Examine your privilege and do something about it (Note that having privilege does NOT mean you haven’t struggled)
Understand that it’s not a binary: we all have biases and that doesn’t make you a bad person.
As you talk to others, try not to be defensive. Have a growth mindset and understand it’s a constant growing process.
The Wiseburn CARE team has put together a folder of resources that include things like how to talk to kids about COVID, things to do to stay busy while at home, mental health resources, and resources to embrace race. They also hosted a talk yesterday about how to have difficult discussions in our current climate. The idea of implicit bias came up and they shared a resource to help us explore what our biases are. I took the one on race and the result made me pause and reflect on how my unconscious biases may contribute to discriminatory behaviors toward white and black people. FYI: The test on race only asks about black and white people.
Embrace Race Resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Qq5j5bkn6T5Uexx8-GrMlRp0Frua-mqh
Psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington created "Project Implicit" to develop Hidden Bias Tests—called Implicit Association Tests, or IATs, in the academic world—to measure unconscious bias.
TAKE THE TEST HERE: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html (the original test is the one labeled Race ('Black - White' IAT)
About Stereotypes and Prejudices: Hidden Bias Tests measure unconscious, or automatic, biases. Your willingness to examine your own possible biases is an important step in understanding the roots of stereotypes and prejudice in our society. The ability to distinguish friend from foe helped early humans survive, and the ability to quickly and automatically categorize people is a fundamental quality of the human mind. Categories give order to life, and every day, we group other people into categories based on social and other characteristics. This is the foundation of stereotypes, prejudice and, ultimately, discrimination.
Listen to Hidden Brain episodes free, on demand. President Trump said this week that a few "bad apples" were to blame for police killings of black people. But research suggests that something more complicated is at play — a force that affects everyone in the culture, not just police officers. In this bonus episode, we revisit our 2017 look at implicit bias and how a culture of racism can infect us all.
None of us are immune.
