Implicit Bias and Structural Racialization

by Kathleen Osta, LCSW and Hugh Vasquez

November 2018

“Implicit biases come from culture. I think of them as the thumbprint of the culture on our minds. Human beings have the ability to learn to associate two things together very quickly—that is innate. What we teach ourselves, what we choose to associate is up to us.” 

-Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji

Increased interest in the topic of implicit bias provides an opportunity to open and deepen important conversations in our organizations and communities about equity, belonging, and ultimately justice. Most work on implicit bias focuses on increasing awareness of individuals in service of changing how they view and treat others. However, in order to lead to meaningful change, an exploration of implicit bias must be situated as part of a much larger conversation about how current inequities in our institutions came to be, how they are held in place, and what our role as leaders is in perpetuating inequities despite our good intentions. Our success in creating organizations and communities in which everyone has access to the opportunities they need to thrive depends on our willingness to confront the history and impacts of structural racism, learn how implicit bias operates, and take action to interrupt inequitable practices at the interpersonal, institutional and structural level.

Implicit bias (also referred to as unconscious bias) is the process of associating stereotypes or attitudes towards categories of people without conscious awareness – which can result in actions and decisions that are at odds with one’s conscious beliefs about fairness and equality. This can lead us to make biased and unfair decisions regarding who we hire for a job or select for a promotion, which classes we place students into and who we send out of the classroom for behavior infractions, and which treatment options we make available to patients. And, we know from extensive research, that this happens all the time in our schools, in hospitals, in policing, and in places of employment.

While it is critical that we work to identify and mitigate the effects of implicit bias, some have argued that a focus on implicit bias is problematic because it lets white people off the hook, “Race had nothing to do with my decision.”  That is, if people can say their actions are unconscious, how can we hold them accountable for actions that create and perpetuate systemic oppression and structural inequalities? We understand this caution. Yet, we believe that recent research findings in the field of neuroscience are ultimately cause for optimism and that the uptick in interest in implicit bias “training” in the fields of education, public health, social services, law enforcement, government and private sector companies is a hopeful sign. The field of neuroscience has shown us that our brains continue to develop and grow well into adulthood. This means that while we cannot avoid mentally absorbing some of the negative stereotypes about groups of people that permeate our culture, the associations and implicit biases that we internalize are malleable. We can, quite literally, change the physiology of our brain, like adding wiring to a house or building a new road in a city.  We have the ability to produce new associations which in turn can produce new, more inclusive and equitable, ways of behaving and reacting.

In order to ensure that learning about implicit bias leads to significant and meaningful change toward creating more equitable and inclusive communities and organizations, we offer these considerations.

Consideration #1:  Situate learning about implicit bias in a historical and socioeconomic political context.

We are not born with negative biases toward any particular group of people. The biases we have internalized, both consciously and unconsciously, have been “primed” through our experiences – images and messages we receive every day about who is “normal” or “desirable” and “belongs” and who is “different” or “undesirable” and “not one of us.”  These messages are neither neutral nor random. In the United States, “whiteness” is the dominant and privileged identity; socially constructed to justify conquest and slavery and reified in laws and policies, both historic and current, that ensure that white people benefit disproportionately from the benefits of society and are protected from more of its harms. White supremacy is baked into our country’s DNA. As such, what is deemed good and acceptable is normed to white people and we have all, white people and people of color, internalized an “anti-black and brown” bias.  The effects of these biases results in both individual and institutional acts and are pervasive across sectors including education, health, employment, and housing. The negative associations and assumptions we make about people of color have been wired into our unconscious mind over hundreds of years and show up in all of our institutions today.

Consideration #2:  Highlight and interrogate the ways that current policies and practices create and reproduce inequitable outcomes that serve to reinforce our implicit biases and the ways in which our implicit biases lead us to reify (and justify) existing inequities.  

Access to opportunity has never been equitable or fair in the United States. As john powell points out, since our inception as a nation “We the People” only included some people. Housing discrimination, racial segregation, voter suppression, and disinvestment in neighborhoods where people of color live, are a result of explicit policies which produce outcomes that reinforce our biases – whether we are conscious of it or not. It isn’t just the media that reinforces our negative racial biases (which it does), it is also the way we have historically and currently denied people of color access to opportunities in and across our communities that reinforces negative associations (crime, unemployment, crumbling infrastructure). In other words, we design policies and practices that disproportionately benefit white people and exclude and harm people of color and then use the negative outcomes the policies produce as evidence of racial superiority and inferiority.

For example, our inequitable structural arrangements mean that children of color are much more likely to grow up in poverty and attend underfunded, under-resourced schools with other students of color living in poverty.  When these students, who have very likely had less experienced teachers, larger class sizes, and fewer extracurricular and enrichment activities score below state standards, the discourse that accompanies this fact most often focuses on what “extra” supports are needed for these students as if the problem is somehow located in the student and not in the material conditions of their educational experiences. The structural arrangement produces the outcomes (low achievement for student of color), but the outcomes produce and reinforce associations in our minds between students of color and lower academic performance.

Similarly, we now live in neighborhoods that are more racially segregated than they were in the 1960s.  This means that many white children grow up with very little interaction with people of color. It may also mean that the primary way white people learn about people of color are through media depictions which often serve to perpetuate harmful negative stereotypes. To complicate things further, in their own segregated communities, they may only see people of color working in lower paying service positions such as gardeners, house cleaners, dishwashers in restaurants, security guards in their schools, lunchroom supervisors, or bus drivers. What are they learning?  What messages are being reinforced unconsciously every day by simply walking around in their communities? What children see and experience every day attaches to messages about “those people” that are fed to their brains without their conscious awareness. In this way, white children (and people) living in racially segregated neighborhoods are primed to make associations between people of color and violence, crime and lower status positions.

This plays out within racially diverse schools as well. For example, in schools we often see the majority of African American and Latino kids placed in the lower track classes while “honors” and “gifted” classes are most often filled with white students. As a result, our mind consciously and unconsciously starts to associate African American and Latino kids with being less intelligent, less capable. (Note again that student placement patterns are the result of both the structural arrangements and policies governing schooling and the discretion of individual teachers and counselors.)  Now picture a new student of color walking into the school. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we may assume that student should not be placed in the honors track. Even if we consciously and intellectually understand that intelligence is malleable and evenly distributed across the human race, what our mind sees day-to-day in our communities and schools are conditions that create associations that reinforce negative assumptions about the academic ability of students of color. When, based on this implicit assumption, we place the new student of color into a lower and less rigorous track, we reproduce the inequity and the vicious cycle of structural racism and implicit bias continues.