Last time I started in on a long-promised discussion about Diversity and Inclusion by introducing the topic of Unearned Privilege.  I had wanted to talk about the subject of this essay, Unintentional Bias, but found that I needed to talk about privilege first.  I’m starting to realize that this concept of unearned privilege is more foundational than I thought, so I encourage you to read that essay if you haven’t already. 

There is also one more thought I need to share before launching into today’s topic.  I implore you to not weaponize these concepts.  Discussions about unearned privilege and unintentional bias are meant to get you looking inward—not to give you verbiage to slam others.  The good Jew, here, is actually going to quote a translation of Matthew (7:5): “First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”  My corollary to this thought is that getting that log out of your own eye is a lifelong journey.  You should never get around to a righteous focus on the speck in your friend’s eye.  This is about you and your thoughts and your actions and your own journey toward virtue.

We touched on bias before when I made a first pass in A Less Punitive Perspective on Bias and The Danger of the Defining Characteristic.  In those essays, I focused on “tribalism” as being the source of bias. The Cliff Notes version is that our global society has evolved a lot faster than our internal hardwiring associated with building trust.  We still instinctively distrust The Other—meaning anyone who looks different than you do or acts differently than you do.  And the easiest way to navigate in our increasingly diverse world is to apply stereotypes and judgements to entire classes of people.  Unfortunately, in our hyperconnected world, that instinct is used against us through advertising and by those who play on our unintentional biases for monetary gain or for power and influence.  Hence the need to bring this discussion out into the open and get each of us to own our piece.

Building on this base thought, I’ve come to realize that unintentional bias is strongly connected to the unarticulated assumptions we make about others, which in turn are borne of our unearned privilege.  And since owning our unearned privilege is so uncomfortable, guess what?  Owning our unintentional biases is just as hard.  A good example from my working days comes to mind.  I have no idea why I know this story.  It seems like something I should not have been privy to, but I was.  Early in my career, a position opened up that would have been ideal for a good friend of mine.  She was just a few years older than me and very ambitious.  She was smart and a hard worker and passionate about the product line she was developing.  The position in question was a step up in responsibility and involved having the lead accountability on bringing this new product out to customers.  It involved strategy development and implementation and a more direct connection to the sale of the product.  Accountability for the “profit and loss”, or P&L, of a business was the holy grail of anyone looking to move up.  This role, however, required a lot of travel.  What I learned is that this friend of mine was not even offered consideration of the role.  Why?  Not because she wasn’t qualified.  She was the most qualified of the potential candidates.  It was because she had two small children.  The men around the table assumed that she would not want to travel so much because of her parental responsibilities so they didn’t even ask her if she was interested.  They actually thought that they were being sensitive to her situation!  That is unintentional bias based on an assumption drawn from unearned privilege.

Corporations have tried really hard to root out overt discrimination and their initial attempts at sensitization have had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing unintentional bias.  In the 90s, my company started holding Leadership Education sessions.  This program was really well thought out and developed.  It brought some important insights and verbiage into the organization.  And it was intensive!  Groups of participants, who stayed together throughout their training, were taken off site for a week at a time.  There was prework to create anticipation and the subject matter pulled no punches, particularly around awareness of Diversity and Inclusion issues (at least as they were understood at that time).  The benefit and problem were that these sessions were held in a bubble.  Participants had to truly focus on the matter at hand and leave their “day job” to their teams back home.  The focus was the good thing.  The bad thing was that they went back to their day jobs after this intense week away, thinking their awareness was all raised (we didn’t have “woke” back then) and they truly believed they were no longer the problem.  They then went back to their regular behaviors without realizing that they were bringing unintentional bias into every decision.  They were sensitized to the plight of the scuba diver, to use my analogy from before, and they may have even understood their privilege as fish.  But they still didn’t understand what water was.  They were either trying to encourage the scuba divers to just throw off that scuba gear and breathe the water or shunting them to the shallow end citing sensitivity to their plight.  Neither worked well to give people of difference, any difference, an equal shot at opportunity.

Changing bias, you see, is an active and purposeful process.  It follows Newton’s Law of Motion:  a body in motion will stay in motion unless you exert a force to stop it.  Similarly, unintentional bias will continue unless you exert directed effort to stop it.  Remember that, as with unearned privilege, unintentional bias in and of itself is not a bad thing.  What matters is your awareness of it and what you do with it once you are aware.  Our unintentional biases are often born of our circumstance.  For example, I was raised in the 1960s in the deep South.  I harbor unintentional racial bias.  I know I do.  I hate it.  I’ve been working to root it out of me for decades.  I like to think that I’ve been largely successful.  My goal is not to never have a biased thought.  It is to quickly recognize when a biased thought emerges and to immediately challenge it, think about both the source and trigger of the thought, and try to get out ahead of it next time.  It’s an active and purposeful process.  And while I use the example of racial bias, in this case with respect to African Americans, I am by no means limited to that bias.  Nor is it my most vexing bias.  I am catching myself all the time in snap judgements that reflect unintentional biases that I never recognized before.  That’s when my face flushes with shame and I begin the internal flagellation to try and beat it out myself.

It is exhausting when you think about it and that exhaustion leads us to fall back into old comfortable patterns from before we realized we were carrying a bias.  That leads to resentment of the work it takes to root the bias out and often lashing out at those who have been on the receiving end of that bias.  Often, it also leads to projection—applying your own motivations to someone else’s behaviors.  That’s a different topic altogether.   While I begged you to not weaponize someone else’s bias, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold someone else accountable for a bias they may not realize they are expressing.  It’s all in the “how” of making someone else accountable and that begins with your own humility.  Unintentional bias makes you human.  Everyone has it and always will.  Your job is to work on yourself, first and foremost.  Question those assumptions you are making about people different from you.  Learn about the realities of other’s lives.  Don’t assume.  Give them grace; share your privilege.  They will do the same for you.  We’ll be better off for it.