prejudice

Many people assume that prejudice of any kind is a conscious belief about one group or another. You are aware of your dislike for “people from country X” or your fear of “people Y”. And more than that, you endorse these beliefs. But this isn’t always so. Although the above is definitely an example of prejudice, it doesn’t exhaust the ways in which people express bias. Most of the time, prejudice is an unconscious state. You may not be aware of your prejudice against “people from country X” or your fear of “people Y”.

Now, this poses a problem for how they can possible be discovered – our prejudices, that is. If these thoughts are unconscious, hidden even from ourselves, the most prejudiced among us can feign neutrality, confident he or she will not be disproved. Well, fear no longer. There are now tests to uncover our hidden thoughts. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one. The IAT is actually a series of tests, determining your degree of prejudice towards a number of different groups. There is a “skin-tone”; a religion; a disability; an Arab-Muslim; and a race (black-white) test. These tests depend on rapid associations between various words. There is no time, for example, between the presentation of a traditionally Arab name, like “Akbar”, and the options of “good” and “bad”. The reasoning goes: with no time to tease out the “politically correct” answer, an individual experiencing a bias towards Arabs will characterize “Akbar” as “bad” more than someone that doesn’t have that bias.

I took most of the tests. With great regret, I have to say I revealed a prejudice on a few of them. I won’t tell you which tests, but, in my defense, the prejudice revealed was usually small, sometimes negligible. I’m not that bad! Also, no one, I think, can go through life in a prejudiced world without soaking some of it in. But this doesn’t mean we’re all doomed. This is not the secular version of original sin. We are still capable of being good people. We would just need a more attainable, more human, standard of what it is to be good. Perhaps a good person – one who’s realistic in this kind of world - is not someone that’s perfect, unblemished by prejudice and moral blind-spots. He or she is simply willing to be self-reflective and to constantly examine their flaws. Even to the point of masochism. Their goal is not to be perfect, untarnished. Maybe they just want to consistently improve; to constantly be a little better than they were before. So, I’ll acknowledge my prejudices and try to work them out.