How to Combat Systemic & Implicit Bias
Uncomfortable? Get comfortable.
“No pain, no gain,” they say. Yet as grown-ups, we know we’re wired to run from discomfort of any sort. And when we say wired, we mean evolutionary circuitry stuff. Of course avoiding unpleasant experiences can serve a protective purpose, but since encountering saber-toothed tigers on the street is no longer a thing, we need to evolve a bit further and recognize when discomfort is a good thing. Sure, we could just stay in our lane and happily swim in a pool of carefully curated content that reaffirms what we already think and know. But we don’t get stronger by staying safe or sitting still—and we can’t grow without tackling the tough sh*t that makes us want to retreat. Because that discomfort you feel when thinking about systemic racism? Nothing compared to the real thing.
Disrupt your biases.
Project Implicit from Harvard delivers a number of tests that help you identify your implicit biases, recommended by this week’s Into Them subject Peter Wilson. Once you sign up each test takes about 15 minutes (time well spent, trust us). Knowledge literally is power here: We ALL have implicit biases and you can’t disrupt them unless you are aware of them.
Realize it’s not about you.
Author Charles Blow would be the first to tell you that The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto is not written for white people—but we’re reading it anyway. It is painful to recognize all the ways in which Northern liberals have failed Black people, but it’s not incorrect. Blow’s central argument is that it is time for Black people to reverse the Great Migration North and return to the South, to truly claim positions of power. He identifies Southern states where the Black population could be in a position to become a majority voting block and therefore able to truly choose leaders and impact policy. Looking at you, Georgia.
Get your daily dose.
We look forward to the newsletter “Anti-Racism Daily” with every morning scan of our inboxes. Featuring a different learning each day, its crisp format truly makes it feel like a lesson. Starting our day smarter? Always on our list, and it ensures that our efforts happen on the daily. Sometimes we are aware of the particular issue highlighted; other learnings yield “eureka” moments. Bonus round: Supporting the work of Black press outlets ensures that we have a diverse media landscape.
Hear a leading voice.
Most of us know Ta-Nehisi Coates through his groundbreaking book Between the World and Me,which is written as a letter to his teenage son. We also recommend We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy which is a collection of Coates’ The Atlantic essays written during the presidency of Barack Obama, right down to the predictable outcome of the 2016 election. If not the full collection, we encourage you to read The Case for Reparations at a minimum.
Digest a shameful story.
Many people know some version of the story of the Exonerated 5 (formerly known as the Central Park 5), but “When They See Us” will make you deeply feel every last bit of the tragedy of five children from Harlem falsely accused of a brutal crime, coerced into confession, outmanned by the legal system and living the fallout. Episode Four in particular, exposing the prison sentence of the one child charged as an adult, will have you seriously questioning why we devalue human life and capacity for rehabilitation so terribly. Also worth a watch: Oprah’s follow up interview with the five men, checking in on how their lives are still impacted.
Find words that ring true.
You can see almost any interview or writing from the great James Baldwin and think it’s a contemporary piece. “I Am Not Your Negro” is constructed from an unfinished book exploring his relationships with Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers. No one is more eloquent and urgent than Baldwin, and sadly, many of his questions and observations still ring true. To wit: “It is not a racial problem. It's a problem of whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great western house I come from is one house, and I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I am the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, created by them. My blood, my father's blood, is in that soil.”
Read the room.
For Your (Dis) Comfort hosts Zoom salons (and a podcast) that seek to educate through the observation of conversation. Their discussions explore race and privilege from the perspective of Black people living in America. From our experience, it is aptly named, but hearing things that are hard to hear has heightened our understanding and made us keenly aware of views we hadn’t even considered.
