“Your English is very good.”
I have been told this a number of times in my life. Alas, it was not because my literary genius was finally being recognised. No, it was because I have a foreign name.
“Thank you very much,” I’d reply. “You do know I was born here?”
I would shrug it off with a laugh at how daft it was to say that to me, especially with my distinct London accent. But I wouldn’t have laughed if I had thought it had stopped my progressing in life; if I thought that job applications had been filtered out because of that name.
When aged 17, teacher Craig Cunningham applied for his first retail job. The phone interview went smoothly and he was invited to a face-to-face meeting, at which he was told he didn’t look like how he sounded on the phone.
“That wouldn’t be the last time I heard that statement: the complexities of the stereotypes of black men are not lost on me,” he says.
Unconscious bias, or implicit bias, is defined as learned stereotypes that are automatic and unintentional and influence your behaviour, a gut instinct that makes assumptions based on various experiences. It’s the subconscious ways in which we treat people differently when they are from groups other than our own, the product of knowledge picked from all sorts of places.
It’s why people will often happily say “I’ll never work for a woman again” - they had only one female boss in their career and they had a bad experience, so it sticks in their mind. Never mind the many men they worked for who were terrible. They didn’t stand out.
It is often small and thoughtless episodes that have a pernicious effect. Unconscious bias is all around us, touching almost everything we do and say and affecting actions and responses. It’s a constant presence lurking in the shadows of our day-to-day lives.
“It’s in the quiet moments where racism and unconscious bias lies and hides and thrives,” as the Duchess of Sussex pointed out this week.
And it can be rightly devastating to have it exposed. A colleague underwent training for a mental health support line, where one activity was to take a call from a trainer posing as a hypothetical caller. The trainer told them about their difficult relationship with their partner, Chris, and how Chris had been physically abusive towards them. My colleague said: “I’m really glad you felt able to talk to me about this. When he -”
They didn’t get any further. The trainer had stood up and walked out the room. She had never specified a sex for Chris, but because the voice was female and had mentioned physical abuse, my colleague made an assumption and had shut down a conversation before it had even started. One small word and they had alienated someone in need.
They were mortified. It was not a mistake they would make again.
And that’s the important part. To be aware and to learn how to work on these biases. “The key for us all is not to fall back on instinct for decision making but rather to use it as a trigger for sparking analytical and logical thought,” says behavioural scientist Pragya Agarwal in an extract from her book Sway: unravelling unconscious bias. “It is vital to filter possibilities quickly at a subconscious level and direct our decision making to a point at which our rational, conscious mind can take over, one where we can acknowledge and evaluate our biases openly”.
Importantly, it’s an ongoing process. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was criticised this week for describing the Black Lives Matter movement as “a moment”, seemingly dismissing some of its concerns. His response was to say he would undergo unconscious bias training. He saw that as putting an end to the matter.
That’s the wrong outlook. It should be just the beginning.
This article originally appeared in the 10 July 2020 issue under the headline “Confronting unconscious bias is not a moment, it’s the movement”
