Me and My Bias

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.