Last week I mentioned the book Children of Blood and Bone. In addition to being an excellent read, it also carries a deep level of metaphor. You can read it and enjoy it as a novel about a quest to restore magic in a faraway land. You can also read it as a piece of literature talking about cultural bias.
What is cultural bias? Well, it can get a little deep, but we’ve got about 900 words to figure it out. We all have biases. I like the Vikings, others prefer the Packers. I like sauerkraut on my bratwurst along with ketchup and mustard, other people might not choose some of those condiments.
But historically, there are also people who have a bias against other races or cultures. You might have heard about this thing we had in our country for many years called slavery. Africans were brought over to serve the settlers because of the color of their skin. They were viewed as lesser beings. In fact, the Constitution has language counting each slave as 3/5 of a person, which was part of the voting process.
There has been a strong bias against the Jewish people over the centuries. Most notably, we think of the Holocaust, when Adolph Hitler targeted them as a secondary people and imprisoned and killed thousands of Jews. Hitler had a strong bias against that particular segment of the population.
And we continue to see stories and questions about bias in the newspaper all the time. But often, this is what is known more as an implicit bias. That’s a form of bias or racism without conscious thought. It’s different than to think that people of other races or cultures are lesser beings. That’s unfortunate that there are still people in 2018 who have such an explicit bias.
But what’s scarier is that, quite likely, many of us have some level of implicit bias. Tom Rademacher, former Teacher of the Year in Minnesota, has made this a real focus of his writing and teaching. He gives examples of implicit bias such as a police officer seeing a gun in the hands of a black man when it’s really a cell phone. It’s when a teacher sees a young black student as a behavior problem but a comparable white student is just intense. A group of white teens in a mall is harmless but a group of black teens in that same mall is dangerous.
How many of us have that implicit bias? It might be more than we think. There is a group called Project Implicit, and on their website you can take different quizzes to help determine your implicit bias. If you’re very honest about the questions, it can be a true look into how you regard people of other cultures.
And sometimes that’s hard. Let’s be honest. Most people reading this column are white. We live in small communities without a very large minority population. Our culture, while having some differences based on which European country your ancestors came from, is defined. When we start to recognize that other cultures celebrate Christmas differently or treat religion differently or view the family setting differently, we can see the broad, wonderful world that is out there.
But when you’re not exposed to other cultures, through no fault of your own, it’s hard to find that recognition. I grew up in New Ulm, a town of 13,000 people, most of them white Germans. I wasn’t truly exposed to other cultures until I went to college. It can result in culture shock.
Remember when the “bad guys” in movies were Russian spies during the Cold War? These days those characters tend to be extremist Muslims. These types of things place that implicit bias in our minds. So what can we do about it?
As educators, especially in a small town, we have to work to give that exposure through historical examples, literary and artistic works, and other areas of our curriculum to help kids understand, appreciate, and, most importantly, respect other cultures. This is important so we can stop feeding the news cycle with stories that involve both explicit and implicit racism.
I’ve seen all those stories, but didn’t really understand the issue right away. After all, I’m a privileged white man. I’ve never been racially profiled or stereotyped by people who have authority over me. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the problem.
And then I read The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. This is one of those “torn from the headlines” books that has, at its heart, the story of a young black girl who sees her friend gunned down by police because they thought his hairbrush was a gun. The book has a unique twist since this girl’s family got out of the inner city and she attends a prep school, but she’s still judged based on the color of her skin in different situations. After finishing this excellent piece of literature, I gained a better understanding of what is happening in these situations. And it might have been the first time I read a book in which I didn’t think the excessive amount of profanity was excessive!
This is a tough subject to talk and write about. But it’s something we need to talk and write about. I took one of those quizzes mentioned earlier, and I discovered something I already knew – I’m not perfect when it comes to this. Probably many of us aren’t. But self-awareness is the first step to becoming a better citizen and respecting the cultures of others.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is boracic, which means having no money, as in, “His implicit bias led him to believe the people of color he saw on the street were boracic.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!