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Marginal Gains's avatar

And the implicit bias starts very early. A story from the book: Biased (https://tinyurl.com/t9zsutua), the best book I have read on this topic:

I explained that some years ago my son Everett and I were on a plane. He was five years old, wide-eyed, and trying to take it all in. He looked around and saw a black passenger. He said, “Hey, that guy looks like Daddy.” I looked at the man, and truth be told, he did not look anything like Daddy—not in any way. I looked around for anyone else Everett might be referring to. But there was only one black man on the plane. I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony: the race researcher having to explain to her black child that not all black people look alike. But then I paused and thought about the fact that kids see the world differently from adults. Maybe Everett was seeing something that I missed. I decided to take another look.

I checked the guy’s height. No resemblance there. He was several inches shorter than my husband. I studied his face. There was nothing in his features that looked familiar. I looked at his skin color. No similarity there either. Then I took a look at his hair. This man had dreadlocks flowing down his back. Everett’s father is bald.

I gathered my thoughts and turned to my son, prepared to lecture him in the

way that I might inform an unobservant student in my class. But before I could

begin, he looked up at me and said,

“I hope that man doesn’t rob the plane.”

Maybe I didn’t get that right.

“What did you say?” I asked him, wishing I had not heard what I heard. And he said it again, as innocently and as sweetly as you can imagine from a bright-eyed boy trying to understand the world: “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.” I was on the brink of being upset. “Why would you say that?”

I asked as gently as I could. “You know Daddy wouldn’t rob a plane.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“Well, why did you say that?” This time my voice dropped an octave and turned sharp.

Everett looked up at me with a really sad face and said very solemnly, “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I was thinking that.”

We are living with such

severe racial stratification that even a five-year-old can tell us what’s supposed to happen next. Even with no malice—even with no hatred—the black-crime association made its way into the mind of my five-year-old son, into all of our children, into all of us.

I believe that the above story is a powerful illustration of how deeply ingrained implicit bias can be, even in young children who have no conscious intention of harm or prejudice. It highlights the pervasive influence of societal stereotypes and media portrayals that link race, in this case, Blackness, with criminality.

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Walter Frank's avatar

The critical question is how much do we lose when a qualified individual is excluded. I found it amusing when Dr. Santa Ono President of University of Florida wrote an opinion piece saying he was anti-dei and against Antisemitism . Not long ago he would have been excluded by his ethnicity. I remember when there were virtually no Jews in executive positions in major corporations.

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