Excuse-Making for Racism: On the Inevitable Overuse and Abuse of the Concept Known as 'Implicit Bias'

Language is an effort to describe social reality. Language is also a reflection of a given society’s norms and values. Language is not fixed; it is malleable and changing.

Language is an attempt to communicate our own personal experiences and understandings of the world to other people. 

Language can be precise and exact. Language often fails to capture the full range of the human experience.

Language is also an invention.

Consequently, the language that is used to discuss the colorline in America has changed over time. Black Americans were once “negroes” or “colored”. “Nigger” was once a common term, one used without shame by white people and others to belittle and dehumanize African-Americans, and is now considered verboten in public speech (even allowing for the twisted logic of those who would try to suggest that “nigga” is somehow different in ugliness and its vile antecedents than its parent “nigger”).

The language used to talk about white supremacy in the West has expanded to include academic terms such as “aversive”, “old fashioned”, “meta”, and “institutional” racism.

There, one of the most recent inventions in the discourse of race is the term “implicit bias” (or its variants such as “unconscious”/“subconscious” racism and bias).

For some time, the term has been used by social psychologists and other researchers. It has now leaked out from a relatively insular community of scholars to the general public.

Implicit bias has become a more familiar and common term because of how the mass media and political elites have struggled during the Obama years to explain persistent and overt white racial animus towards the country’s first black President, as well as to somehow make sense of how America’s police (and white identified vigilantes) have continued to kill and murder unarmed black and brown people with relative impunity under the guise of feeling “threatened” or “in fear of their lives”.

In discussing the killing of Michael Brown and other unarmed black people by America’s police, Eric Holder has on more than one occasion deployed the phrase “implicit bias”.

James Comey, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also used the phrase “unconscious bias” in a recent speech about the recorded on video choking death of Eric Garner by the New York Police Department.

The popularization of terms such as “implicit bias” is a double edged sword.

The concept is critically important for understanding racism and white supremacy in the post civil rights era because of how it adds conceptual specificity, grounded in empirical research, to explain white supremacy’s impact on human behavior.

But, the scientific, historical, cultural, and sociological research that undergirds “implicit bias” as a concept with both high explanatory and descriptive power, can made hollow by how the general public (as well as some elites and opinion leaders) misuses and misunderstands the concept.

This is the challenge of language: it can be twisted and distorted either intentionally by dishonest actors or because of ignorance and habit.

To wit.

There are many “commonsense” understandings of race that are incorrect. However, these commonsense understandings of race persist because individuals accept them as taken for granted assumptions about social and empirical reality.

Implicit bias is also especially vulnerable to being distorted because of its relative novelty.

The concept can impart a false veneer of expertise on those who utter it.

This is especially true in the United States with its peculiar obsessions about race and the colorline—in what is a country where so many people have an opinion about “race” and “racism” but have done very little work to actually understand said concepts with any depth or rigor.

As used by social scientists, implicit bias is understood in the following way.

From the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity:

Defining Implicit Bias

Also known as implicit social cognition, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.  These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control.  Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness.  Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.

The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance.  These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages.  In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations.

A Few Key Characteristics of Implicit Biases 

Implicit biases are pervasive.  Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges. 

Implicit and explicit biases are related but distinct mental constructs.  They are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce each other.

The implicit associations we hold do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.

We generally tend to hold implicit biases that favor our own ingroup, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our ingroup.

Implicit biases are malleable.  Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.

Implicit bias is not an excuse or explanation for white supremacy and/or racism.

The concept of “implicit bias” is not to be used in such a manner as to suggest that racism is learned behavior, thus individuals who exhibit subconscious racism are somehow “off the hook” because they are not truly responsible for their actions.

Ultimately, implicit bias is a key component in any effort to have a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of white supremacy because it illustrates the complexity and mixed nature of racial progress and the colorline. For example, white individuals can elect a black president but still have deep animosity towards black people as a group.

Moreover, the social structures and conditions of the United States can evolve and change in a superficial and symbolic way. Yet, white supremacy is so deep in the sinew and bone of the American body politic that it is learned and internalized by both whites and non-whites alike.

America is a society that is profoundly sick with racism and white supremacy. This sickness distorts social and empirical reality (see: white racial paranoiac thinking and white fragility). As such, it also twists and distorts language.

Here, conservatives, and the White Right more generally, have done an excellent job stealing and distorting the anti-racist language of progressives and liberals. Racism has been warped into fictions of “reverse racism” where white people are somehow the real “victims” of bias in the United States. “Equality of opportunity” exists within the same schema where white men can somehow imagine themselves as being discriminated against. 

And in one of the worst hatchet jobs of collective delusion as processed through white supremacy and the Right-wing’s myth making apparatus, the radical Brother Doctor Martin Luther King is transformed into a Republican darling who would support their efforts to destroy the social safety net and the gains of the Black Freedom Struggle.

In an era of lies, distortions, and twists of language along the colorline, there is a real threat that powerful language such as “implicit bias” will be distorted.

Some of this will be a function of ignorance and lazy thinking.

Other efforts to reframe and distort the meaning and context of implicit bias will involve conservatives, the White Right, and liberal racists, who will claim that because there are some black and brown people who also exhibit signs of subconscious bias against African-Americans, that such sentiments are universal. Thus, white supremacy and white racism are not unique; in this framework, white folks are therefore freed from questions of redistributive justice, ethical behavior, and moral responsibility for how they benefit materially, politically, and psychologically from Whiteness and systems of white privilege.

Unfortunately, a distorting of the concept “implicit” bias can (and likely will) be used to buttress the common colorblind white racist deflection that “everyone is racist”.

Terms and concepts are circulated via public discourse. In a perfect world, terms such as “implicit bias” would not be used by those people who actually understand their true meaning and context. This is an impossible dream. Language can be radically democratic—in the worst ways possible—as terms and concepts are often robbed of their true specificity and form.

The colorline is not safe from such a phenomenon. How could it ever be?