Beating Around the Bias
While out of state this summer, I found myself sitting in a café with a couple of acquaintances sipping an afternoon stout and listening to local live music. One of my companions nodded toward a person walking past our table and said, “Man or woman?”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” I responded. My other companion replied likewise. We both knew acquaintance #1 was snidely passing judgment on anyone straying from their assigned sex at birth. We refused to provide ammunition. Acquaintance #1 got the message and said no more about it.
Early the next morning, I was walking in the fog along a river bank where there was nobody else about. Until I saw a figure ahead—large, bulky, long hair. And I asked myself “Man or woman?” Suddenly it mattered. I was alone—afraid of a man, but not a woman.
A conundrum. Was my reaction to the sex of a stranger any different from acquaintance #1 above?
Some months ago, I took several of Harvard’s implicit bias tests. If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend trying it: implicit.harvard.edu. Whether or not you agree with the results, you’ll likely find food for thought. Results indicated I have a “slight automatic preference for Gay people over Straight people.”
I buy it. As a straight woman, my personal experience suggests a gay man is far less likely to hurt me—emotionally or physically—than a straight man. We can just co-exist without worrying about all that baggage. And I don’t often fear women, gay or straight.
But gender issues were not what initially took me to the Harvard website; it was race. I heard an African American man tell about his own experience with an implicit bias test on race, wherein results indicated he had bias against Black men. Astonished, he repeated the test—with the same result. He proceeded to illuminate the many ways racism is embedded in the very fabric of our nation, providing very compelling examples.
The long and short of it is it’s pretty difficult to not absorb some degree of racial bias just by existing. And, of course, some existences are more apt to cause racial bias than others.
I took an implicit bias test on race which revealed that I do, in fact, have race issues—despite growing up with parents who marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King, Jr., and taught me that skin color has no bearing whatsoever on a person’s character. I was a little surprised by the test results. Now it’s up to me to make an effort to undo what’s been done to me—and to society at large.
The point of all this is that it’s difficult—if not impossible—to avoid having implicit bias. About sex, gender identity, race, religion, you name it. But as with many bad habits, recognizing it is the first step toward fixing the problem. At present, we are a nation full of angry people, many of whom want to blame somebody else for their problems: liberals, conservatives, MAGAs, Democrats, Republicans, Blacks, whites, immigrants, natives, Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, gays… you name it. With a little introspection, honesty and effort, we could do better.
I’m still pondering how much of my reaction to the stranger in the fog was justified. My culture has taught me this fear, but that, in and of itself, doesn’t make it correct. Or healthy.
A final note: I do have a boldfaced explicit bias: I think those who believe they are bias-free are lying to themselves.