Implicit Bias and the Hard Road to Equality
I walked in through a sea of navy-blue uniforms. The auditorium was filled to capacity, with 132 sworn members of the Oakland Police Department sitting motionless with perfect posture: erect, arms crossed. As I walked down the aisle to take the stage, I could not see their faces, but I already knew what they were thinking.
The road to this particular presentation was a long one. The police force was still recovering from a major scandal that had left a legacy of distrust in the community. I was just wrapping up a two-year report that was about to be released to the public — one of the final steps required by the federal oversight team brought in to investigate extensive civil rights violations by members of this department — and I didn’t want the police to be blindsided by our
findings. Many in the community were calling for an end to racial profiling. They wanted fair treatment. They were demanding justice. Many in the police department felt they were delivering that justice every day — sometimes at great sacrifice. I wanted to help the officers to understand the insidious ways in which implicit bias could act on human decision-making, despite the officers’ noble intentions and deliberate efforts.
I decided to veer off my usual script, with its statistics, scientific facts, and studies, and share instead a personal story.
I explained that, some years ago, my son Everett and I were on a plane. He was five years old, wide-eyed, and trying to take it all in. He looked around and saw a black passenger. He said, “Hey, that guy looks like Daddy.” I looked at the man, and truth be told, he did not look anything like Daddy — not in any way. I looked around for anyone else Everett might be referring to. But there was only one black man on the plane.
I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony: the race researcher having to explain to her own black child that not all black people look alike. But then I paused and thought about the fact that kids see the world differently from adults. Maybe Everett was seeing something that I missed. I decided to take another look.
I checked the guy’s height. No resemblance there. He was several inches shorter than my husband. I studied his face. There was nothing in his features that looked familiar. I looked at his skin color. No similarity there either. Then I took a look at his hair. This man had dreadlocks flowing down his back. Everett’s father is bald.
I gathered my thoughts and turned to my son, prepared to lecture him in the way that I might inform an unobservant student in my class. But before I could begin, he looked up at me and said, “I hope that man doesn’t rob the plane.”
Maybe I didn’t get that right. “What did you say?” I asked him, wishing I had not heard what I heard. And he said it again, as innocently and as sweetly as you can imagine from a bright-eyed boy trying to understand the world: “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.”
I was on the brink of being upset. “Why would you say that?” I asked as gently as I could. “You know Daddy wouldn’t rob a plane.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“Well, why did you say that?” This time my voice dropped an octave and turned sharp.
Everett looked up at me with a really sad face and said very solemnly, “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I was thinking that.”
Just telling that story reminded me of how much that moment hurt. I took a deep breath, and when I looked back out at the crowd in the auditorium, I saw they were no longer uniformed police officers, and I was no longer a university researcher. We were parents, unable to protect our children from a world that is often bewildering and frightening, a world that influences them so profoundly, so insidiously, and so unconsciously that they — and we — don’t know why we think the way we do.
After I finished my presentation, one officer came up to me: “Your story about your son on the plane reminded me of an experience I had on the street. It’s something I haven’t thought about in a long time,” the officer told me.
“I was out one day, working undercover,” the officer said, “and I saw a guy, at a distance, who didn’t look right. This guy looked similar to me — you know, black, same build, same height. But this guy had a scruffy beard, unkempt hair, ripped clothes, and he looked like he was up to no good. The guy began approaching me, and as he was getting closer, I had a feeling that he had a gun on him. Something’s off with this guy, I thought. This dude ain’t right.
I couldn’t help but but struck by the irony: the race researcher having to explain to her own black child that not all black people look alike.
“So the guy is coming down a hill, near the front of a nice office building — one of those big office towers with glass walls. And as the guy is approaching, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was armed and dangerous.
“As I got closer to the building, I lost him for a second and I began to feel panicked. Suddenly I see the guy again, but this time he is inside the office building. I could see the guy clearly through the glass wall. He was walking inside the building — in the same direction and at the same pace as I was walking.
“Something was wrong. When I quickened my pace, I could see him quicken his pace. And finally, I decided to stop abruptly, turn, and confront the guy.
“He stops too, and I look at him face-to-face,” the officer said to me. “And when I look in his eyes, a shock went through me. I realized that I was staring at myself. I was the person I feared. I was staring at my own reflection through the mirrored wall. That entire time, I was tailing myself; I was profiling myself.”
That’s the kind of power that our unconscious biases can exert without our awareness or permission.
Implicit bias is not a new way of calling someone a racist. In fact, you don’t have to be a racist at all to be influenced by it. Implicit bias is a kind of distorting lens that’s a product of both the architecture of our brain and the disparities in our society.
We all have ideas about race, even the most open-minded among us. Those ideas have the power to bias our perception, our attention, our memory, and our actions — all despite our conscious awareness or deliberate intentions.
Bias can lead to racial disparities in everything from preschool suspensions to corporate leadership. And the disparities themselves then bolster our biases. For example, knowing that a disproportionate amount of violent crime is committed by young black men can bias judgments about black people more generally. That affects how blacks are seen in all manner of situations — whether sitting in a classroom or a coffee shop, whether leading a Fortune 500 company or fighting a California wildfire. The stereotypes shadow them.
People can hold biases based on all sorts of characteristics — skin color, age, weight, ethnic origin, accent, disability, height, gender. I talk a lot about race, specifically about blacks and whites, because those two groups have been studied the most by researchers investigating bias. And because the racial dynamics between blacks and whites are dramatic, consequential, and enduring. In the United States, those tensions over centuries have even set the tone for how other social groups are regarded.
Confronting implicit bias requires us to look in the mirror. To understand the influence of implicit racial bias requires us to stare into our own eyes — much as the undercover police officer who found that he had been tailing himself had done — to face how readily stereotypes and unconscious associations can shape our reality. By acknowledging the distorting lens of fear and bias, we move one step closer to clearly seeing each other. And we move one step closer to clearly seeing the social harms — the devastation — that bias can leave in its wake. Change requires a kind of open-minded attention that is well within our reach.
Sarah Leary is one of the founders (with Chris Varelas and former CEO Nirav Tolia) of Nextdoor, an online social networking service that serves as a sort of giant chat room for individual neighborhoods. Tens of millions of people use it, across the country and around the world. Its mission statement conveys its high-minded goal: to provide a trusted platform where neighbors work together to build stronger, safer, happier communities.
Nextdoor aims to offer an online space where people can feel comfortable connecting with neighbors they’ve never met, whether they’re looking for a lost dog or a reliable babysitter, or warning neighbors about a coyote roaming the block or a stranger who seems out of sync with the prevailing demographic. It’s that last option that caused the trouble that brought me to Nextdoor’s conference room.
At that time, Nextdoor was working well in more than 185,000 neighborhoods in the United States and another 25,000 around the world. But its “crime and safety” category has become the problem child. There were too many posts with racist overtones, messages that labeled blacks and Latinos “suspicious” for walking down a street, sitting in a car, talking on a cellphone, knocking on a door. When an Oakland-area news outlet wrote about the problem, Sarah and her business partners were horrified by the stories that emerged. Instead of bringing neighbors closer together, the platform exposed raw racial dynamics that generated hurt feelings, sparked hostilities, and fueled fierce online arguments.
The Nextdoor team began scouring the site for signs of racial profiling. The number of troubling posts they found was “minuscule” for a site that channels millions of messages every day, Sarah said. “But we were of the mindset that even one of these is bad. … There was a real kind of gut check and soul-searching experience for us.
“Most people weren’t consciously racial profiling,” Sarah said. “They couldn’t even agree on what it was. They just knew when they’d seen something that made them uncomfortable and compelled them, for safety’s sake, to share it.”
Nextdoor needed to find a way to dial back the hair-trigger impulse that makes skin color alone arouse suspicion. Her team wanted to educate, not shame or alienate users who’d stumbled into trouble with awkward or insensitive postings.
Speed is the holy grail of technology. The goal is to create an online experience for users that’s easy, quick, and fluid, allowing them to express themselves instantly. Yet these are exactly the kinds of conditions that lead us to rely on subconscious bias.
There were too many posts with racist overtones, messages that labeled blacks and Latinos “suspicious” for walking down a street, sitting in a car, talking on a cellphone, knocking on a door.
To curb racial profiling on the platform, they had to contemplate slowing people down. Research supports the notion that raising the issue of race and discrimination explicitly can lead people to be more open-minded and act more fairly, particularly when they have time to reflect on their choices.
The posting process was changed to require users to home in on behavior, pushing them past the “If you see something, say something” mindset and forcing them to think more critically: If you see something suspicious, say something specific.
Adding friction to the process slowed things down a bit, but it did not lead to the huge drop-off in users that industry observers had predicted. What it did do was reduce the incidence of racial profiling: Nextdoor’s tracking suggests it is down by more than 75 percent.
The approach offers benefits beyond reducing neighborhood animosity. That friction and the awareness it generates may make people more willing and better equipped to think and talk frankly about race. Conversations about racial issues in interracial spaces can be uncomfortable. It’s no wonder people tend to avoid them. White people don’t want to have to worry that something they say will come out wrong and they’ll be accused of being racist. And minorities, on the other side of the divide, don’t want to have to wonder if they’re going to be insulted by some tone-deaf remark.
Nextdoor can’t make the angst go away. But benefits accrue from nudging people to talk about race and consider the harm a thoughtless judgment can do. “What I have found is that this can be a personal journey,” Sarah said. “When you raise the issue with people, at first there might be a little bit of ‘Oh, come on.’ And then you explain and you get ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense.’ I think right now most people believe ‘I can only screw this up, so maybe I shouldn’t have that conversation.’ But if people believed that having the conversations actually led to better understanding, they’d be more willing.”
She saw that happen in Oakland, when people came together to talk about their distress over racially biased posts. “I think people just get closed off, and they try to simplify the world with simple assumptions to get through their day,” she said. “But there’s a whole canopy of examples of people’s lives that are maybe more similar to yours than you assume. When you have direct connections with people who are different from you, then you develop an ability to recognize that.” So the scary black teenager in the hoodie in the dark turns out to be Jake from down the block, walking home from swim team practice.
The beauty of Nextdoor’s template is that it catches people before they’ve done anything wrong. “We try and be very mindful of going through the process of assuming good intent,” Sarah explained. “I think where it actually gets embarrassing for people is when they had good intentions and they put something out there, and they thought they were helping the neighborhood, and someone comes back and is like, ‘You’re a racist.’”
The tool gets users to stop and think before they post something that will land them in heated arguments. When there’s more thoughtfulness and less defensiveness, honest conversations about race are possible.
Ultimately, we see our neighborhoods as an extension of our homes. And home is the place where you let your guard down; where you expect to feel loved, safe, and comfortable. But living with diversity means getting comfortable with people who might not always think like you, people who don’t have the same experience or perspectives. That process can be challenging. But it might also be an opportunity to expand your horizons.
Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of SPARQ, a Stanford Center that brings together researchers and practitioners to address significant social problems.
This article is featured in the September/October 2019 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
Featured image: Shutterstock.com
The First Auto Race: Thanksgiving 1895
It seemed like a great idea at the time.
Having read about an automobile race in France, H.H. Kohlsaat decided he’d host America’s first auto race in Chicago. The year was 1895 and automobiles were still a great novelty. Kohlsaat, who owned the Chicago Times Herald, planned to exploit the growing interest in motoring by sponsoring a 54-mile race from downtown Chicago to Evanston, Illinois, and back. It would be open to all qualifying vehicles, foreign or domestic, powered by gas, electricity, or steam. The top prize would be $2,000 (the equivalent of over $50,000 today).
To draw a big holiday crowd, he set the race date for the Fourth of July 1895.
He quickly learned this was too soon for the competitors. Applicants begged Kohlsaat to postpone the race so they could get their vehicles ready for the competition.
So Kohlsaat pushed the race back to Labor Day. As that date drew near, the contestants pleaded for more time.
In the end, Kohlsaat pushed the date back to Thanksgiving Day, November 28.
He hoped that fair weather would hold for the race, but the night before Thanksgiving, a storm blew into town and buried Chicago streets in snow. High winds followed, blowing snowdrifts across racecourse streets.
Only six cars made it to the starting line in Jackson Park that morning. At 8:55 a.m., a small, shivering crowd watched the first vehicle set off. It was the only gas-powered American car in the contest and had been built by brothers Charles and Frank Duryea. The other three gas vehicles were all German machines built by Karl Benz, one representing the De La Verne Refrigerator Machine Company, one representing Macy’s Department Store in New York, and the last driven by Oscar Mueller of Decatur, Illinois, who proved a tough adversary.
The last two entries were electric models, a Sturges Electric and Morris and Salom’s Electrobat. No steam models competed.
After the cars disappeared, the crowd dispersed. It was 30 degrees and windy at the lakeside. With the vehicles expected to travel at just 5 mph, there would be nothing to see for the next 10 hours.
The vehicles struggled up Lake Shore Drive fighting wind and snowdrifts. As they passed Lincoln Park, they were suddenly greeted by cheers from a crowd of thousands. These weren’t race fans, but attendees at the football game between the University of Chicago and University of Michigan, who noticed the horseless carriages slowly working their way up the street. Shortly afterward, as Frank Duryea crossed the Rush Street Bridge, the steering arm on his vehicle snapped. He managed to get his vehicle to a blacksmith’s shop, where the arm was repaired, but the delay put him an hour behind the leading Benz car.
Years later, when Kohlsaat gave his account of the race in the Post, he wrote that early that on Thanksgiving afternoon “a large number of people gathered near the [Evanston] Industrial School and received the first comers with cheers. The Macy machine was then slightly in the lead.” Just two blocks beyond, though, Frank Duryea came up on the leader. “In accordance to the rules of the contest,” Kohlsaat wrote, the Macy Benz pulled to one side.
The driver of the Macy Benz tried to close Duryea’s lengthening lead, but late in the afternoon, Macy’s driver ran into a sleigh that had overturned in the street. He was able to extricate the car and resume driving, but he soon ran into a horse-drawn hackney cab, which damaged the car’s steering. The driver managed to roll the car in-between the trolley car tracks and drive between the tracks to next checkpoint. Mechanics spent 80 minutes putting the Benz back in running order. But by 6:15, the darkening sky and cold winds were too discouraging. The Macy Benz vehicle dropped out of the race.
This left just Duryea and another Benz, driven by Oscar Mueller.
Duryea had now been driving for nine hours. He was experiencing trouble with his ignition, not to mention the snowdrifts. In addition, he’d taken a wrong turn that added several miles to his route. But he was still ahead of Mueller, who was facing even greater difficulties.
Before starting, Mueller had decided he would not just carry a referee, like all entrants, but an extra passenger as well. After spending the day in the back of the car, huddled against the freezing winds, the passenger was overcome by the cold. He was lifted out of the car and carried off for medical attention in a sleigh. Mueller kept driving, but he, too, was losing consciousness.
By 6:30 p.m., Duryea was getting close to the finish line. Kohlsaat wrote, “Lacking spectators, except here and there a solitary workman on his way home … the men on the motor gave vent to war whoops, cheers, cat calls, and other manifestations of joy over the victory they were winning.”
At 7:18 p.m., Frank Duryea crossed the finish line. He’d taken 10 hours and 23 minutes to travel 52.4 miles.
Almost two hours later, Mueller’s Benz came in sight, but now the referee was driving. In one hand, he held the steering tiller and, in the other, held up Mueller, who’d collapsed from the cold.
The first automobile race was over.
The next automobile race was held, more sensibly, on Memorial Day.
Not surprising, Chicago’s Thanksgiving Day race never became a holiday tradition. Chicagoans weren’t afraid to spend hours standing in the cold for a public event. But even as early as 1895, the holiday already established its cold-weather sport. As the Chicago Tribune declared on its front page that day, Thanksgiving was, “the day we celebrate — the day when football and turkey rule.”
Kohlsaat’s account doesn’t use the term “automobile.” As he explains, “There was considerable opposition to calling the horseless carriage ‘automobile,’ as the name was too Frenchy, so The Times Herald offered $500 for a name, and ‘motocycle’ was awarded the prize.”
That’s motocycle, without an r.
Years later, Duryea recalled his early days of inventing the automobile, and his early racing days. You can read his article “It Doesn’t Pay to Pioneer,” originally published in 1931, in the Post’s latest special issue: Automobiles in America!
The Racers’ Edge
Indianapolis, Thursday May 21 — The track at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is fairly quiet, until it isn’t. Drivers are doing practice runs and each time one goes by, the air is scorched by the noise. Or maybe a better word is ripped. The human reaction to the din is purely physical. One is instinctively on alert — it’s an adrenaline burst. Yet when you meet the drivers, you are struck by how calm they are — not at all like the thrill-seekers one has known. Which is a reminder that this is not a game; it’s a job. Here’s how the fastest drivers in the world go to work.
James Jakes
“The most nerve-wracking part of the race is the lead up into it.” —James Jakes
(Photo by Walter Kuhn)
James Jakes was born in Great Britain. The 27-year-old started racing in 2002 and began driving IndyCars in 2011.
The Saturday Evening Post: To an average person, it would seem thrilling, even terrifying, to ride at these speeds.
JJ: To be honest it just comes very naturally. You’re doing so much more in the car than just driving. You know, you have all your tools to play with in the car, you’re getting instructions from your team, not only about your position but about your engine, and much more, so the driving comes naturally really. You just fall into a groove.
SEP: You’re calm?
JJ: Yes, the worst part, the most nerve-wracking part of the race is the lead up into it. As soon as the green flag goes, everyone’s in their element. You just get in the car and do what you have to do. Actually, on Sunday I will be wearing a heart rate monitor, so you’ll be able to see how calm I am.
Conor Daly
“You’re fully fueled by adrenaline.” —Conor Daly
(Photo by Mike Harding)
Conor Daly, 23, is the son of professional race car driver Derek Daly. He started racing go-karts as a 10-year-old, and in 2005 Kart Racers of America named him Junior Driver of the Year. In 2008, he graduated to race cars. He made his debut in IndyCars in 2013.
SEP: How important is fitness? To the average person, you’re just driving a car.
CD: Exactly! That’s the biggest thing we try to change people’s thoughts on. We train every day. It’s not just your arms or your neck, it’s also your legs, your core. You’re putting 1,500 pounds of pressure on the break pedal every lap.
SEP: Traveling that speed, do you have a sense of the adrenaline rush?
CD: You’re fully fueled by adrenaline. When you’re at that limit, you’re at the verge of life or death — because in the end it is a dangerous sport. That’s part of the reason I love racing — the adrenaline, the fear, the speed. So you definitely feel it. Especially here. The first time I raced at Indy, every lap I was thinking to myself, You know what? This is pretty fast! And I love it. I love every bit of it.
SEP: You’re from a racing family. How important is that?
CD: My dad was a racer. And I have racing in the family, racing in the blood. He was my manager for a long time. He guided me through the road to get here. And he’s a smart guy.
SEP: What specifically would he tell you after a race?
CD: He’s not intrusive, but after a race he may say, “You know what, here’s what this guy was doing.” Or “You might not have seen this line” or whatever. So it’s cool to have him on my side.
SEP: What’s the main difference between highway driving and racing?
CD: Everything. It’s literally a world of difference.
SEP: Yeah, but anyone can get in a car and drive really fast.
CD:Okay, here’s a good way to think of it. Every car does the same thing. It goes, it stops and it turns left and right. Ours do the same thing, but at a lot faster rate. I can’t even begin to describe the difference that makes.
Charlie Kimball
“It [diabetes] does not define me, but it’s part of the description of who I am.” —Charlie Kimball
(Photo by Dana Garrett)
Charlie Kimball has been racing Indy cars since 2011. He is also the first licensed driver with diabetes in the history of IndyCar racing.
SEP: How does your diabetes affect your driving?
CK: Diabetes is not part of the conversation, because if I do my job right, it literally is just another part of me. I’m Charlie Kimball. I was born in England; I grew up in America; I’m married; I have diabetes. It does not define me, but it’s part of the description of who I am.
Ryan Briscoe
“To get called up because of something like that sort of tames your excitement a little bit.” —Ryan Briscoe
(Photo by Chris Jones)
33-year-old Ryan Briscoe replaced James “Hinch” Hinchcliffe, who suffered a horrific crash that very nearly took his life during an Indy 500 practice on Monday, May 18, before the race. Briscoe, an Australian IndyCar driver with 129 total starts and seven victories, got a last-minute call to fill the seat. Sunday will be his 10th appearance at the 500. In previous starts, he finished fifth twice.
SEP: What’s it like to come in on such short notice?
RB: I’m excited to be the one to have been chosen to fill in for Hinch. But to get called up because of something like that sort of tames your excitement a little bit. It’s terrible for Hinch and my thoughts are with him. And fortunately he’s doing great — he’s recovering already better than anyone expected. Which is really fantastic news.
SEP: How challenging is this situation workwise? Practicing for an hour before the biggest race day in the world?
RB: At this point my mind’s on the race and hopefully I’ll go out and do a good job. I’m comfortable. There’s not a funny feeling about the car. I feel good about it. Got familiar with the buttons on the steering wheel, and you know, braking coming into the pits, and doing a couple of pit stops. I’ve just got to be really focused in next couple days so I don’t miss anything that’s important, and so I don’t find myself scratching my head about something on Sunday.
SEP: What about the suit you’re wearing? Did they make it for you on short notice?
RB: It’s Hinch’s and it fits perfect! Next time I get something made, I’ll just say, “give me Hinch’s measurements.” I’ve never measured myself for a suit and had it fit as well as this one does.
SEP: Can you talk about the physical fitness that is required of a driver?
RB: Fitness is a big part of our lives. It’s kind of like our everyday job is being in the gym and working out, and the fun part of the job is going to the racetrack and driving race cars. For these cars, probably more than for any other race car in the world, I’d say, pure strength is important. We don’t have power steering. We’ve got so much downforce coming through the steering column; it’s like driving a 5-ton truck basically. So, you need to be strong, but you also need endurance. This race is more mentally fatiguing than physically fatiguing. You have to be mentally prepared to maintain that concentration for such a long time at these speeds. Any little mistake is very costly.