The head honcho of an explicitly pro black pressure group (which supports Antifa and Black Lives Matter) demands White public officials take a bias test–because racism or something.
Right. Got it.
Everyone should get tested for implicit bias, and if you’re a public official or receiving public dollars — it should be mandatory. It’s just a matter of time before another black person is abused, arrested, or shot dead for flying, golfing, driving, walking or drinking coffee “while black.”
We know that in another week, black Twitter will once again be enraged by another disturbing video of a black woman in Waffle House getting body-slammed to the floor by police, only to see a white man who killed four people and wounded four more at a Tennessee Waffle House brought in by police without the use of excessive force. Then there’s Starbucks.
How do we explain that racism still remains a much more popular drink in America than coffee?
We commend Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson for his deliberate speed in taking steps that many a Fortune 500 company would fear. At the same time, we ask why is our society continually placing training on unconscious and implicit bias into a red box that says “break only in case of emergency,” when we know it’s just a matter of time before another incident is caught on video and made public?
We know soon enough there’ll be another young black man lost on his way to school, shot at just for asking for directions. Or another Stephon Clark, an unarmed father killed by eight bullets in his back and shot at 20 times by Sacramento police.
In America, black people exist within the polarities of black and white. Black is normally associated with our nadir — both humans and a nation — while white our zenith. In The Souls of Black Folk, NAACP founder and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois speaks of the haunting power of the “color line,” and of a double-consciousness that still shadows black people today.
“The history of the American negro is the history of this strife,” said Du Bois.
It’s not that black people want to be white, argued Du Bois. Black people only want “to make it possible for a man to be both a negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
A hundred years since Du Bois’ classic, America still grapples with the intense labor pains necessary for giving birth to an ever elusive colorblind society and the problem of the color line remains, like stagnant water polluting the American ideals of justice and meritocracy.
It’s a conundrum wrapped inside a ball of hate, explicit bias, racism, micro-aggressions and subconscious fears that can only be unraveled through our nation staring down face to face its problem with racism — whether expressed explicitly or implicitly.
One thing is clear, America still remains very uneasy with black people, especially black men. Numerous studies and statistics bear this out. Whether we are purchasing a car or caught in the criminal justice system, inexplicable disparities exist. African Americans will be charged more for a vehicle than whites, or steered toward subprime loans, or stopped by the police at a rate higher than that of whites, despite being less likely than whites to have weapons or drugs.
Research from the Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity found a tendency by civilians and police to “overestimate the age and culpability of black male youth compared with their white and Hispanic counterparts.
“For police, this tendency to implicitly dehumanize black boys was correlated with their likelihood of having a record reflecting more use-of-force instances with blacks than other races.”
Kirwan additionally found in another study that “the majority of test takers were more likely to implicitly associate images of weapons with black faces than white faces.”
How do we explain that implicit bias is a real thing?
While the United States has a very long history with explicit bias and state-sponsored racism, we are only partially committed to believing the extent to which our internal biases impacts us subconsciously. We are unable to grasp that implicit bias functions like a powdered drug stirred into our societal drink and continuously seeping out our societal pores, ranging from law enforcement to education to religion, entertainment and media. It’s like our shadow and travels with all of us everywhere we go, regardless of our self-proclaimed objectivity or colorblindness.
It appeared recently in an incident where a former White House staffer moving into his new apartment on New York’s Upper West Side was mistaken for a burglar by neighbors who called the police. It appeared just this week when a white student called police because a black student was napping in the common room of a Yale University dorm. It took the black woman more than 15 minutes, a room key and a Yale ID to persuade police she was a graduate student.
Often called unconscious bias, it exists in how we process information on a subconscious level. Our brain constantly seeks shortcuts in dealing with the billions of stimuli we encounter daily, and we put people and things into groups, unaware that we are actually doing this or that these unconscious biases are actually affecting our behavior.
We think this person looks more trustworthy or more like a leader, while the guy over there looks shifty. It doesn’t matter if we’re wrong because deep down we know we’re right. We don’t have to be a scientist to get this, just willing to get tested, and the resources to do this already exist.
There’s the Harvard implicit association test (IAT), which more than 6 million people have taken, with varying levels of unexpected bias being revealed.
The NAACP is calling for an expansion of the movement to demand mandatory testing for implicit bias, particularly for officials paid with public dollars. For major corporations, implicit bias training must become a part of corporate responsibility rather than always as a response to videotaped intolerance.
This is the beginning of a movement designed to awaken the soul of our nation in ways that not only make us better people, but also a society where we are both accountable for what we know as well as what we are unaware of.
Derrick Johnson is the president and CEO of the NAACP. Follow him on Twitter @DerrickNAACP.