Book 201 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Quit Fighting for a Seat at Someone Else’s Table, Create Your Own Instead!

Book – Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes the Way We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Book Description:

From one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious racial bias come stories, science, and strategies to address one of the central controversies of our time

How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society—in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and criminal justice system. Yet she also offers us tools to address it. Eberhardt shows us how we can be vulnerable to bias but not doomed to live under its grip. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving.

Reflection:

My wife is an equity, diversity, and inclusion real life champion and thought leader. For the past 10+ years of her career in public education, she has poured herself into this topic in an effort to make an impact through her work as an educator, curriculum designer, and now the principal at a Charter School she helped to found. Almost everything she reads, conferences she attends, and trainings she facilitates has a clear focus on driving change in these areas of our society, specifically in public education and our children. I think it is safe to say that uncovering and driving change in the areas of implicit bias, equity, and systemic racism is her meaningful work and what motivates her each day.

My wife also really hates conflict. She doesn’t like to argue or debate abstract topics for fun. I, on the other hand, LOVE to passionately debate, discuss, and dissect anything and everything. I will hop into the arena with anyone, at any time, and for any topic. It is a blast for me and gets my juices flowing. As expected, her avoidance of these topics and my overenthusiasm to try and engage around way to many topics has probably been the area of most conflict in our marriage. I constantly bring up abstract topics to debate / discuss and my wife shuts it down. I keep probing, and she shuts it down harder until we both end up frustrated and give up.

It is with this lens that I choose our next book for us to tackle together called Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes the Way We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer L. Eberhardt. I figured I’d tip the scales in her favor on this one and jump into the world of her meaningful work together and see what I learned. It was certainly an interesting experiment and generated a lot of interesting dialogue and conversations around the topic. For once, she didn’t shut down either when I challenged topics and we had some really fun debates. I guess taking a page out of the How to Win Friends and Influence People book of getting people to talk about they really care about actually does work…lol.

After going on this journey into the world of systemic racism and unconscious racial bias with my wife, the biggest thing I learned is that I 100% agree that it exists. Unconscious Bias exists in this world. We’ve seen and discussed this topic through many other books we’ve read on this journey already that talk about this exact topic only in other areas of life of like Thinking, Fast and Slow, Influence, Nudge, Alchemy, Think Again, and HumanKind.

It brings everything back to me of the analogy of our minds being represented by an Elephant and a tiny little Rider that I first heard about in The Happiness Hypothesis. Our Elephant represents are our instinctual subconscious behaviors that take place automatically. They are brilliantly designed, incredibly sophisticated, and have been honed since the dawn of the first man to keep us alive. Our Elephants are incredible, but they aren’t infallible. That is why we also have the tiny rider that sits on top of the elephant that can slowly course correct over time if it sees we are being led astray. The rider represents our rational mind. The rider’s job is to pay attention to when nature is tricking our elephant and retrain it over time to hardwire some new habits and behaviors. It is possible, but it is REALLY HARD!

The author got me thinking about how my own elephant reacts when I see someone that looks physically different than me, and that is important. I did notice upon reflection that in the moment I did feel differently, and I approach the situation a little differently based on whether I feel “safe” or not. This is how our elephants have evolved to protect us, but that doesn’t mean that it is right. My rider can’t change the course of my elephant if I’m not aware, and now I’m aware. Slowly, but surely, I can now start to retrain my own elephant to make the changes in my life to overcome this bias if I so choose. That will take years of conscious training, trial and error, and if I’m lucky I just might be able to guide this elephant down a slightly different path. The bias won’t go away, but maybe I can train it to not react in ways that are unnecessary or hurt others in the process if I’m good enough.

With that said, this is where I get hung up on this whole topic…is retraining everyone’s elephants even possible on a topic like unconscious racial bias? If I know it will take years of daily work of retraining my elephant to even make a tiny dent in this bias, how do we expect everyone in the broader society to be willing to do the same? In my opinion, we can’t.

Well, then what can we do if this matters to us, one might ask?

While I don’t know anything, here is my solution.

I’m inclined to encourage people to stop fighting human nature. Our elephants will always win one way or another. Society at large will always be designed to embrace whatever our elephant evolutionarily tells us to do. There is nothing we can do there. However, what you can do is attempt to create your own world and surround yourself with people that value the same ideas you do within that broader ecosystem. That new world can be anything you want it to be, the possibilities are truly endless and only limited by your imagination. It can take the shape of a business, a nonprofit, a church, a school, a virtual world, a dance troupe, a new sport, or whatever else you can dream up. The most important thing is to build that world with what you value most in this world and invite others that care about the same thing. It is then, and only then, that you will have any chance at making a systemic change that you seek while living in a world that cares about what you care about.

Stop fighting for a seat at the table that will never value what you value and channel your passion into building your own table instead to reflect the world you wish to live!

That is what my wife is doing with her charter school being built from the ground up to tackle implicit racial bias! That is what I’m doing to help myself and others life a life driven by values, meaningful work, and meaningful relationships with ClubAny! That is all that any of us can do if we want to live the life that matters to each of us.

Question: What steps are you taking to build the world that you wish to live!

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes the Way We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer L. Eberhardt