Racial Biases Are Pretty Normal

Let’s talk about race in America. It's okay if that subject makes you uncomfortable. Me too! My anxiety has been going through the roof even thinking about this post. But there is a very important point I want to drive home: racial biases are normal and common.

You may be familiar with the term “systemic racism,” which attributes the wide disparity in education levels, incarceration rates, income, etc. to racial biases that are ingrained into our society and our laws. I personally find this theory compelling, but in the social sciences, an observation about outcomes alone is not sufficient to establish the cause of those outcomes. So systemic inequality doesn't, on its own, tell us much about how widespread racial biases are.

On the other hand, experimental evidence clearly establishes the pervasiveness of racial biases. For instance, in 2004 Bertrand and Mullainathan showed that when people where shown resumes with first names that were strongly associated with a certain race, people responded more favorably to names that were common among whites than names that were common among blacks (a more recent study could not replicate the result with last names, but frankly, I think last names are a pretty weak signal of race. Apparently "Jefferson" and "Washington" are more common among blacks, which I suppose sounds right if I think about it carefully, but I seriously doubt that thought would occur to me if I was glancing at a resume). The racial biases also show up clearly in computer based tests: for instance, most white people, it turns out, do much better on tasks that require sorting "bad" words with blacks and "good" words with whites than the other way around.

It is important to establish that racial bias is normal and common because our society has an unhealthy culture of shame and silence when it comes race. Yes, this nation engaged in codified slavery and segregation, and both are morally indefensible. Yes, I believe continuing racial inequality is a very real problem. But people don't have racial biases because they chose to have them. People develop racial biases because as children we watch role models such as parents and teachers act out such biases. In most cases, those adults never intended to teach to pass that lesson on and may not have been aware of their own biases, but children have an incredible capacity to pick up on and emulate subtle behaviors: it's how we learn to construct sentences, tell jokes, make friends, and any other of a myriad of complex social behaviors.

Having biases does not make us bad people. To the contrary, some of the bravest, best people I know will admit to their own biases in public. However, racial biases will not go away by pretending they don't exist. We will pass them on to our children and our grandchildren unless we commit to fighting them.

We should be open to learning about our biases. Harvard has short, publicly available implicit bias tests. As long as you aren't afraid of the result, you might find the tests to be fun. And if you are surprised by the result you get, then know you are in the majority and it doesn't mean you have done anything wrong. What it does mean is that it will take awareness, courage, and effort to combat these biases. Changing ourselves and our culture will be an uphill battle every step of the way, but we must not shrink from the task.