Most racism today is done by those who vow they are not racist.
NEW ORLEANS—W.K.
Kellogg’s (WKKF) 2012 conference kicked off with what is now familiar
news regarding racial inequity: Racial inequity exists, and it’s not
decreasing. In the conference’s first plenary session titled
“Unconscious
Bias
and Race,” Dr. David Williams, professor of African and African
American Studies at Harvard University, cited studies documenting that
when Latinos and African Americans were treated by physicians for a
broken bone in their leg, they received pain
medication significantly less often than white patients with the same injury.
The data were not new. They came from a
2002 Institute of Medicine report
on racial and ethnic disparities in health care, which stressed that “a
large body of research underscores the existence of disparities.” As
examples, the report stated
… minorities are less likely to be
given appropriate cardiac medications or to undergo bypass surgery, and
are less likely to receive kidney dialysis or transplants. By contrast,
they are more likely to receive certain less-desirable procedures, such
as lower limb amputations for diabetes and other conditions.
The
data beg an obvious question, and Williams did not disappoint. “How on
earth do we make sense of this?” he asked. “How is it possible that for
the best trained medical workforce in the world to produce… care that
appears to be so discriminatory?
The answer, Williams argued, is
unconscious
discrimination. According to Williams, the research shows that when
people hold a negative stereotype about a group and meet someone from
that group, they often treat that person differently and honestly don't
even realize it. Williams noted that most Americans would object to
being labeled as “racist” or even as “discriminating”, but he added,
“Welcome to the human race. It is a normal process about how all of us
process information. The problem for our society is that the level of
negative stereotypes is very high.”
Understanding
the power of unconscious bias has emerged as a new mission for leaders
and advocates working to bring racial healing and racial equity to
communities across the U.S.
Dr. Gail Christopher, vice president
for program strategy at the Kellogg Foundation, explained that centuries
of a racial hierarchy in America has left its mark on our society,
especially pertaining to how people of color are perceived by whites.
“Our society assigns value to groups of people,” she said. “It is a
process that is embedded in the consciousness of Americans and impacted
by centuries of bias.”
Of course, doctors are not the only ones who express unconscious racial bias. Dr. Phillip Goff
, assistant
psychology professor at UCLA, showed examples of how law enforcement
officials can be influenced by unconscious bias not only when it comes
to race, but also in regard to what they perceive to be threats to their
masculinity. Over 80% of incidents that involved police use of deadly
force were preceded by threat to the officers’ masculinity. "’Fag’ is a
deadly word,” Goff observed. In fact, Goff’s research suggests that
threats to masculinity were much more predictive of deadly use of force
(in highly realistic simulation exercises) than explicit measures of
racial prejudice. Racism, it turns out, is not necessarily perpetrated
by racists but by people who feel threatened for other reasons and are
not aware of their racial bias.
Here's Goff revealing one of social scientists' "
dirty little secrets."
Goff’s
findings may allow us to reconcile the existence of racial inequity on a
variety of different indexes with the increasingly popular rhetoric
that racism no longer exists.
“That is an illusion,” said Rachel Godsil, the director of research for the American Values Institute.
The
last panelist, john powell, director of the Haas Center for Diversity
and Inclusion and Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and
Inclusion at the University of California Berkeley, elaborated. “The
fact that we have these deep, unconscious biases – and it’s conflicted
around race … we can be primed to be racially fair, we can be primed to
be racially anxious – and it doesn’t make us a racist. It makes us
human. And if we’re going to address it, we have to acknowledge that.”
“There are three types of not knowing,” powell explained: 1.
What we can’t know, like how many neurons are firing at any given
moment, 2. What we don’t care to know, like the color of the car we pass
at a particular intersection, and 3. What we don’t want to know. When
we talk about racism, we usually talk about #2 and #3, and those are
important conversations to be having. We all need to care. We all need
to want to know. But #1 is important as well.
Indeed, unless we
intentionally go out of our way to learn about and become aware of our
own bias, it is likely to spill out at the most inopportune time, like
during a stressful traffic stop (in the case of a law enforcement
officer) or during a medical emergency in the ER. As powell observed,
“when there's tension between conscious and unconscious drives, the
unconscious usually wins.”
The good news is that it doesn’t have
to. We just have to learn to become aware and be willing to acknowledge
our own biases and then consciously override them. Denial and professed
racial color-blindness only makes things worse.
__________________________________________
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