unconscious bias

October 8, 2020 By Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert Leave a Comment

Unconscious Bias Training Is Divisive Nonsense

Many public and private institutions and workplaces are turning to alleged anti-racist training materials and providers that endorse the idea of unconscious bias, which is itself based on a scientifically discredited concept of implicit association tests. The result, argues Carrie Clark at Spiked Online, can only be more resentment:

The test seemed to show that vast swathes of people were still ‘unconsciously’ racist, in spite of the dramatic decline in racist attitudes over the past 25 years.

The diversity industry has grown to be hugely profitable. It is now worth a cool $8 billion a year in the United States. Assisted by the IAT’s veneer of scientific respectability, unconscious-bias training has been marketed as an essential tool for any business serious about addressing racial inequality.

But reams and reams of research have discredited the IAT, undermining the entire premise of unconscious-bias training in the process. Time and again, meta-analysis has failed to find a correlation between a person’s score on the IAT and how discriminatory their behaviour is.

Let kids be kids

The “unconscious bias” theory is detrimental in the fight against racism, argues Ella Whelan:

It’s this fetishisation of white self hatred that has propelled figures like Robin DiAngelo and the theories around white fragility to fame. There’s nothing a white liberal likes more than being congratulated for recognising the sins of their fathers – even if that means admitting you’re racist when you don’t think you are. The problem is, unconscious bias is a highly questionable theory.

Photo by Andrew Ebrahim on Unsplash

July 3, 2020 By Joan Smith Leave a Comment

Racial sensitivity training turned me into a confused racist

Lloyd Evans recounts his experience of an online training programme designed to teach ‘racial sensitivity’:

I couldn’t help concluding that two messages were being conveyed. First, that office workers should treat each other with courtesy and friendliness. Secondly, that many white people are almost entirely devoid of these virtues.

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

June 28, 2020 By Joan Smith Leave a Comment

On ‘White Fragility’

Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller has “a simple message”, argues Matt Taibbi: “there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category”.

White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

June 26, 2020 By Joan Smith Leave a Comment

White Fragility Training and Freedom of Belief

What happens, asks Helen Pluckrose, when an ideology holds that beliefs other than its own are harmful and oppressive of others, and fails to recognise that it too is a belief system in itself?

It is essential that employers recognise that the concepts of Social Justice, whiteness, white privilege and white fragility all depend upon a very specific belief system that they do not have the moral right to demand any of their employees believe. It seems very likely that many employers organising this kind of training do not recognise this and simply regard the phenomenon epitomised by the work of Robin DiAngelo as the latest and most reputable development in the field of anti-racism and feel that they should support it in this current climate. Therefore, it needs to be made clear to them what the truth claims of this theory actually are, how they work and what they require people to pretend to believe about themselves, the nature of racism and the structure and culture of the society in which they live.

Photo by Tetiana SHYSHKINA on Unsplash

August 19, 2019 By Joan Smith Leave a Comment

The fight to redefine racism

Kelefa Sanneh unpacks the new thinking about race elaborated in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

In modern American political discourse, racism connotes hatred, and just about everyone claims to oppose it. But many on the contemporary left have pursued a more active opposition, galvanized by the rise of Donald Trump, who has been eager to denounce black politicians but reluctant to denounce white racists. In many liberal circles, a movement has gathered force: a crusade against racism and other isms. It is a fierce movement, and sometimes a frivolous one, aiming the power of its outrage at excessive prison sentences, tasteless Halloween costumes, and many offenses in between. This movement seems to have been particularly transformative among white liberals, who are now, by some measures, more concerned about racism than African-Americans are. One survey found that white people who voted for Hillary Clinton felt warmer toward black people than toward their fellow-whites.

Photo by Devin Berko on Unsplash

January 4, 2019 By Joan Smith Leave a Comment

Unravelling the concept of unconscious bias

The concept of unconscious bias is “the child of neoliberalism”, argues Jenny Bourne of the Institute of Race Relations. According to the new narrative, “racism is covert not overt; it is psychological not social; it is individual not structural; it is subconscious not conscious”.

The emphasis on individual bias runs fundamentally against a materialist view of society. It puts the chicken before the egg. Do ‘white’ attitudes and biases create the discrimination that blights the lives of BAME people? Or are those biases being inculcated and constantly being redefined by the political culture around us, itself being reproduced by the laws of the land, the steers from the media, and in fact the larger processes of globalisation and its flipside austerity – which provide the wrapper for class and power relations?