Hard Truths

My first year in college when classes ended each day, most of us would drift back to the dorm. I recall we tended to cluster in the hallway, recapping the buzz of the day before heading out to what other experiences the college held for us. There was one guy though who would come down the corridor with the thousand-yard stare. He didn't acknowledge us. We could have been invisible.

Every day, he passed us, went into his room, and closed the door. After a few minutes, we hear his stereo go on. Every day we heard, "The World Is a Ghetto" by War.

This was Bates College. Established in 1864 by New England Abolitionists, it was chartered to be racially integrated, gender integrated, and egalitarian. There were no fraternities, sororities, or any other exclusive clubs. All aspects of the college were to be open to all.

We were very self-congratulatory. The home of our founding president, Oren Cheney, had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Later, Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth visited and stayed as guests in his home. Black alumni of the college include Benjamin Mays, founder of Morehouse College; Peter Gomes, Harvard Chaplain; and Bryant Gumble, television journalist, actor, and writer.

At the same time, my classmate and I had no black professors. There were no black administrators. In four years, I had only one professor who wasn't a white male. Not incidentally in four years, she was the only professor I saw disrespected by a student. During a class discussion on Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia, one of my classmates spoke contemptuously about having to waste his time on a "second rate" writer in the syllabus. There was no black history. I was given nothing to read by Frederick Douglas or Sojourner Truth, much less Malcolm X. Literature? Maybe Langston Hughes.

I still can't imagine the isolation my neighbor experienced.

For all its good intentions, the college was blind to its implicit biases and not a few explicit ones, and in our most formative years, steeped all of us students in them. And this was 110 years after its high-minded founding.

Woke

Woke was appropriated by white people when it was an awareness in the black community that black people needed to be awake to people like me who, for all our good intentions, would sting with macro- and micro-aggressions from the implicit biases we have been steeping in all our lives. We are the gauntlet of well-meaning toxicity my neighbor navigated just to get back to his room.

This isn't an opinion piece. This is the cognitive science of our unconscious reflexes meeting mathematics in the form of statistics which includes differential and integral calculus and linear algebra.

What makes the work of cognitive biases so hard is one of the most powerful biases is the bias to think we're better than we are. Even Jesus ran into this all the time. People would come up to him and tell him the great things they had done, and he'd say, the Aramaic equivalent of "That's great! Now this is how you can do better." We're told a lot of people walked away at that point, and he lost the only election he was in to a thief and an insurrectionist.

What makes this not an opinion is that our bodies know. When we're biased toward someone, our responses warm; our eyes soften. When we're biased against someone, our responses cool; our eyes harden. There are a host of neuromuscular and biochemical responses that are measurable. My classmate ran our gauntlet with his thousand-yard stare because, maybe against our wanting to be better people, our bodies responded to him as not one of us and he saw it and felt it.

Because these biases are unconscious; and therefore beyond our ability to know and remediate, researchers have spent decades working to create reliable measures of unconscious bias that makes those biases visible to those of us who hold them, so that we have a shot at remediating them.

I was first exposed to the data on implicit bias in the 1980s' when I had my ass handed to me by a black professor at CalState LA for my glib dismissal of that truth.

Explore taking the Implicit Association Test It's gone through almost forty years of testing, refinement, challenge, and debate. Review the test and methodology.

Most people, not all, find it challenges our identity. This can result in what T.S. Eliot called,

"the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of things ill done and done to others' harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue."

If you don't trust the data, there's a more direct route. You and I can meet at 2am in Manhattan outside the Fulton Street station near City Hall. We can take the A train to Inwood. It's not the whole line. Just the part that runs the length of Manhattan. During our ride we can experience and discuss the full range of our explicit and implicit biases that show up along the way. The first explicit bias we may confront is that we're not safe. This is because we have implicit biases that make us feel safer in familiar places surrounded by familiar people, when, in fact, we're more likely to be harmed or murdered by our most familiar people in our most familiar places.

"the rending pain of re-enactment" is harsh. It hits us with grief, which starts its expression as denial and anger, and because we have no way of remediating what we can't examine consciously, that denial and anger goes to rage pretty fast.

Here are people who know more than I do about the impact of our implicit biases:

The past isn't past

Beverly Tatum "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria."

The Brookings Institution "Black Wealth Is Increasing, but So Is the Racial Wealth Gap"

McKinsey & Company

"At the current pace of change, it could take decades to improve outcomes for Black Americans and more than three centuries to get to racial parity. How can different types of communities move closer to delivering a better quality of life for all residents?"

Podcasts to help you stay awake

These are black spaces. If you visit and that's not you, just be quiet, listen, and learn.

Higher Learning

Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsey

"Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay dissect the biggest topics in Black entertainment, politics and sports. Twice a week, they will wade into the most important and timely conversations, often inviting guests to offer their unique perspectives while shedding light on the many facets of the culture."

The Grio Black Podcast Network

Michael Harriot

"How in the world did we get here? Wypipologist Michael Harriot breaks it all down in TheGrio Daily. Imagine your college professor teaching in a barbershop; that's Michael Harriot, wicked humor and smart as hell. The journalist, poet, author, TV writer, and Black Twitter King does not hold back when he explains the systems and issues that affect Black people daily. From white supremacy, police brutality, and gun violence, Michael Harriot is not afraid to say the quiet part out loud."

February 2025

It's still Black History Month

Here's some of what I missed in school

Frederick Douglas

Sojourner Truth

Malcolm X

Eunice Foote