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B E YO N D CO N V E R S AT I O N S A B O U T R ACE
How Bias Helps and Hurts People Normally we just think of bias as something that hurts people—like racism. But an important part of understanding racial injustice is also understanding how bias helps people. Doug knows that he benefited from parents who read to him at a very young age, and dinnertime discussions helped him develop a good vocabulary. That gave him confidence in school that probably made teachers think that he was capable and intelligent. They were biased in Doug’s favor even before they had any evidence to believe that he could be a decent student. Anthony drives a car that might cause some people to assume he is successful, intelligent, and hardworking, even though they have not met him— they just make a biased judgment about Anthony based on his car. But for every person bias helps, there are others it harms. Children arrive in the United States every day who are extremely intelligent, but who don’t speak English at home and don’t have the vocabulary that Doug or Anthony did as a child, so some people might draw negative conclusions about their intelligence and capability. Teachers do not even ask them to consider advanced classes or gifted and talented programs because, after all, they don’t seem ready for them. Similarly, some adults drive cars that are old and in disrepair, don’t wear nice clothes, and may not smell very good, so even before other people meet them, they can draw conclusions about the intelligence and capability of those adults. That might influence an employer to not even consider them for a job, an unfair act that hurts not only the adult with the old car but also everyone in the family depending on him or her for food and shelter.
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The truth is, anyone can be biased, and almost all of us are. Stanford professor Jennifer L. Eberhardt (2019), who is African American, acknowledged that when she first entered a largely white school, she could not tell the difference in the facial features of her white classmates. They simply all looked alike to her. More tellingly, she revealed that when she took her five-year-old son on a plane, he saw an African American man and asked Eberhardt if the man was going to rob the plane. The kindergarten-aged child had no obvious reason to be biased against a Black man, yet there it was—drawing conclusions based on the stranger’s appearance. If Eberhardt and her son can be biased, then we might all want to take a breath and admit that we can be biased as well.
