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.

I have taken these exact tests before in high school, so I knew the gist of them before I took them. In high school, we took every test, and the results I got then made sense. I have always been accepting and I was introduced to maybe different people of different backgrounds from a young age. My mom made sure of that. My mom says I have always been empathetic towards others, and I firmly believe that personality/mindset/action is the only thing someone should be judged on.

That being said, the results I got were not at all what I expected. I personally strongly disagree with my results. I would have agreed with a slight automatic preference but I do not think I have a strong automatic preference in this case.

The CTAA reading was super interesting and I found it to be very insightful for a lot of different reasons. The main reason had to be how it highlighted maximizing consequentialists and their beliefs. They believe that one should produce as much happiness as possible, and I find this super important in life. I personally believe that whatever anyone does, they should do it because it makes them happy.

The universalistic maximizing consequentialist argument can be applied to a lot of life choices and arguments. If doing something – such as donating to a charity – will maximize happiness for everyone in the world and it is morally good to maximize happiness for everyone in the world, then I concur that “H” or a person should do said action. The maximizing consequentialist point of view does have a downfall, one we saw with the water pumps in DGB, where people thought that they were producing the most amount of happiness for the people in need – when in fact they were not. That being said, I think that the maximizing consequentialist argument should be one that is considered often for arguing and choices, but with sincere thought to actually produce the most happiness/good, not just assuming you are producing the most happiness/good.