Implicit Bias: Maybe I’m Not a Self-Hating Jew After All
UTNS 5144 Blog Post #1
I am not new to the IAT (Implicit Association Test). I have taken it multiple times, I have listened to psychology professionals discuss it, I have heard anecdotal claims about how thinking of prominent Black leaders during the racial bias test can affect your score, and I have read how a founder of the test admits to showing implicit bias against women, her own “out group.”
Perhaps that’s why this time around, I was particularly interested in taking a version of the test in which I myself am part of the “out group.” I possess my own complicated relationship with Judaism, having grown up embedded in a large reform community that provided many of my friends, activities, and values. I have also spent the last few years unlearning my Zionist conditioning in concordance with my leftist ideology, putting me at odds with friends, family, and institutions that I had previously been in lockstep with.
Interestingly, I still found myself very easily associating “Christianity” with “bad” and “Judaism” with “good.” The opposite was surprisingly difficult. A part of me was relieved that my personal struggles (and even accusations of being a “self-hating Jew” by denouncing Zionism) weren’t souring my implicit perceptions of the religion that still so enriches my life. As an over-rationalizer, another part of me had to step back and try to understand what might be causing these results.
It seems that when my personal perceptions (I think, analyze, and critique much more frequently my own Judaism than other peoples’ religious experiences day to day) are pitted against the societal ones ingrained within me (Church corruption, child sexual abuse, political conservatism, etc. etc. etc.) the societal prevails. My core lived experience of Judaism being mainly GOOD and the broader left-leaning construct of Christianity being mainly BAD may seem like comparing apples to oranges. But how can you possibly compare your lived experienced, no matter how nuanced, to another outside of yourself? Perhaps my conscious bias is just in line with my unconscious. Or perhaps my conscious bias is able to help override, or at least obfuscate, my unconscious. I may never know the answer definitively.
In engaging with an NGO that does work with traumatized children across the world, it is crucial to remain adaptable and constantly question our own potential biases in each new cultural context. The intersections along race, religion, gender, and ability must be scrutinized. While working with Clowns Without Borders, our team hopes to extract universal principles of humor that transcend culture or are at least sufficiently malleable. In doing so, we must seek to avoid becoming “color-blind” and rather embrace what can be shared broadly across cultures to provide the best possible design proposals.
In a discussion around implicit bias we may bring to the table, we must also consider how those intersect and conflict with our explicit biases as well. Just as the IAT gave me a deeper insight to the relationship between my conscious and unconscious associations with Judaism in relation to Christianity, we must cross-reference our own Western lens with our views (and underlying notions) of countries like Zimbabwe, Brazil, Mexico, and Poland. I embrace this challenge to hold a global mindset alongside such hyper-localization.
I envision our team sampling dishes and drinks from each country as we get to know each other, finding out what makes each other laugh and how we can get to the root of that collective humor. After all, at the end of the day, don’t we all just want to eat and laugh?
