Implicit Bias
Implicit biases are attitudes or stereotypes that unconsciously affect our actions, decisions, and understanding.
- Implicit biases can be positive (a preference for something or someone) or negative (an aversion to or fear of something or someone).
- Implicit biases are different from known biases that people may choose to conceal for social or political reasons. In fact, implicit biases often conflict with a person’s explicit and/or declared beliefs.
- Implicit biases are formed over a lifetime as a result of exposure to direct and indirect messages. The media plays a large role in this formation process.
- Implicit biases are pervasive: everyone has them.
- Implicit biases are changeable, but research shows that this process takes time, intention, and training.
In this video, CNN journalist Van Jones gives a brief overview of implicit bias and references some of the ways it has manifested in recent events.
Video \(\PageIndex{11}\): Van's research on the concept of Implicit Bias and the role it is playing in race relations today. (Close-captioning and other YouTube settings will appear once the video starts.) (Fair Use; CNN on Rebuild the Dream via YouTube)
The Kirwan Institute is a leader in the field of implicit bias research. Watch their video, in which they explore some of the ways that individual impacts of implicit bias can compound to create large negative impacts for people of color.
Figure \(\PageIndex{12}\): "Implicit Bias, Lifelong Impact." (Close-captioning and other YouTube settings will appear once the video starts.) (Fair Use; The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity via YouTube)
Microaggressions
Implicit biases can impact our relationships and interactions with each other in many ways, some of which are described in the research findings listed above. One way that implicit biases can manifest is in the form of microaggressions: subtle verbal or nonverbal insults or denigrating messages communicated toward a marginalized person, often by someone who may be well-intentioned but unaware of the impact their words or actions have on the target. Examples of common microaggressions include statements like:
- Where are you really from?
- What are you?
- You don’t act like a normal Black person.
- You’re really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.
Microaggressions can be based on any aspect of a marginalized person’s identity (for example, sexuality, religion, or gender). Individual microaggressions may not be devastating to the person experiencing them; however, their cumulative effects over time can be large. The Tumblr blog Microaggressions, which aims to “mak[e] visible the ways in which social difference is produced and policed in everyday lives,” describes this as follows:
Often, [microaggressions] are never meant to hurt – acts done with little conscious awareness of their meanings and effects. Instead, their slow accumulation during a childhood and over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.
In his research, Dr. Derald Wing Sue found that BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) experience microaggressions every day – from the time they get up in the morning until they go to bed at night. In his workshops, Sue asks White people in the room these questions:
Do you know what it’s like to be a Black person in this society where you go into a subway and you sit down and people never sit next to you? Do you know what it’s like to pass a man or a woman, and they suddenly clutch their purses more tightly?
As he notes, many Whites have never thought about how this feels because they don’t live this reality. It is invisible to them. By asking this question, Sue’s goal is to make the invisible visible, to get White people (and all people) to “see” the microaggressions BIPOC experience on a daily basis, and to challenge them to understand how those microaggressions negatively impact the daily lived experiences of BIPOC.
To learn more about how young people experience microaggressions, watch this video, in which college students share their personal stories related to this issue.
Video \(\PageIndex{13}\): "Microaggressions in the Classroom." (Close-captioning and other YouTube settings will appear once the video starts.) (Fair Use; Focused.Arts.Media.Education. via YouTube)
What's the Impact on BIPOC?
Pervasive implicit bias and microaggressions do more than simply cause BIPOC to “feel bad.” Constant exposure to racism in both implicit and explicit forms can have cumulative and serious impacts on BIPOC. Researchers are only now beginning to identify and understand some of these impacts. For example, scientists have begun linking prolonged racism-related stress to racial health disparities such as differences in maternal mortality rates between Black and White women. Other racial health disparities, such as differing rates of asthma and diabetes across racial groups, may also be linked to the stress impact of racism. Stress hormones, while harmless in small doses, are toxic with prolonged exposure, and can cause permanent damage to the nervous, cardiovascular, immune, and endocrine systems.
An increasing amount of evidence suggests that being Black in a society filled with racial prejudice, discrimination, and inequality takes what has been called a “hidden toll” on the lives of African Americans (Blitstein, 2009). African Americans on the average have worse health than whites and die at younger ages. In fact, every year there are an additional 100,000 African American deaths than would be expected if they lived as long as whites do. Although many reasons probably explain all these disparities, scholars are increasingly concluding that the stress of being Black is a major factor (Geronimus et al., 2010).
African Americans are much more likely than whites to be poor, to live in high-crime neighborhoods, and to live in crowded conditions, among many other problems. They are also more likely to experience racial slights, refusals to be interviewed for jobs, and other forms of discrimination in their everyday lives. All these problems mean that African Americans from their earliest ages grow up with a great deal of stress, far more than what most whites experience. This stress in turn has certain neural and physiological effects, including hypertension (high blood pressure), that impair African Americans’ short-term and long-term health and that ultimately shorten their lives. These effects accumulate over time: Black and white hypertension rates are equal for people in their twenties, but the Black rate becomes much higher by the time people reach their forties and fifties. As a recent news article on evidence of this “hidden toll” summarized this process, “The long-term stress of living in a white-dominated society ‘weathers’ Blacks, making them age faster than their white counterparts” (Blitstein, 2009, p. 48).
Although there is less research on other people of color, many Latinos and Native Americans also experience the various sources of stress that African Americans experience. To the extent this is true, racial and ethnic inequality also takes a hidden toll on members of these two groups. They, too, experience racial slights, live under disadvantaged conditions, and face other problems that result in high levels of stress and shorten their life spans.
