Working Harder and Smarter to Succeed

I had an interesting conversation with my daughter about what it means to be a black female in a country still struggling with bias against people of color and women.  I’m sad that my generation couldn’t do more to eliminate all the bias women and people of color still have to overcome.  We all have a part to play in leveling the field, but until we confront and eliminate bias, women and people of color will have to continue to work harder and smarter to succeed.On C-Span Washington Journal Saturday morning, the topic was on  how African Americans continue to lag behind all other demographic groups in just about every metric of success.  People called in with a variety of explanations and solutions.  One man attributed the disparity to a natural lack of ability, not slavery or discrimination.  Others blamed discrimination and racism–some of which is imbedded in public policy.  But most adopted the bootstrap ideology that African Americans just need to buckle down, ignore bias, racism, and discrimination, and just work harder.  Some African Americans called in to say that the problem was that African Americans don’t support each other as much as they could and should.

In my thinking, the solution lies in a combination of approaches.  First, as voting Americans we need to ensure that our lawmakers at the local and national level enact legislation that does not unjustly or inadvertently harm African Americans and the poor.  A glaring example has been the war on drugs wherein cheap crack cocaine carried much stiffer prison sentences than the rich man’s cocaine.   The result was a rise in more African Americans going to prison and for longer periods of time.  And now that we have privatized many prisons, it has become profitable for companies if judges send and keep people in prison.

Another example of public policy that injured African Americans was the practice of housing covenants and redlining that limited African Americans’ ability to accumulate wealth through housing equity and also led to poorly funded local schools where their children attend.  Banks continue to be complicit with unfair lending practices that more closely scrutinize home and business loans to African Americans.

Science has no evidence that any single race or ethnicity or gender is inherently smarter or more energetic than another.  However, societies, including ours, are stuck in antiquated opportunity structures that differentiate  according to discredited notions of intelligence based on race and gender. This holdover from the eugenics movement  is difficult to expel from our collective mindset.  While we might outwardly acknowledge that no differences exist, the unconscientious or implicit bias we all have slips out from time to time.  For example, last week at my Sorority’s  African American Speech Exposition, where children from local schools highlight the accomplishments of an African American historical figure, I heard comments like this: “Despite being an African American,  XXX was very intelligent.”  Another student said something similar, “Even though XXX was African American, she worked hard.”  Unconscientious bias shows up in whose ideas we value in meetings, who we deem qualified for a particular position, and whose background, experience, and credentials are good enough to be president of the United States.  It shows up in whose behaviors we excuse or punish both in school and in the criminal justice system.

But some of the bias is overt.  When my son was going to move to China to teach English after graduating from college, the placement company discovered that he was African American and explained to him that he would be sent to a  more rural city and that he would be paid less than the white teachers because African Americans were deemed less qualified to teach English in China.  My son declined to go and instead became a Peace Corp volunteer.

Confronting overt and unconscientious bias takes courage.  But we have to gently and tactfully call it out when we see it.  When we ignore it, we perpetuate it.  Silence is consent.  We all have hidden biases, even against people who look just like us.  It is not unusual for African Americans to think of African Americans in general as less intelligent or credible.  I recall my grandfather once saying something was true because a white man said it. We can and should confront our own biases and there is a way to begin to do it.

Harvard created an online implicit bias assessment that anyone can take to expose their personal biases relative to particular groups of people https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.  I’ve taken most of them and have made my staff take some.  I don’t ask anyone to share their results as they might be embarrassed or overly proud.  But it is a good tool for self-examination, awareness, reflection and can be the first step toward improvement.

Next week I’ll have even more to say on this topic.