The topic of the renaming of Mitchell-Freeman Hall has come up in almost all of my classes, and after listening to my peers, reading the statements from the University, and hearing what my professors have to say, I have one outstanding question: “Why are we really keeping the name ‘Freeman’ on the building?’

The answer? Probably money, but we wouldn’t know because the University of Richmond isn’t being transparent with us. President Crutcher’s explanation for Freeman’s name to remain on the building makes no sense; there is a huge difference between remembering historical figures and memorializing them. By naming a building after a racist segregationalist (who wasn’t shy about labeling himself as such) the University is memorializing him, honoring him. But the whole concept of this is shocking—it may be an overused example, but imagine if Germany had statues and buildings “remembering” Adolf Hitler? People would lose it. He was a horrible person who committed genocide… we all know who he was, it’s ingrained in our history, but there’s absolutely no good reason to celebrate or memorialize him because his actions, despite being in the past, were so atrocious it would be unfathomable to create anything that would even remotely honor him—so why is Richmond honoring and memorializing Freeman by keeping his name on the building despite his revolting actions and beliefs?

Like I said, at the end of the day the only explanation that makes sense to me would be that the University is still benefiting financially from the Freeman family and there are contractual issues with changing the building name, but if that is the truth, it just goes to show how this school prioritizes money over the wellbeing of its students. The lack of transparency with the school is concerning and really becomes apparent when issues like this arise; the student body, especially black students, deserves an honest explanation and an actual plan on how the University is planning to combat acts of racism and its problematic history.

“Nobody wants to be accused of having a bias.”

The word “bias” has become, as Dr. Bezio pointed out in her podcast, a rather nasty word that people tend to avoid association with. I find this interesting because, let’s be honest, we all have biases. Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, we all have some sort of bias that influences our everyday choices. Like Dr. Bezio says in her podcast, we can’t really help it; our brains are designed to seek out patterns. We still have these ingrained survival mechanisms in our minds. We inherently try and relate things to other things, like the cloud example: they’re just clouds with no specific shape or pattern, yet we watch them to see if they take form as animals we can identify.

It’s this sort of instinctual pattern-making our minds do that really intrigues me. Because, if we didn’t have this natural instinct, this implicit bias, where would we be? Could we not make any connections, because the idea of making any connections implies being biased? Take the cloud example: one person says a cloud looks like a pen, another person says the same cloud actually looks like a sword. In a world without implicit bias, do both agree on one or the other, or do they avoid “matching” the cloud to a different object altogether?

So, in a way, bias is a good thing—in certain cases. Dr. Bezio goes in-depth in her podcast about how bias tends to fuel the “-isms”: racism, sexism, ableism, and so on. So how do we separate “good” from “bad” bias? Or is there any possibility of separation at all? Patterns and culture are a crucial part of growing up and developing traditions, personality traits, and decision-making skills, so how do we ensure we grow up with those characteristics and simultaneously ban implicit bias?  I think it’s an incredibly fine line to walk, and the answer may never be found.

I decided to take the Implicit Bias Test that measured my implicit bias for exercise. The end result was that I associated exercise with “good,” which is honestly what I figured. However, what surprised me was the word association part that asked me to sort particular words by clicking “i” and “e” on my keyboard. I was supposed to hit “i” if a word reminded me of having to do with exercise and the words “good” and “bad”, and “e” if it didn’t. If I got it wrong, I got a big old red “x” for incorrect. I found myself often hitting “e” when the word “sitting” came up, associating it with bad. This was incorrect, of course, because sitting doesn’t have anything to do with being inherently bad or anything necessarily to do with exercise. It made me realize that I’ve been taught that being still, sitting, and not doing something constantly was automatically “bad” because I was being lazy. I’ve been raised to believe that not doing something is doing something bad, which of course isn’t true and there are plenty of benefits to things like meditation and personal reflection.

Overall, I think the exercise was really interesting. To be honest, I had no idea how the test was going to gauge my bias towards exercise, but after it gave me my results and talked about how it timed me, it all made a lot more sense.

During the Summer of 2020, I decided to take “Introduction to Philosophical Problems & Arguments” with Professor Brannon McDaniel, and we ended up going over very similar topics regarding ethics and cultural relativism. However, I honestly understood it a lot better by the way it was organized in this podcast. Separating and defining normativism and relativism helped me better to understand the intersection of those two ideologies and the three defining measures of morality.

I have to wonder though: how do normativists believe we are getting closer and closer to the truth every day if each of their truths is different? Furthermore, if one truth is met that was believed by a certain culture or religion, does that truth automatically morally govern our world? For example, let’s say one day there was suddenly undeniable proof that the Catholic God existed and his word was the ultimate word, nothing else to it. Does that mean we drop our current frameworks and situate ourselves exclusively around his word? So many wars are fought over religion, who is right or which deity is supreme, so I have to wonder that if a supreme deity ever emerged, how would normativists and people in general respond?

If a supreme deity emerges and says that “all murder is wrong and punishable by death” does that mean we scrap our current American judicial system? Because right now, as explained in the podcast, we have several different layers of punishment based on the intention, severity, and planning of the crime. If the existence of a supreme deity was real and their only command on the subject was “eye for an eye” or, in this instance, “death for your death,” does that apply to everyone? Because that would ultimately mean that a serial killer that tracked down and hunted twenty people intentionally would receive the same punishment as a person cutting down a tree that accidentally falls and kills a person walking by. Very different motives behind each one, clearly, so would the supreme deity itself have a system of measuring moral responsibility?