Everyone’s a little bit racist
Years ago, I went to watch the musical “Avenue Q’. It’s hilarious. Squirm in your seat uncomfortable sometimes. But that’s just the Brit in me talking. And there’s one song that I will always remember. It’s called “Everyone’s a little bit racist”.
I mean, everyone but me, right?
Wrong.
I get up early these days. It’s my two hours of calm before the baby storm. I’m fresh, I’m alert, I’m ready to go. One morning, I decided to take one of those Harvard implicit bias tests. And, because of that song, I chose the one on race. So I could say, with evidence, everyone’s a little bit racist but me!
The test gave me four categories — good, bad, Black, White. I had to correctly categorize words, like happy and sad, as good and bad, and faces of people as Black and White. The test showed me a series of ‘bad words’ followed by images of Black people and a series of ‘good’ words followed by images of White people. “It’s priming me!”, I thought. Yes, that’s the trouble with doing these tests when you’ve studied the theory. You know how they work. So in my fresh and alert state, I correctly categorized all good words and bad words, and all White faces and Black faces. I didn’t make a single mistake. I was proud. I was not even a little bit racist!
Because I get up early, by about 3pm, I reach a real lull in energy. Words swim across my screen. Not even a cup of tea can pick me up. The window to the test was still open so, for want of something to pass the time, I re-did the test. The same test. Not only did I know the theory. I now knew what was coming next. Black, White, good, bad. It should have been easy to re-create my perfect score. Except this time, I was tired. And I got almost half of the questions wrong. I was more than a little bit racist.
I couldn’t believe it. But yet, I should have anticipated it. In my tired state, my energy depleted, I fell into automatic thinking. And it turns out, my automatic thinking is heavily biased. When I have low energy, out comes my unconscious bias. Suddenly, so much of the world around me made more sense.
On paper, we have come so far in America. We have worked hard to eliminate segregation laws and equalize opportunity across races. In theory, racism should no longer exist. The same applies to other groups who have historically experienced discrimination: women; LGBT; those with disabilities.
But in practice, when we are tired, we do the lazy thing.* We revert to stereotypes. And that can be dangerous. For your physical wellbeing, if you’re Black and up against a White police officer who has been on shift all night. For your economic wellbeing, if you’re passed up on a promotion opportunity because your boss just gets on better with your male co-worker. For your emotional wellbeing, if you’re heckled and told to go back to where you came from, because some people in your country think they’ve voted to end immigration.**
A lot of really good work on combatting implicit bias and automatic thinking is being done across the country, from ground level all the way up to executive boards. Just yesterday, the San Francisco Police Department successfully de-escalated a stand-off with an armed man, without automatically firing their weapons. It took time, but they did it. But if my experience is anything to go by, we need to learn to give people more space to rest — to re-energize and re-group — in order to avoid falling into bias traps. That might mean giving police officers who have just attended a violent scene a break before they go to their next call-out. Or scheduling down time between candidates for a job interview.
Some situations can be made ‘blind’, like gender or race on job applications.
But the way we live is through human connections.
And that is where we can be at our very best, and our very worst.
*Dan Ariely has talked about the effect of energy depletion on good decision-making in his book “Predictably Irrational”
**This works as much for the victim as it does for the perpetrator. After all, if you’re tired and don’t want to study for a test, it takes less energy to say, “I’m a girl, I won’t be good at Math”, then it does to put effort into doing well. Carol Dweck has written extensively about the psychology of success and using techniques to overcome stereotype threat.
Postscript: This blog is a re-post from Telling Times and was written before I saw the videos of the police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. We await the official verdict but once again, they look like brutality fueled by bias, resulting in lives lost. It was also written before the tragic events in Dallas.
