Can Racial Bias be Eliminated?

Wait a minute! We weren’t racists at the time that George Floyd was murdered nor before, we’re not racists now, and we don’t intend to be racist in the future. So why are we being told, all of a sudden, that everyone has a deep-seated negative racial bias and really is a racist to some degree? Supposedly, everyone has been that way for a long time and just didn’t know it. It has been such an intrinsic part of our being that (until now) it’s never been felt at a conscious level. Apparently however, those on the receiving end of this constant racial bias have been tolerating it all along. For them, we’re now told, this aspect of our behavior has been borne in the interest of maintaining relationships that served some useful purpose (business and social group inclusion, work environment, etc.). Now that this previously hidden reality has been brought to light, we are further told we need implicit bias training to fix the problem once and for all. This training is so expertly devised, it will be able to change something buried in our psyche so deeply we were not even aware it existed. Only after this “reeducation” will we begin to live a life free of the bias we were unaware we were projecting in the first place.

Once every person in the United States receives this training, systemic racism will be a thing of the past. And once that past has been entirely eliminated by ridding ourselves of all the hateful artifacts reminding us of it, racism will have not only been completely eradicated from our minds and souls, but also from our physical environment and the ground we walk on. Then, and only then, our relationships with each other will be pure and completely unspoiled by any breath of prejudice.

This is the new message that some businesses, academicians, and civic leaders are offering up to the Black Live Matter movement to show an understanding and compassion for their cause. In some of these cases, this message is motivated by genuine fear that the protesters will descend upon institutions or places of business with invective or physical violence. In these instances, the above message is designed to appease and thus prevent physical damage and/or brand name decimation. It is acquiescence, pure and simple.

In our opinion, this situation begs for a show of strength from business and civic leaders, not timidity and certainly not acquiescence. Allowing violent acts to take place, (be it extorted groveling from businesses, statue toppling, destroying buildings/cars, or injuring humans) just to show solidarity with the agitators, is despicably weak. We even have leaders applauding the destruction, like Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle, which is worse than having no leadership at all.

In other cases, good old American capitalism is at work. Some businesses are attempting to increase their customer base and make more money by grafting an anti-racial bias training plan onto their traditional marketing schemes. Profit is the motivator here, not fear or the desire to combat racial insensitivity. To the extent that businesses in this category have been able to “align” their messaging with the cause of the protesters and increase their profits show that capitalism is alive and well. The protesters’ own message is easily being used for financial gain. There is little difference between this and what people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have already been doing to make fortunes from the “racism industry”.

Here, the very protesters who are claiming to be oppressed and unfairly treated, are being utilized to further enrich companies who feign agreement with their cause. In this case the Black Lives Matter movement is being easily manipulated and co-opted for a profit purpose. Are the protesters so naïve, they don’t know (or don’t believe) this is happening?

Finally, the words spoken by the protesters and written on their signs and banners (“End Racial Bias”, “Stop Racism”, “Stop White Supremacy”, “Stop Killing”) conflate different concepts, as if all those terms point to the same underlying meaning. While the passion is clearly present, it is ambiguous as to which specific cause the Black Live Matter protestors are organized around at any given time. That has led some companies and institutions to fashion a response against a particular BLM complaint which they think they are best positioned to publicly address. For example, many businesses already provide some form of bias “awareness” training to their employees. Highlighting that fact or promising to expand that training attempts to appeal to the “Stop Racial Bias” component on the BLM grievance list. However, the protesters then often castigate these efforts as being insufficient. For example, they insist that implicit racial bias be “cured” and eliminated to end the perceived widespread unfairness.

Unfortunately, human nature is an immovable obstacle preventing the excision of built-in biases in each of us. Thus, achieving an outcome of humans without bias is not possible (our opinion). Animal and human design includes an innate sense of “same” and “other”. It would not serve species survival for a baby cheetah to wander over to a pride of lions¹. It would be eaten. This is a survival trait. In one of many human studies exploring the “sameness” versus “otherness” dichotomy², babies as young as 7 months demonstrate a preference for same race faces in uncertain situations. However, humans can learn to be aware of bias regarding perceived differences and otherness. They can temper their behavior and perhaps their beliefs with this awareness. This is what bias awareness training seeks to accomplish. But bias eradication? Not likely, no matter what the “reeducation” process entails.

All of this, in our opinion, is evidence that the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t really know what specific outcome is to be achieved with their protests. They have articulated no coherent path to achieving their goals beyond the physical destruction of flashy targets as in toppling monuments, torching shops, or commandeering whole city blocks. Extorted acquiescence to demands will never achieve a perfectly unbiased and equitable society.

Unfortunately, there is a deepening personal investment of the BLM protestors and others in the notion of present-day systemic racism. This makes it extremely difficult for any of them to consider the evidence-based causes of social and economic disparity – fatherless families and dependency on government assistance. Re-directing protest energy into solving these other much better documented and studied problems will appear to many of the protesters as giving up the leverage they believe they currently enjoy. Looking inward can be dispiriting, daunting, and not nearly as newsworthy as tearing down a monument or commandeering a police precinct.

¹Hungry Lion Hunting Baby Cheetah – Mother Cheetah Fails To Save Her Baby; https://youtu.be/Sy2yQY8vQLs

²Infants Rely More on Gaze Cues from Own‐Race Than Other‐Race Adults for Learning Under Uncertainty

First published – 4/10/2017

Naiqi G. Xiao, Rachel Wu, Paul C. Quinn, Shaoying Liu, Kristen S. Tummeltshammer, Natasha Z. Kirkham, Liezhong Ge, Olivier Pascalis, Kang Lee