The resource
Dushaw Hockett, “We all have implicit biases. So what can we do about it?”, TEDx MidAtlanticSalon, Washington, D.C. March 6, 2017 (uploaded to YouTube on Sept. 18, 2017). 12 minutes.
The way that we currently think about, talk about, and act on issues of racial bias and other lines of difference in this country is woefully inadequate and it’s incomplete. . . The very robust and compelling evidence that has been coming out of the science community for the past ten plus years suggests that if we want to move to a radically different place—a radically better place—on issues of race and difference in this country, we have to pay attention to something called implicit bias.
— Dushaw Hockett
Growing & Belonging learning level
This is a Level 1 Growing & Belonging learning opportunity.
About this resource
The speaker
Dushaw Hockett is the founder and Executive Director of Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity (SPACEs), a Washington, DC-based leadership development and community building organization dedicated to bridging the gap between what people imagine and what they achieve. He’s the former Director of Special Initiatives for the Center for Community Change (CCC), a 40-plus year old national social justice organization founded in the memory of the late Robert F. Kennedy.
As an outgrowth of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Initiative (TRHT), Dushaw serves as healing facilitator/practitioner. In this capacity, he has facilitated healing circles for numerous organizations including but not limited to the Independent Sector, the American Library Association (ALA), the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the Michigan Council on Foundations.
He has served on the boards of numerous local and national organizations including the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC). He currently serves as an advisor to the Perception Institute.
The presentation
Hockett begins his talk by discussing the three characteristics of implicit biases:
- They operate at a subconscious level. The nature of implicit bias is that we don’t know that we have it.
- They often run contrary to our conscious, stated beliefs and values.
- They are triggered through rapid and automatic mental associations that we make between people and the attitudes or stereotypes we hold about those people.
He continues his argument by discussing why we must focus on implicit bias if we are to stop harming entire communities of people. Among these are:
- The tools we’re currently using to address bias are insufficient because have been designed to address explicit bias instead of implicit bias.
- Implicit bias is predictive. It allows us to predict how people will act based on biases that can be diagnosed using existing tools like Project Implicit.
- Implicit bias can also be preventative. It can help us to develop tools—including internal motivation and habitual practices—that can shift us away from our current model of reactive, emergency responses to bias and toward a preventative approach based in part on public health research.
- An implicit bias approach helps to reduce the shame and shaming that arises when we talk about bias. An implicit bias approach shifts the essential questions from “Are you racist or not racist?” or “Are you sexist or not sexist?” to “How do we align our actions and behaviors with our consciously held egalitarian beliefs?”
Content and themes
Implicit bias, stereotypes, racism, sexism
The learning guide
Download the learning guide for “We all have implicit biases. So what can we do about it?”
To get credit for this continuing education opportunity
- Read the introductory sections of this learning guide.
- Watch or listen to “We all have implicit biases. So what can we do about it?”
- Consider and answer the questions in this learning guide.
- Share your best ideas from your answers to the questions in prompts 3 and 4 with your program coordinator. (Ask them if they’d like to receive this information from you via email or another method.)
