The Implicit Bias Test Made Me Check My Assumptions About “Conservative Racism”

This is the third of a nine-part series exploring conversations I’ve had with my cousin about racism. Ben and I are both white; I’m progressive and he’s conservative. We’re trying to listen to each other with respect, even as we try to change each other’s minds.

At first, I wanted to teach my cousin about implicit bias.

An interesting moment occurred when Ben and I were discussing implicit bias. I was the one who brought bias up—I wanted Ben to understand it—but the conversation didn’t go how I’d hoped.

In case you’re fuzzy on it, here’s a definition of implicit bias (in part):

Also known as unconscious or hidden bias, implicit biases are negative associations that people unknowingly hold. They are expressed automatically, without conscious awareness. Many studies have indicated that implicit biases affect individuals’ attitudes and actions, thus creating real-world implications, even though individuals may not even be aware that those biases exist within themselves.

(From The Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity: http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/docs/SOTS-Implicit_Bias.pdf.)

I figured if Ben could understand that bias against people of color is widespread, it would help him understand systemic racism. When most people running a system are unconsciously biased, it’s almost inevitable that the system will be biased, too. That creates disadvantages for people of color.

I suggested Ben take an implicit bias test.

I directed Ben to Harvard’s Project Implicit website, where you can take a simple test to learn about your own biases towards various minority groups, such as African Americans, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, or people with disabilities.

I cautioned that the results can be disturbing. Most people do find that they have bias—seventy percent of test-takers have a slight, moderate, or strong bias against African Americans compared to European Americans. Even people who are staunch antiracists often find that they have bias, and even many African Americans themselves have bias against their own group. The same is true for other minorities as well.

The website explains that we likely pick up our biases through culture and media, which tend to favor dominant groups: people who are white, male, straight, Christian, etc. Minority group members are less likely to have bias against their own group, but they do still often have it.

Sure enough, when I had first taken the test years ago, I’d been disappointed to register a slight bias against African Americans. I hated that this insidious bias lurked within me, but I wasn’t surprised, since it’s found in so many of us.

Ben’s test results suprised me.

Ben gamely took the test. When he told me about it, he was almost apologetic: although he’d done his best to follow the instructions, the results had said he had no bias against African Americans. Then he mentioned he’d also taken the test a couple years earlier, and that back then, he’d gotten the same result.

As he said this, he was being as polite and self-effacing as he could, and I knew why. All this time, I’d been taking him to task for essentially being racist, but on the test, I had registered as more biased than him. Didn’t that mean that in at least this one way, I was actually more racist than him?

I had also assumed his ideas about racism were less informed than they really were. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might already know about implicit bias and still hold the views he held.

Now I realized my assumptions had been flawed. It’s easy for white progressives like me to point to Trump or neo-Nazi groups, or even just to social conservatives like Ben, and convince ourselves that all of these people are “the” problem with racism in America. But of course, systemic racism isn’t confined to conservatives or the “Other.” It pervades not only the South and the Republican Party but also the North and progressivism as well.

To me, the contrast between Ben’s and my test results was a reminder of exactly what antiracism teaches. Seventy percent of Americans have implicit racial bias, and that includes people all along the political spectrum. This was a check-in: I didn’t have a pristine moral high ground here. Systemic racism was something Ben and I were both involved in, as white Americans participating in systems that were (I believed) racist.

Ben’s results made me reflect on my own bias.

It turned out the implicit bias test wasn’t a great tool for persuading Ben about systemic racism. I would have to try a different tack. In the meantime, this was an opportunity for deeper reflection on my part, and I hoped my reflection would help Ben reflect, too.

We talked about why I might have more bias than him. Both Ben and I have more white friends than friends of color, but he interacts daily with Black people, because he’s an active-duty military member who lives in the South. I grew up, and live in, one of the whitest neighborhoods of one of the whitest cities in the country. Additionally, my former career was in soil and water conservation, with the unfortunate side effect of being surrounded by people who looked like me in most of my jobs. I mused to Ben that all of that probably affected my bias.

Thinking about the conversation later, it occurred to me that there must be many Trump supporters who interact with people of color more than many progressives do. A great many white, working-class people, who are so often Trumpies, work blue-collar jobs alongside colleagues who are Black or brown.

Meanwhile, many progressives move in the educated worlds of academia and white-collar jobs. We often live in cloistered white neighborhoods like mine, or if not, we’re in the process of gentrifying the places we live.

Educated white people commonly assume that less-educated means more racist or biased. But how many of us harbor unconscious bias stronger than that of less-educated white folks, because we’re more isolated from people of color than they are? (Side note: Ben himself is as educated as me.)

As I was writing this post, I took the Harvard test again out of curiosity. This time, like Ben, I came out in the small unbiased group. Nevertheless, these tests aren’t perfect, and checking in with myself for possible bias is something I intend to do for the rest of my life.

Am I really more racist than Ben?

Some people consider implicit bias to be a subtle form of racism, while others argue that it’s different from racism or prejudice because it’s unconscious. In its Frequently Asked Questions, Project Implicit’s website says:

If my [test] shows that I have an implicit preference for one group over another, does that mean I am prejudiced?

…The [test] shows biases that are not necessarily endorsed and that may even be contradictory to what one consciously believes. So…we would not say that such people are prejudiced.

In other words, when I “tested positive” for unconscious bias, it didn’t necessarily mean I was prejudiced or racist. Still, as I continued talking to Ben about race, it felt important to keep this lesson in mind: that “the problem” of racism wasn’t outside of myself.