CCS 115 Implicit And Unconscious Bias Discussion Paper After completing the reading answer the following questions in a 4 page reflection paper: NO PLAGIAR

CCS 115 Implicit And Unconscious Bias Discussion Paper After completing the reading answer the following questions in a 4 page reflection paper: NO PLAGIARISM!!!

Note: You must support the information presented in your paper with citations.

1. How do implicit/unconscious biases impact individuals in everyday life (employment, housing, education, health care, etc.). Cover at least two areas (being as specific as possible).

2. What is the connection between implicit bias and microaggressions and how do they lead to the mistreatment and/or discrimination against non-dominant groups. Make sure that you define both concepts for the reader.

3. How do implicit/unconscious biases lead to inequity?

4. What will you commit to doing with the information you have learned about implicit/unconscious bias?

You are required to use at least three sources for your paper. You must cite using APA (or MLA). Failure to support information in your paper with citations will result in loss of points.

The paper should be double-spaced (single-space between paragraphs).
You must use at least three sources for your paper.
You are required to cite within your paper and include a reference page. Implicit Bias and Structural Inequity
Kathleen Osta, A.M., Regional Director, Midwest Region, National Equity Project
Hugh Vasquez, MSW, Senior Associate, National Equity Project
“Implicit biases come from culture. I think of them as the thumbprint of the culture on our
minds. Human beings have the ability to learn to associate two things together very
quickly—that is innate. What we teach ourselves, what we choose to associate is up to us.”
Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji
Increased interest in the topic of implicit bias provides an opportunity to open and deepen
important conversations in our organizations and communities about equity, belonging, and
ultimately justice. Most work on implicit bias focuses on increasing awareness of individuals in
service of changing how they view and treat others. However, in order to lead to meaningful
change, an exploration of implicit bias must be situated as part of a much larger conversation
about how current inequities in our institutions came to be, how they are held in place, and
what our role as leaders is in perpetuating inequities despite our good intentions. Our success
in creating organizations and communities in which everyone has access to the opportunities
they need to thrive depends on our ability to confront the history and impacts of structural
racism, learn how implicit bias operates, and take action to interrupt inequities at the
interpersonal, institutional and structural level.
Implicit bias (also referred to as unconscious bias) is the process of associating stereotypes or
attitudes towards categories of people without conscious awareness – which can result in
actions and decisions that are at odds with one’s intentions or explicit values. This can lead us
to make biased and unfair decisions regarding who we hire for a job or select for a promotion,
which classes we place students into and who we send out of the classroom for behavior
infractions, and which treatment options we make available to patients.
Some have argued that the surge in popularity of the implicit bias field is because it keeps
white people safe and does not require them to be accountable for creating and perpetuating
systemic oppression and structural inequalities. We understand this caution. Yet, we believe
that recent research findings in the field of neuroscience are ultimately cause for optimism and
that the uptick in interest in implicit bias “training” in the fields of education, public health,
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social services, law enforcement, government and private sector companies is a hopeful sign.
The field of neuroscience has shown us that our brains continue to develop and grow well into
adulthood. This means that while we cannot avoid mentally absorbing some of the negative
stereotypes about groups of people that permeate our culture, the associations and implicit
biases that we internalize are malleable. We can, quite literally, change the physiology of our
brain, like adding wiring to a house or building a new road in a city. We have the ability to
produce new associations which in turn can produce new, more inclusive and equitable, ways
of behaving and reacting.
In order to ensure that learning about implicit bias leads to significant and meaningful change
toward creating more equitable and inclusive communities and organizations, we offer these
important cautions and considerations.
Consideration #1:
Situate learning about implicit bias in a historical and
socioeconomic political context.
We are not born with negative biases toward any particular group of people. The biases we
have internalized, both consciously and unconsciously, have been “primed” through our
experiences – images and messages we receive every day about who is “normal” or
“desirable” and “belongs” and who is “different” or “undesirable” and “not one of us.” These
messages are neither neutral nor random. In the United States, “whiteness” is the dominant
and privileged identity; socially constructed to justify conquest and slavery and reified in laws
and policies, both historic and current, that ensure that white people benefit disproportionately
from the benefits of society and are protected from more of its harms. White supremacy is
baked into our country’s DNA. As such, what is deemed good and acceptable is normed to
white people and we have all, white people and people of color, internalized an “anti-black
and brown” bias. The effects of these biases results in both individual and institutional acts
and are pervasive across sectors including education, health, employment, and housing. The
negative associations and assumptions we make about people of color have been wired into
our unconscious mind over hundreds of years and show up in all of our institutions today.
Consideration #2: Highlight and interrogate the ways that current policies and
practices create and reproduce inequitable outcomes that serve to reinforce
our implicit biases and the ways in which our implicit biases lead us to reify (and
justify) existing inequities.
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Access to opportunity has never been equitable or fair in the United States. As john powell
points out, since our inception as a nation “We the People” only included some people.
Housing discrimination, racial segregation, voter suppression, and disinvestment in
neighborhoods where people of color live, are a result of explicit policies which produce
outcomes that reinforce our biases – whether we are conscious of it or not. It isn’t just the
media that reinforces our negative racial biases (which it does), it is also the way we have
historically and currently denied people of color access to opportunities in and across our
communities that reinforces negative associations (crime, unemployment, crumbling
infrastructure). In other words, we design policies and practices that disproportionately benefit
white people and exclude and harm people of color and then use the negative outcomes the
policies produce as evidence of racial superiority and inferiority.
For example, our inequitable structural arrangements mean that children of color are much
more likely to grow up in poverty and attend underfunded, under-resourced schools with other
students of color living in poverty. When these students, who have very likely had less
experienced teachers, larger class sizes, and fewer extracurricular and enrichment activities
score below state standards, the discourse that accompanies this fact most often focuses on
what “extra” supports are needed for these students as if the problem is somehow located in
the student a
​ nd not in the material conditions of their educational experiences. The structural
arrangement produces the outcomes (low achievement for student of color), but the outcomes
produce and reinforce associations in our minds between students of color and lower academic
performance.
Similarly, we now live in neighborhoods that are more racially segregated than they were in the
1960s. This means that many white children grow up with very little interaction with people of
color. It may also mean that the primary way white people learn about people of color are
through media depictions which often serve to perpetuate harmful negative stereotypes. To
complicate things further, in their own segregated communities, they may only see people of
color working in lower paying service positions such as gardeners, house cleaners, dishwashers
in restaurants, security guards in their schools, lunchroom supervisors, or bus drivers. What are
they learning? What messages are being reinforced unconsciously every day by simply walking
around in their communities? What children see and experience every day attaches to
messages about “those people” that are fed to their brains without their conscious awareness.
In this way, white children (and people) living in racially segregated neighborhoods are primed
to make associations between people of color and violence, crime and lower status positions.
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This plays out within racially diverse schools as well. For example, in schools we often see the
majority of African American and Latino kids placed in the lower track classes while “honors”
and “gifted” classes are most often filled with white students. As a result, our mind consciously
and unconsciously starts to associate African American and Latino kids with being less
intelligent, less capable. (Note again that student placement patterns are the result of both the
structural arrangements and policies governing schooling and the discretion of individual
teachers and counselors.) Now picture a new student of color walking into the school. Whether
we are conscious of it or not, we may assume that student should not be placed in the honors
track. Even if we consciously and intellectually understand that intelligence is malleable and
evenly distributed across the human race, what our mind sees day-to-day in our communities
and schools are conditions that create associations that reinforce negative assumptions about
the academic ability of students of color. When, based on this implicit assumption, we place
the new student of color into a lower and less rigorous track, we reproduce the inequity and
the vicious cycle of structural racism and implicit bias continues.
Another example relevant for educators is the issue of student discipline. We are barraged with
images of African American and Latino men and boys’ mug shots in the media. There have
been numerous studies (IAT and others) that show that we associate black and brown boys with
aggression and violence; we have been primed to do so since before the United States was a
country. As early as preschool, we are viewing the same behaviors very differently for different
groups of children, attributing aggression to boys of color. One preschool study showed that
when teachers were told there may be challenging behavior in their preschool classroom, they
watched black boys significantly more than other children even though all the children were
behaving well. Black preschoolers are more likely to receive suspensions than white
preschoolers​. Throughout their educational experience, African American and Latino students
are more likely to be disciplined harshly and sent out of class. We walk by the school office and
we see African American students sitting there – in trouble. Consciously or not, our mind begins
to make associations between African American and Latino students and misbehavior in school.
When we interact with these students, we carry those associations and assumptions with us. We
don’t consciously THINK we are doing this, but we are. We perceive the same behavior from a
student of color in the classroom as threatening and disruptive and are more likely to send that
student out to a system of harsher punishment.
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Consideration #3: Understand that structural racism, othering, and exclusion
have become normalized and result in policies and practices that ensure access
to opportunity for some and exclude others.
Part of what allows these harmful associations and assumptions about people of color to
endure is the fact that we have come to accept the structural and institutional inequities we
have created as normal. We see neighborhoods with vastly different resources and most days
we carry on with our lives accepting that this is just “how it is.” We have come to accept the
current inequitable conditions – it’s the water we swim in. But the current conditions are NOT
NATURAL and are not normal. We created them through laws and policies that have created
advantage for some particularly white people and disadvantage for others particularly people
of color. By default, we accept these structural inequities as normal and we mostly try to help
kids and families of color survive, and maybe do a little bit better, while living under
inequitable conditions in a system that was not designed for their success. As educators, social
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workers, nurses, doctors, we are doing our best to meet the needs of the populations we serve.
This is our job and the work that we do matters. However, it is critical to periodically step back
and problematize the current structural conditions that have produced the inequitable
outcomes and therefore the harmful associations and biases. Our work as advocates and
providers is to make these inequitable conditions visible and consider the ways in which our
programs and services may be designed without sufficient consideration of how different
populations are “situated” to opportunity in our communities and how implicit bias may be
playing out in our own policies and practices.
Consideration #4: Don’t confuse the fact that “we all have implicit biases” with
immunity from responsibility as the benefactors of the current inequitable
structural arrangements.
It can come as a relief to white people to find out that people of color have also internalized
negative racial biases. It shouldn’t. While it is true that none of us are immune to the negative
narratives and images we receive via the media, our families, in our communities, in literature,
etc., the fact that we have all internalized these biases makes us no less responsible for their
negative effects. Awareness of how implicit bias operates requires us to become even more
vigilant and comes with an even greater level of responsibility to interrupt biases when we see
them, in ourselves and others, and to dismantle the structures that created and perpetuate
systems of othering. Understanding how implicit bias operates within each of us does not let us
off the hook, rather it illuminates the ways that we may be unknowingly contributing to
inequities at the interpersonal, institutional, or structural level and pushes us to think critically
and creatively about how to create inclusive communities in which everyone belongs and has
what they need to thrive.
Consideration #5: We are all connected – our fates our linked. Working for
social justice is not about “helping those kids” or “those communities”, but
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about dismantling structures that exclude, increasing access to opportunity and
building healthy, inclusive communities in which we all belong and can thrive.
Now let’s connect all of this to the concepts of “belonging” and “othering.” Belonging is more
than just “feeling included.” john powell makes the case that “in a legitimate democracy,
belonging means that your well-being is considered and your ability to design and give
meaning to its structures and institutions is realized.” Our need to connect is as fundamental
as our need for food and water. Across many studies of mammals, from the smallest rodents
all the way to us humans, the data suggests that we are profoundly shaped by our social
environment and that we suffer greatly when our social bonds are threatened or severed. This
is why our brains evolved to experience threats to our social connections in much the same way
they experience physical pain. By activating the same neural circuitry that causes us to feel
physical pain, our experience of social pain helps ensure the survival of our children and
ensures that staying socially connected will be a lifelong need, like food and warmth. Deep
down we know that belonging is essential to survival and we resist any attempts to be divided
from each other. However, although we are hard wired for belonging, we have become soft
wired for othering.
Othering is defined as “a set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality
and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group
identities.” Othering is artificial; we have created it. For example, racial discrimination in our
laws, real estate practices, and banking industry meant that people of color have not had
access to home ownership, the primary driver of wealth accumulation in the United States. This
form of othering has become institutionalized and its harmful effects can be seen in every
major city today.
Yet, it is NOT in our nature to “other.” One can see evidence of this during natural disasters.
When a devastating earthquake hit the San Francisco area in 1989, the impulse to help other
human beings superseded any biases about one another’s differences as people helped each
other out of the rubble. When the World Trade Center towers fell, people helped each other
without regard to race as they ran from the ashes. These are the times when we truly
experience our linked fates and our hard wiring kicks into action, human being to human being.
With this in mind, the health and well-being of our communities can be measured by the extent
to which all of its members experience a sense of belonging and have access to and benefit
from the opportunities available. Numerous studies from across the globe have shown that
when we have inequality, it is not just the marginalized who suffer, but rather exclusion hurts us
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all. Extreme inequality reduces quality of life, life expectancy, and social cohesion which in turn
lead to greater isolation and increased rates of poverty and racial tension. As we delve into an
exploration of implicit bias, we are called to look at the extent to which our policies, practices,
and ways of communicating create a sense of belonging for every member of our communities
and to identify those policies, practices, and narratives that create or perpetuate othering in
any form.
Consideration #6: Any effort to interrupt implicit bias and its impacts must be
accompanied by efforts to dismantle structures that exclude and build
structures that provide access to opportunity or create new opportunities.
As we have seen, inequitable structural arrangements produce and reinforce implicit biases.
Therefore, any effort to mitigate implicit biases and interrupt their harmful effects must include
strategies focused on changing s​ tructures​. Yes, we need to increase our self-awareness and
interrogate how biases may be playing out and shaping our interactions and decision making.
We need to actively work to change the narrative about people and communities, to actively
do stereotype replacement, and intentionally build more relationships and connections across
differences to build new neural pathways. However, in order for any of this to lead to
meaningful change toward equity and justice, we must also dismantle the policies and
practices in our organizations and communities that create and perpetuate inequities in the first
place.
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About the National Equity Project
The ​National Equity Project ​(​www.nationalequityproject.org​) is a U.S. based leadership and organizational
development non-profit committed to increasing the capacity of people to achieve thriving, self-determining,
educated, and just communities. Our mission is to transform the experiences, outcomes, and life options for
children and families who have been historically underserved by our institutions and systems.
About the Authors
Kathleen Osta, MSW, Regional Director, Midwest Region, National Equity Project
As Regional Director, Kathleen supports a team of staff to provide coaching and strategic advising to leaders
in school districts, non-profits, foundations, and national networks who are committed to designing equitable
policies and practices and leading equity-focused system change effort…
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