Terminating Bias

This afternoon, I attended a virtual interview training so that I can take part in the search for Mr. Riley's replacement. We have a really strong Language Arts team, and I feel like I understand the school's needs well enough by now to throw in my two cents when it comes to bringing in the people who will benefit the school community, especially when it comes to my team. 

Much of the training revolved around implicit bias and methods that help interviewers sideline their own biases and focus on the individual candidate and their qualifications. I can't say that any of this was news to me, but it's always interesting to self-examine and root out that bias. To me, it's not just about recognizing that you hold certain biases, but finding where they came from.

Often, we discover these things when we see them reflected in others' lives, whether they be true stories

or fiction, or are shown them in some other form. For me, it began with Ava DuVernay's essential film, The 13th. This documentation of how the US Government and other institutions maintained the suppression of Black people and their rights after the formal abolition of slavery. What I saw in that film that set off my "Ah-HA!" moment was the news footage from the 80's and 90's that had seeped into my consciousness, and how it connected directly with misconceptions I had as a kid.

From the representation of Black people in TV and movies to the prime-time news specials on "super-predators" (a.k.a. young Black men), I had been given a reality in which our suburban streets, green lawns, and clean schools were safe for me to roam, and that the city and its "Black ghettos" were not a friendly place for me to be. As The 13th reminded me, at age 11 I witnessed the presidential campaign of Vice President George H.W. Bush, who used these biases to turn voters against his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. As DuVernay shows, Bush used TV ads to show how Dukakis had "allowed" convict Willie Horton to flee Massachusetts to Maryland, where he raped a woman and stabbed her companion. Horton was not the only "Boogeyman" used to scare us sheltered suburban-Whites into supporting the death penalty and the Republicans who vowed to use it. There were the five young Black men known as the Central Park Five, accused of raping a jogger in Central Park in 1989, whose executions were loudly supported by Donald Trump, at the time simply a sleazy real estate developer with a history of discrimination and shady business

practices.; there was the endless stream of violent, dark-skinned criminals being pursued on TV's COPS, which has finally ended its long and damaging run.

As I watched The 13th (five times a day, as I showed it to my students in early 2019), I saw how I had been programmed to fear, and how different actions and decisions in my past had been rooted in that fear. Even as recently as 2012, when I received my teaching certification in New York and began to look for jobs, I was extremely reluctant to pursue opportunities in the Bronx. I remember feeling that I wouldn't be able to handle "those" kids, that I wasn't tough enough to get through to them. Why did I feel that way? Was there any first-hand experience that informed this notion? No. 

We all have our biases. It's just how our brains work. What we also have is the ability to identify these biases and keep them from driving our behavior. It's up to each of us as individuals to know and understand where we hold our biases, and be conscious of situations in which they may rear their ugly heads. I've been working hard to do this. Sometimes, if I'm in a situation where I might be irrationally uncomfortable or feel unsafe, I do a "Terminator" scan.

If you've seen the Terminator films, you've seen when Terminators visually assess an environment for any legitimate threats. When I pinpoint the factors that are making me feel unsafe, I can ask myself if they're rational. Once I identify the biases as irrational, I can move past them. It's effective when it needs to be, but not always. For example, no amount of logic will stop me from being afraid of what a classroom (live or virtual) of teenagers is thinking about me on the first day of school. 

Teenagers defy all logic (and that is yet another bias).