I watched a Ted Talk entitled “How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them” by Verna Myers. In her talk, Myers mentioned many of the unwarranted killings of young black men. She cautioned that the same stereotypes and prejudices that resulted in the deaths of those young black men are inside us all because we have all grown up learning them. Myers wanted to give people advice on how to overcome their biases and prevent another Ferguson. She gave three main pieces of advice:

The first thing she said was to stop trying to deny our implicit bias. Myers does diversity seminars and sees people all the time trying to come up to her and claim that they are good people and don’t have any biases. The truth is that we all have biases whether or not we realize them. When times get difficult we lean on those biases that we did not even know we had. Myers urged listeners to stop trying to be colorblind because the problem is not that we see color it is the way we react when we see people that are not the same color as we are. Once we realize our bias we should actively work to disconfirm it. She said that we should all stare at awesome black people to help us dissociate black and negative. We need to go looking for our biases and disconfirm them. 

Next, she said that we need to move toward young black men and not away from them. Here she is asking us to walk towards discomfort. She challenges listeners to take inventory of their social and professional circles and take not of which people are missing from those circles and seek them out. We need to expand our circles and embrace any discomfort that might come with that. 

Finally, Myers urged us to remember to say something when we see something, even to the people closest to you. Biases move from generation to generation because younger people do not see racist behavior called out, which tells them that behavior is okay. We need to shelter children from racism so they do not internalize it and act on it. We should work to create the expectation that if anyone sees racist behavior they will say something.