DAY 2: Dismantling Bias
"The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward." - Ijeoma Oluo
We all have implicit biases, even if we don’t want to think that we do. Bias is all around us and comes in many different forms. Implicit bias itself is not inherently bad; it’s a neutral survival trait. It becomes a problem when people rely on information
that reinforces stereotypes, either knowingly or unknowingly, to inform interactions with other people, which can lead to inequity and discrimination.
Bias is learned. As Anurag Gupta states in his powerful TED talk, “There’s nothing
inherent about bias. We weren’t born to think ‘light skin pretty, dark skin, not pretty,’ ‘rich people hard-working, poor people lazy.’ We learn to make these associations.” Gupta also says, “Imagine with me what our companies, our communities,
our politics would look like if each one of us felt a sense of belonging in our skin, in our surroundings. If we didn’t live in ideas of one another but in the presence of one another - the real people. We have the tools. What’s stopping us? What’s
stopping you?”
To dismantle our implicit biases, the first step is to admit that you are biased, as we all are in different ways. Next, you should identify and understand your own biases, and Harvard’s Implicit Bias Test can help with that. It’s also important to understand how your biases affect your interactions with others. Finally, you can take measures to eliminate
biases by educating yourself and implementing your learning. For more on practical ways for rooting out bias, see this article by Jill Suttie from Greater Good Magazine.
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What are some of the racial stereotypes you have learned about different groups of people, including your own?
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How do you see these biases showing up in your daily life and your interactions with others? Can you think of a specific time when you recognized a bias that was previously unconscious?
Author Photo Credit: Ijeoma Oluo
SIBA thanks its generous sponsors, who have made the 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge possible:
Many of the quotes used in the Challenge are excerpted from Words of Change: Anti-Racism by permission of Sasquatch Books. Copyright 2020 By Kenyra Rankin. All rights reserved.
Although SIBA has modified when appropriate for a bookseller audience, the majority of prompts and resources come directly from the 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge created
by Food Solutions New England (FSNE). We are so grateful for their extraordinary work creating this program and making it available to other organizations.
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