attitudes.

Baron and Banaji (2006) found that implicit and explicit biases diverged as the age of participants increased: (a) At age 6 years, both implicit and explicit attitudes were roughly similar; (b) at age 10 years, the beginnings of a dissociation began to occur—that is, explicit bias began to decline while implicit bias remained unchanged; and (c) at adulthood, explicit bias dropped dramatically, but again implicit bias remained unchanged.

Second, although successful in dealing with overt expressions of bias, implicit biases in well-intentioned people remain relatively untouched and strong.

Implicit in Torres's statement, and worked out in great detail by many contextual theologians is, third, an emphasis on commitment as “the first act of theology” (Torres and Fabella 1978:269)—more specifically, commitment to the poor and marginalized. The point of departure is therefore orthopraxis, not orthodoxy. Orthopraxis, says Lamb, aims at transforming human history, redeeming it through a knowledge born of subject-empowering, life-giving love, which heals the biases needlessly victimizing millions of our brothers and sisters. Vox victimarum vox Dei. The cries of the victims are the voice of God. To the extent that those cries are not heard above the din of our political, cultural, economic, social, and ecclesial celebrations or bickerings, we have already begun a descent into hell (1982:22f).

I’ve written about unconscious bias before, and I encourage you to test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu. It’s sobering to discover that whatever you believe intellectually, you’re biased about race, gender, age or disability.

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 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.

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.

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.

What kind of person is likely to carry this kind of unconscious bias? “This is a wonderful person,” Williams said, “who has sympathy for the bad things that have happened in the past. But that person is still an American and has been fed the larger stereotypes of blacks that are deeply embedded in the culture of this society. So, despite holding no explicit racial prejudices, they nonetheless hold implicit bias that’s deep in their subconscious.

Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of $59,380.89 Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong cleaning and housekeeper workforce, whose median annual income is $21,820.90 So who’s the real working class?

Every atom in the world is teeming with lessons, but no atom is free from biases and predispositions.

Neuroscience of Ideology (The Sonnet) No matter the intention of origin, No ideology can stand uncorrupt through time. Even the perfect of theories fall apart, because, The brain can't pledge obedience without being blind. To maintain the grandeur of an ideology, The mind chooses to switch off certain faculties. Thus the mind starts digging its own grave, As well as for the world, without even knowing it. Ideology relevant today won't be relevant tomorrow, But the ideology itself isn't aware of this. Thus in the guise of savior it keeps raising sheep, Who then turn defensive and ruin all possibility of peace. Borders don't preserve peace, borders only breed war. All peace is fiction till we treat every border as Donald Trump's wall.

To See Color (The Sonnet) The problem is not that you see color, It is that you assume character from color. The problem is not that you see gender, It is that you assume capacity from gender. The problem is not that you see religion, It is that you assume tendency from religion. The problem is not that you see profession, It is that you assume worth from profession. The problem is not that you see sexuality, It is that you assume nature from sexuality. The problem is not that you see nationality, It is that you assume honor from nationality. The main problem is not that you make assumptions. It is that you assume yourself beyond examination.

Every atom within the human brain is teeming with light. Yet you know why it doesn't come to the surface? Because tradition and ignorance have conditioned the mind to labor more on raising walls rather than bringing them down.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

people are not trustworthy, that when stressed he cannot really emotionally stay connected to them, and that he is unworthy of being loved. This way of seeing the world is typical of insecure attachments and these unconscious emotional biases will guide overt behavior, especially under relational stress. What is more, the infant of a misattuned mother will frequently be presented with an aggressive expression on his mother’s face, implying he is a threat, or with an expression of fear-terror, implying that he is the source of alarm. Images of his mother’s aggressive and/or fearful face, and the resultant chaotic alterations in her bodily state, are internalized, meaning they are imprinted in his developing right brain limbic circuits as an implicit memory, below levels of consciousness. Although out of awareness, they can plague him and his relationships for his entire life unless he finds a way to bring them into conscious awareness and work with them. Furthermore, when the caregiver is attuned in her early interactions, her more mature nervous system is regulating the infant’s neurochemistry and homeostasis. This, in turn, has a profound influence on the structural organization of the developing brain. Conversely emotional trauma will negatively impact the parts of the brain which are developing at the time of trauma. For example, if high levels of stress hormones are circulating in a pregnant mother, it up-regulates the fetus’ developing stress response – making the child, and future adult hypersensitive to stress. Relational trauma that occurs around the time of birth has a negative impact on both the developing micro-architecture of the amygdala itself, and the amygdala’s connection to the HPA axis, as well as to other parts of the limbic system. Thus high levels of early unrepaired interpersonal stress have a profoundly harmful effect on the ability to form social bonds, and on temperament. Suffering unrepaired and frequent emotional stress after about ten months interferes with the experience-dependent maturation of the highest level regulatory systems in the right orbifrontal cortex. This opens the door