If we refuse to face our unconscious biases, no matter how much
we
want to be part of the solution, we are the problem.
We are at a point in our society where any time anyone
alleges bias it’s likely to be met with a lot of defensiveness and anger and,
“How could you say that?” And the reality is we’re all infected with some
unconscious bias. We all hold stereotypes. We may not mean to be racist or
biased or sexist but it’s within us. So when someone says, “I think this was
biased,” or, “This was an oversight that appeared to be based on bias.” Instead
of reacting defensively to say, “Oh, maybe it was, and I’m sorry,” that, I
think, would be a nice model for us as a nation in handling our issues.
Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow” in an
interview on the 2/21/14 (#308) episode of Real Time.
A few years ago I attended a
conference on race and racial issues in the United States. In one workshop that was part of this
conference, a group presented a psychotherapeutic technique with which I had
some objections. The presenter was a black woman whom I’ll call Sandra. As
Sandra proceeded, I became more and more uncomfortable with my objections until
I could no longer contain my frustration. I raised my hand in the middle of the
presentation and said loudly, “I have a problem with this.” Sandra said,
“that’s OK, you have a right to your feelings.” I responded, “I know I do.” I
got up and left the workshop.
Once outside of the room I began to
calm down. Small emotional outbursts have never been completely foreign to me
but to have one in a professional and/or activist setting like that took me by
surprise. As my equilibrium returned something occurred to me: I was (still am,
actually) a white male who had just had an emotional outburst disparaging the
content of a workshop that was being delivered by a woman of color. Was it
possible that my outburst had a racial component? While I may be a pretty
emotional guy, I’m usually able to keep my opinions to myself in group
settings, choosing rather to seethe quietly and then talk trash about it with
my friends afterward. The possibility of there being a racial element to my
behavior started as only an idea; a hypothetical based on the external facts
interpreted by me in the manner I would interpret them if any other person had
done what I’d just did. I had just
flagrantly and publically de-authorized a woman of color.
I spoke to a friend of mine,
another white male who has done a good deal of work and writing in the white
anti-racist field. I asked him what he thought and his response was (to
paraphrase), “I’m not going to tell you what it was because I honestly don’t
know, but look at what happened and decide for yourself.”
I thought about it. I realized
that, of course there was a racial element in this interaction. As a white male
I felt utterly authorized to tell a woman of color how wrong she was. If it had
been another white male delivering the workshop I never would have been so
forthcoming in my criticism. I never would have stormed out of the session. In
fact, I would have felt a good deal more pressure to subordinate my own views
to the ones being expressed. Rather than feeling empowered to challenge the
presenter I would have felt threatened by the challenge to my own beliefs.
As the realization that I had quite
publically and poetically enacted white privilege in the middle of a race
conference dawned on me, a complex soup of emotions simmered up in me. The
overwhelming feeling I had was shame. As a person who is committed to racial
justice, how could I be so naïve about myself? How many times had I heard that
it was no longer the explicit white supremacist that was the biggest threat to
racial justice? They can be readily dismissed and overtly racist actions are
not only illegal but considered morally reprehensible. It’s the well-meaning
white person, steeped in privilege and unaware of his racial biases, that is
the greatest block to racial equity.
Didn’t my actions make me a part of the problem?
By the time Sandra’s workshop was
over I was able to find her and haltingly, sheepishly, apologize. She was very gracious in
accepting it, even though I could barely get the words out for my embarrassment.
I spent the remaining time at that conference unable to think of much else.
I’ve come to understand a few
things about my response to my outburst. Though I was able to spot my own
behavior, the primary response I had was one of shame: shame at having acted
out and embarrassment at having been so blatantly the opposite of who I thought
I was by attending a conference on race. This is a fundamentally self-centered
reaction. It is also, obviously, a shame-based one. Ironically, that shame can
be the primary impediment to my becoming a more aware person. If I were unable
to face that shame and work my way through it, I could easily have
short-circuited my development, such as it is.
Another important realization I
have had about this incident is that never once did I have a conscious
experience of racial animus towards Sandra, not at the time and not since. I
know it’s there, however. Not only do I infer it from my actions, but, against
my will, in spite of my commitments and experience, in contradiction to
everything I value and believe about the universal equality of humankind, I
know I carry biases with me through life. When I see a young black male driving
an expensive car, against my will I think, “Drug money.” not, “Spoiled little
brat. I bet his mom is an investment banker and his dad is a doctor,” like I
would if he were white. I perceive children of color going home from school in
groups on the train as loud and menacing rather than young and excited. In
predominantly non-white neighborhoods, I hold my backpack a little closer and
stay a little more aware of those around me, even as I have been an agent of
gentrification. (A workmate of mine once commented, while giving me a ride
home, “You’re like a marble in a
bowl of raisins in this neighborhood.”) My perceptions of people of color come
through a fog of negative assumptions despite the years of work I’ve done to
grow into a multicultural person.
Sometimes my attempts to avoid my
biases get acted out in an inability to see negatives in people of color as
well. While it’s important to be able to take leadership from racial others,
doing so blindly and uncritically is another acting out that is unfair to that
person of color. But while this is a possibility, I have to avoid using that as
an excuse to act out on my negative biases. It’s conceivable that I could
unconsciously attribute negatives to a person out of biases and then convince
myself that I’m being equitable by challenging that person.
Some people will be appalled at the
things I’ve described about myself here.
For them, what I’ve written about myself will simply be proof that I’m a
bigot. I don’t see it that way. I
see my ability to be consciously aware of my biases as the best hope of
managing them and, because of that, not acting them out in my life and, therefore,
being less of an instrument of oppression in the lives of others who are
impacted by me. I’m writing this because I believe that a huge percentage of us
whites (ok, I’ll admit it, I believe all of us) have biases of which we are
unaware and this makes us more likely to enact them in our own lives and deny
it when they are enacted in society as a whole.
I can envision someone reading this and believing that this
is intellectualizing. It’s not. I am treating my biases similarly to how I deal
with any other unwanted part of myself that dwells largely in my unconscious,
like I would treat fear of success or my tendency to cover up unwanted feelings
with an unhealthy diet. Seeing it, naming it, and talking about it is a path to
managing and overcoming it. My doing it publicly is an attempt to crate space
for others to do so as well.
Because racism is so deeply
ingrained in our society I am also describing an attempt to abide within the
inescapable, something that people of color have done consciously for centuries.
Those of us who seek to overcome our biases know it is a lifetime of
improvement (if we’re diligent and lucky) that never reaches perfection. This
is at least one way that a destinationless journey looks.