Implicit Biases and Unintentional Discrimination

The Washington Post featured an article on the Virginia senatorial debate between Senator George Allen (R) and his challenger, Democrat James Webb. As you are aware, Allen has been dogged during the race by his ties to the Council of Concerned Citizens (the successor organization to the anti-integration, white supremacist White Citizens Councils) and by the incident in which he called an American of Indian descent a racial slur (accidentally, of course). It has also surfaced that James Webb has made unsavory (read: misogynistic) comments about women in years past. Sigh. Poor Virginia. Poor America.

The Post article discusses the psychology of implicit biases and the futility of labeling people as discriminators. The author instead calls on politicians and others in power to recognize that they, like most people, hold unconscious biases based on group membership. To overcome these biases, those who hold them must recognize their existence and then resolve to behave in a way that consciously counteracts the effects of the bias.

Psychological flibberdigist, you may say. However, I support taking implicit biases seriously. I published an article when I was in law school that discussed what an embrace of implicit biases, or unintentional discrimination, would mean for employment law. Because I generally support the movement to recognize implicit biases as common, but combatable if they are recognized, I will include bits of my very long paper here over the next few days to encourage people to think about beating discrimination in a new way.

As a side note, the CCC is white supremacist group. Belonging or aligning oneself with such a group is not evidence of an unconscious bias, it is evidence of a conscious one.