As I was listening to the podcast, I couldn’t help but think of my FYS from last year: Storytelling and Identity. The entire purpose of the class was to break down our assumptions around people in juvenile incarceration, so once a week we went to Bon Air Correctional Facility to talk to inmates. These visits weren’t meant to be serious or accusatory but were designed to show our similarities even across our different incomes, education levels, and life stories. Although they were incarcerated and I was not, there were many similarities between me and many of the guys that I spoke with. I had assumed that they would all be dangerous, aggressive, and vulgar when in reality, they were funny and interesting people. Because I had never interacted with someone who was in prison, I formed all of my ideas of a prisoner off of murder-mystery TV shows like Criminal Minds and Bones. Without exposure to this population, I saw them all as “abnormal” and automatically evil. In reality, most of them were detained on drug charges, larceny, or other non-violent crimes. Moreover, all of the inmates that I spoke to said that they committed their crimes out of need, not desire like the media prefers to portray.

Perhaps even more shocking was the fact out of the 20 plus inmates that I interacted with, not one of them was white or from an affluent area. The vast majority were black and the rest were Hispanic, with most of them coming from New Port News or Portsmith, which are both low-income areas of Virginia. This shows the racist nature of the justice system that Dr. Bezio discussed and how the canons that were put into place in the eighties are still very present. Most of the inmates had at least one parent that was currently incarcerated, and many had been put in foster care or abandoned either because both parents were in jail or the single parent could not afford to keep their child. In over-policing and over-charging POC and low-income people, it creates an inescapable cycle of poverty that compounds through generations and until this problem is addressed it will not go away.

Although I have taken an Implicit Bias Test in the past and studied why they work in other classes, I always try to push back against the answers that they give me. This time, I took the Arab Muslims vs Other people test and came out with a slight preference to Other people. When I first read that, I was actually annoyed, I thought it had to be some sort of error because I am not racist or islamiphobic. But after some consideration, I realized that the results do not make me either, it just means that I have been conditioned to associated Arab names with worse outcomes than other names. Ususally, when I hear these names they are connected to a recent terrorist attack, a fictional villan, or a dictator of some far away country. Of course I know that someone named Mohammed is no more likely to be a terrorist than someone named Mike, but the media only tells one, unflatering side of the story describing the Mohammeds of the world. I think that these bias tests should become more common to show people the biases they have that they would rather ignore so that they can fix the causes of those biases. I know that for me, from now on I will try to recognize my automatic thoughts towards others and I think others would do the same.

As Dr. Bezio mentioned in her podcast, nobody wants to be seen as biased because in our society, being biased is synonymous with being bigoted in one way or another. This was the conception that I previously had of biases, that they were broadly negative connotations that were held by a few in power and something to shy away from. However, over the past few years and as I have done more research on BLM and other social justice movements, I grew to realize how many biases I held and how they were created and reinforced by those around me. In my opinion, these can be just as harmful as true, full-blown racism and are far more common. When people are not aware of a problem they have, or cannot see the problem exists at all, there is no way to fix it and the problem gets worse.

I have spent most of my life in Massachusetts, an incredibly liberal and supposedly un-racist state that prides itself on its actions against slavery in the Civil War. In our history classes, we learn about racism as if it is something exclusive to the South and not a universal fact of life in America. But Massachusetts is also one of the most segregated and homogenous parts of the country, with many schools in Boston and throughout the suburbs consisting of 90% or more one ethnic group. My own high school, which was about an hour outside the city, was 97% white, and most of the other schools in my area shared similar demographics. This is immensely problematic because without exposure to different cultures, races, and ideologies, students have to rely on media depictions (which will always be biased) or simply regurgitate their parents’ views on the world (which will most likely also be biased). The largest issue with this homogeny is that many people do not see a problem with it and preach about equality while they hold deeply racist views. These views get perpetrated by microaggressions and seemingly innocent actions or phrases that get glossed over in daily conversations but become more problematic as they compound.  When people hold racist views and cannot comprehend that they are racists, there is no hope for them to change and we will never be able to create a more equitable society.

As someone who was raised Catholic and is now agnostic, I found the arguments made in the podcast and the reading incredibly interesting. Although I know that this is not true for all Catholics, I was pushed into Catholicism by someone who used their religion as a get-out-of-jail-free card for all of their morally questionable actions. We usually went to church twice a week, all of us were baptized, and we kept very far away from the mortal sins so we would be allowed into heaven no matter what else we did. This is, obviously, an intense normative framework that (in my incredibly biased opinion) eliminates any concept of free-will or self-determination of morals and virtues. Rather than logically determining if something is good or bad for myself, (though consequentialism, doenticism, or Aretaicism), the priests told me what would get me into heaven and I was expected to follow their directives without question. This is just my experience and it does not necessarily characterize the Catholic church as a whole, but in my view, the overbearing normative framework surrounding many religious institutions can lead to the inability to think for ones’ self and force someone to become a follower in the truest sense. (Sorry for any religious folks out there this is not meant to offend and is just my opinion! Please debate and discuss at will!)

For the reasons above, I personally lean towards a more relative framework that would teach citizens to evaluate morality for themselves. Although it might be idealistic, I believe that allowing people to wrestle with, contemplate, and understand why something is good or bad will make society more empathetic and intelligent as a whole. I don’t think that true relativism could work in any society because it would lead to literal anarchy, but I believe that blind followership is incredibly problematic as well. Those who have studied psychology may remember Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development, in which the highest tier of development is following your personal morals based on your own values, save for a few widely accepted rights and wrongs. I agree with Kohlberg’s assessment, but know that it would be utopian to assume that this could be applicable to society generally speaking. Therefore, I believe that there should be a moderately relative framework for society with normative concepts that emphasize empathy and compassion.