Racism Essay

The weeks we spent discussing race were very informative to me and I think I benefitted
from the discussions. One of the ideas that really struck me was the concept that most, if not all,
people have a subconscious bias that essentially makes them racist. Many people claim to look at
all races equally but they may not realize the implicit biases that their culture forces on them. The
same implicit biases that lead white police officers to shoot unarmed black children (Mooney).
Society writes off these police officers as racists and extremes, but what if they are just the
average white American but in a position of power?
We know there is bias and stereotype in this country. We see unintentional discrimination
everywhere. Walking the hallways of Blair one would be hard pressed to find a group of students
of varying race and socioeconomic status. We think were aware of stereotypes and we try our
best to avoid them. What we forget to acknowledge is our subconscious thought process,
something that is impossible to control and extremely difficult to change. We all make a split
second judgement on everyone we see. With so little time and no knowledge of a persons life,
there is little to go off of in making this judgement. Human nature causes us to judge people by
their physical appearance; their facial expression, posture, clothes, and race. Few people would
consider this an accurate judgement of character, but we cannot help it. We will always judge
someone by our first impression of them, and often times this idea of a person remains beneath
the surface throughout our experiences with them, even if proved wrong. This is why first
impressions are such a big deal. The problem is we dont control our criteria. In some cases, it is
created by our culture and socialization, and without realizing it, we hold negative stereotypes
about certain groups of people.
Subconsciously carrying these negative stereotypes is dangerous. The idea we get from
our first impression of a person can lead us to treat them differently than others, and we often
dont realize what were doing. Evidence of this unconscious discrimination can be seen in many
aspects of our society. In medicine, minorities are less likely to be complex surgeries or

transplants, and they are more likely to be given more disagreeable treatments, such as
amputations (Lyubansky). An experienced medical professional should not be prescribing
different treatments for patients of different races, but they dont realize what they're doing, its
completely subconscious.
Over the past decade, multiple psychological tests have been created to judge the
subconscious biases Americans carry. One of the most well known tests is the Implicit
Association Test created by Project Implicit. The test requires the subject to rapidly distinguish
African American and European American faces while also sorting words such as agony,
joy, happy, and anger between good and bad. The test measures the speed for each
categorization and bias is found if negative words are faster matched with black faces and
positive words are more quickly associated with white faces. Its data, which includes over two
million people, shows that whites in certain states show higher levels of implicit bias than those
in other states. The higher levels of implicit bias are centralized in the southeast United States
while the states with the lowest numbers are located in the northwest; the gradient spreading
diagonally across the country (Mooney). Most importantly, the data shows that white people in
every state are biased (Test your Implicit Bias with Science). However, the results include only
people who decided to go online and take a test that measures their bias, they do not represent the
nation as a whole. Nevertheless, an important idea to note is the type of person to take this test.
This may be someone who does not consider themselves biased or racist but wants to know if
they harbor some unconscious bias. The test shows that many of them do. Project Implicit keeps
track of the type of people taking the test and they tend to be younger and more liberal than the
average American (Mooney). In addition, older people who took the test tended to have higher
scores of implicit bias than younger subjects. This suggests that the sample represented in the
results is most likely less biased than the population as a whole. Regardless of the sample, the test
does reveal an important fact, racial bias exists in every part of the United States.

This bias stems from centuries of racial hierarchy in this country that has defined how
whites perceive people of color, and these subconscious perceptions are hard to change. We
develop these biases and stereotypes quickly and at a young age because, as humans, we learn
quickly due to our ability to make generalizations (Gjersoe). This becomes a problem when we
have little exposure to variety. So if the news and our society tells us that young black teenagers
are violent, thats what our subconscious will believe. Even if we think it might not be true. This
idea is accentuated by the fact that no matter what, we tend to associate with our own group,
whether it be our family, people of our age or race, even people wearing the same color shirt. This
mentality also causes us to consider everyone not in the group the same while the members of
our group are unique. This makes forming stereotypes very easy. One way to alter our
subconscious perceptions is by stepping out of our group. For example, interacting and relating
to young black teenagers and realizing that they are no different from themselves (Gjersoe). This
offers proof to our subconscious. Its sad that we need this proof, but it is one possible solution.
As it relates to recent incidents of police brutality, racism, it turns out, is not necessarily
perpetrated by racists but by people who feel threatened for other reasons and are not aware of
their racial bias (Lyubansky). These police officers may not all be racist, but their subconscious
bias controls their actions in these crucial moments. However, this is no excuse. Whites need to
be aware of their subconscious biases and work to change them. The first step being to actually
get to know people of a minority before making a judgement of their character, and most
importantly, never make a generalization about a group of people.