In the Critical thinking podcast, Dr. Bezio emphasizes how bias is viewed so negatively in our society, even though it is a somewhat natural result of the content we consume, and that the only way to change it or prevent it is to purposefully expose ourselves to culture and content that we don’t normally engage with, or that defies general expectations. After listening I decided that I wanted to take an implicit bias quiz to learn more about the biases that I might hold without realizing it, which are not necessarily bad, but are important to understand because it does affect one’s viewpoint of the world whether or not they are aware of it.
I was surprised by the results of my implicit bias quiz, because although I don’t consider myself to have an outright bias, I thought that maybe a hidden bias would show up that I did not know about. I know that I don’t have an explicit bias against black people, but because of ideas spread in mainstream culture that tend to portray black people in a negative light, I wanted to see if I had unconsciously picked up on those biases. I took the IAT test focused on the association between race and harmless objects/weapons. My results ended up falling into the category of slight automatic association with Black Americans and Harmless Objects, and White Americans and Weapons. These are results generally shared by only 6% of the population, so I was very surprised, but also glad to see that my opinions are not popular opinions. But it is also disheartening to see that the majority of people have strong or moderate association with Black Americans and Weapons and White Americans and Harmless Objects. One thing that I thought while looking at the results was that most people who take tests like this generally want to learn more about their biases in order to do something about it, so I think that an even greater portion of the population would have a negative implicit bias against Black Americans.
I think that the difference shown in my test results could be a reflection of the fact that I have paid attention to terror attacks in the United States, and school shootings, most of which have been committed by white men during my childhood, and I think that despite the way terrorists or “bad” people are represented in popular culture, my knowledge of current events has overshadowed that in my mind without my awareness.
I think your point about the prevalence of school shootings is very interesting. think this could also be a generation thing, where we have been in school during the rise in school shooting while other generations have watched it happen from the outside. I am also curious about if the nationwide association of Black people with Weapons has shifted in the past few years with the establishment and resergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement and increased attention on police brutality. Police are probably likely to have a strong association of Black people with Weapons, but I wonder about the actual stats by occupation. Additionally, I wonder if and how gender comes into play with the implicit associations – if gender identity is significant in the nationwide results, and if instead it was Black men and white men, it was Black women and white women, or a mix.
I think it would be interesting to see how our generation’s results would differ from the results of our parents and grandparents who lived in a more segregated world. The association with white people and weapons definitely correlates to the amount of school shootings our country experienced as we were growing up, but I am not sure if my parents would think the same way (my grandparents definitely would not).