Growing up in a very homogenous neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, I attended a very white grade school and high school, and now I am at a college that is not super diverse either. I would not have been exposed to much diversity if I didn’t experience the things I did outside of the white bubble I live in. I have spent every summer attending or working at a summer camp for underserved children on Chicago’s south side where I was sometimes the only white person there. I frequented parishes in the inner city with my family. I travel a lot, to places where I don’t know the language. Basketball has also been a big reason of my exposure to others, with being on teams with people from all over Illinois and playing other girls from across the nation.

All of the experiences make me want to say I don’t have implicit bias – but I do, everyone does. These experiences, though, encourage me to lose the stereotypes that once came to mind when I thought of certain groups of people or concepts. They teach me that although where I am from and America in general puts the white person’s lifestyle/ways of thinking/culture on top and in front of other cultures, white people are not all that in everyone’s mind. Therefore, I agree when the podcast says that greatest thing we can do to reduce our implicit bias is to expose ourselves to everything “other” that we can. I think every person should expose themselves to other cultures and beliefs as much as possible to expand our horizons and realize that what we know now is only part of what we can know. Everybody else has something to teach to us and we can only learn it if we expose ourselves to what others think and believe.