Resisting Personal Bias

This week we're beginning a sermon series on the Spirituality of Resistance. That may sound odd to some of you, but if you consider Jesus for a moment, he was a resistor. He resisted exclusion, injustice, empire, violence, prejudice, religious laws when they were unhelpful, inequity, hypocrisy, judgment. 

Jesus' spirituality, his connection to the divine and the knowledge that everything and everyone is sacred, led him to seek wholeness for himself and others and to stand against systems, situations, attitudes and people who inhibited wholeness for others.

Maya Angelou once wrote: 

Let us live so we do not regret years of inertia and ignorance, so when we die we can say all of our energy was dedicated to the noble liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own.

We must begin with our own liberation! Jesus puts this into a parable and says we must take the plank out of our own eye before we try to take the splinter out of someone else’s. This is why we’re kicking off this series on resistance with a conversation about resisting personal bias.

We ALL have biases. We can’t help it. It is part of being human and part of the way our brains are wired. Some of our biases we’re aware of. I know that I’m biased about liking Kopps custard over Gilles. But we also have unconscious or implicit biases and the most detrimental ones are about other people.

Unconscious or implicit biases are assumptions and prejudgments we make based on our personal experience and our social conditioning (including images and messaging from the media, the church, teachers, etc.).

Ponder for a moment who you grew up around and who you didn’t, what church you went to (or didn’t), what television shows you watched, what your family said and maybe how they treated different groups of people. An unconscious bias can be formed in as little as three exposures. The opinions and beliefs we form about groups of people, combined with a brain wired to respond favorably to things we are familiar with and like, and to respond in a fight or flight manner with things that are unfamiliar or things we’re programmed not to like (which, by the way, kept our species alive for millions of years), we can find ourselves making snap judgments, which lead to how we think about people and how we treat them, possibly without even realizing it.

Brianne Dotson, educator, principal, and founder of BMD Educational Consulting Group writes, “While we all have biases, many unconscious biases tend to be geared toward non-dominant groups based on factors such as class, gender, sexual orientation, race, religious beliefs, age, and ability. These biases show up in our everyday lives in the small actions we take. This includes college professors being more likely to respond to a student’s email based on the perceived race or ethnicity of the student given their name; doctors recommending less pain medication for Black patients than white patients with the same medical condition; and Black preschool-aged boys being disciplined and expelled at much greater numbers than their white counterparts."

Valerie Alexander, who is now the CEO of a tech company, tells a story about being a securities lawyer in Silicon Valley. One night (or maybe morning) she left office at 2 a.m. and put time sheets on her assistant’s desk for her to enter them into the billing system the next day. When she got into the office in the morning, her assistant walked in with her time sheets in hand and asked very nicely if Valerie would like to learn how to enter her time into the billing system. After sitting stunned for a few moments, she politely declined. But the encounter bothered her, why would her assistant ask her if she’d like to learn how to do her job. So, after asking around, of the 14 male attorneys in the firm, none had ever been asked if they wanted to learn how to use the billing system (one didn’t even know there was a billing system). But of the six female attorneys, Valerie was the only one who had never entered her own time sheets.

Now, surely, she said, the assistants would claim that they didn’t treat the male and female attorneys any differently, mostly likely they would’ve said, “no way.” And yet, no male attorney had been asked if they wanted to learn administrative work, and every female attorney had.

I’m sure we all have stories about being on the receiving end of someone else’s bias. And sometimes those things make us feel awful. The blatant, or inadvertent, use of a bias doesn’t lead to our wholeness or the wholeness of the person expressing the bias. And I know that all of us would never want to inadvertently hurt anyone else with our unmanaged biases.

So, here are a few suggestions for us to start taking the plank out of our own eyes and work on liberating our own minds and hearts.

First, we can change our visualization so that more images are familiar to our brains, hence, fewer fight and flight reactions. If we’re going to see a new doctor and we don’t know what they look like, we can play with the image. They might be Asian, or Black, or Hispanic. They might be short or tall, have freckles or not, have a prosthetic leg or be in a wheelchair. We can get our minds used to different ideas, so our hormones don’t kick in and freak out.

Second, we can become more aware of our behavior and take a few moments to analyze our behavior. We can ask ourselves, "Is this how we’d act if this person did or didn’t look like me?"

We also need to start questioning our assumptions:

• Why do we think that a graduate of an ivy league school is smarter than a graduate of a state university?
• Why do we lend more credence to male voices than female voices?
• Why do we consider people of a certain color to be poorer, or messier, or harder-working, or lazier, or alcoholic, or violent or more intelligent, or less intelligent?
• Why do we consider two moms or two dads to be less effective than a traditional mother and father?
• Why do I feel the way I do about a trans person? Or a drag queen?
• Why do I cross to the other side of the street when I see a certain type of person?
• Why are we more apt to ask certain things of women and certain things of men?
• Why...?

Third, we can make a conscious effort to expose ourselves to different experiences, cultures, food, celebrations. Attend a Sufi or Jewish or Hindu temple, do things like Juneteenth Day celebrations and Pride parades, listen to the experiences of people of color. Travel, try different foods. Broadening our minds will not erase the early programming, but it may help us to manage our biases and change our behaviors.

One step at a time, this is how we begin to take the plank out of our own eyes, resist and/or manage our personal biases, and liberate our minds and spirits, bringing us ever closer to wholeness. 

Love & Light!

Kaye