A Moderate Racist

 

In order to protect the public and ensure that I am not a drunk, unethical, bigoted malpractice case just waiting to happen, the State Bar of California requires me to complete 25 hours of mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE) every three years. Of that 25 total hours, at least 4 hours must be in ethics, 2 hours must cover the elimination of bias, and 1 hour must address mental health and substance abuse (or as the Bar euphemistically calls it, “competence issues”). At least half of all coursework must be “participatory.” You can’t just pretend to listen to a program as you’re driving down the road or simply read an article on some topic obliquely related to the law. Instead, you have to physically attend a conference or seminar or participate in a live webinar. 

The opportunity to get MCLE credits abound. A helpful, yet avaricious industry has sprung up to provide these courses to attorneys in need. My inbox fills up with offers of assistance from these vultures annually as the compliance deadline looms. My alma mater also sponsors events to help its alumni satisfy their continuing education obligations. Every year, it hosts a one-day symposium that focuses solely on the more difficult to get credits – ethics, elimination of bias, and competence issues. Back in the day before the virus, this was a live event. Now, it’s held remotely via Zoom.

During this year’s offering on the elimination of bias, there was a discussion of implicit bias and how it can affect your interaction with clients, judges, colleagues, employees, and others. Implicit bias reflects attitudes and prejudices one can unconsciously hold that have developed over time through exposure to stereotypes and other forms of misinformation. A team of scientist from Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia has developed a series of tests one can take to gauge the presence of implicit bias based upon a variety of characteristics, including race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and age.

Intrigued, I decided to take the test for implicit racial bias to see what it revealed about me. The test involved looking at a series of words and faces as they flashed on the screen and then categorizing them as quickly as you could as either “good” or “bad.” If you made an error, the system would tell you. The word portion was pretty straight-forward. Words like “joy” clearly went into the “good” bucket; words like “pain” clearly went to the “bad” bucket. But the face part of the test was more challenging. The test included images of 6 black and 6 white faces from the nose up that you had to identify as either “good” and “bad.” As with the words, if you tried to put a face into the wrong category, the test told you so in real time. 

It was somewhat of an impossible task. It wasn’t clear to me how I was supposed to conclude that one face belonged to an axe murdering pedo while another belonged to a saint based only on the eyes and nose. But I don’t think getting the faces in the right bucket was necessarily the point. I believe how quickly you instinctively categorized a face as either good or bad was the behavior being measured.

Taking a test like that is always unnerving because of the potential for it to reveal something about yourself that you’d rather not know and probably won’t like. It’s easier and more comfortable to just see yourself in low light that masques all of your pimples, scars, blotches, and hairy moles. But I flipped on the spotlight and had a hard look in the mirror anyway. And it wasn’t pretty. According to my test results, I have a “moderate automatic preference for White people over Black people.” Translation: I have an implicit bias in favor of white people and against black people. So the glass half-empty is that I’m apparently a racist; the glass half-full is that I’m only a moderate racist. Whew!

I found my results disturbing so I’ve spent some time contemplating the potential causes of, and excuses for my apparent implicit bias. My immediate reaction was to discount the validity of the test. How could these academic nerds determine that I had a bias just by measuring how quickly I could put faces and words into appropriate boxes? But I knew that was a dodge. Science isn’t always right, but without an objectively-valid reason to question it, I trust it implicitly. My undergraduate training in the hard sciences compels that result. So it had to be something else.

I frequently hear folks talking about how certain historical figures were racist. And judged by contemporary standards, that would certainly be an accurate assessment in a lot of cases. But I also believe that everyone is a product of time and place. Where you grew up, when you grew up, how you grew up, and with whom you grew up all largely inform who you are and how you see the world. So a child growing up in the Deep South in the early 1900s where segregation and bigotry, both overt and subtle, was normalized is apt to hold very different attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes than a child growing up in a mixed-race family in modern-day Berkeley. It’s a variation on the old nature versus nurture thing. You see that play out on one level with the Louis Winthorpe and Billy Ray Valentine characters in the film Trading Places. 

I’m a product of time and place too. That time was the 1960s through the late 1970s; the place was Salt Lake City, Utah. As you might imagine, my hometown was not the most diverse or forward-thinking of places in the 60s and 70s. Neither was my home. I was brought up in the Mormon faith by socially and politically conservative parents. They were a product of time and place too. As a consequence, I wasn’t exposed to people of different races, ethnicities, religious beliefs, political ideologies, or social classes. My small circle was made up exclusively of white Mormons. During the entire twelve years of my primary and secondary education, I went to school with exactly one black kid. It wasn’t until fourth grade that I realized that there was any religion other than Mormonism. Inter-racial marriage was not only incredibly uncommon when I was growing up, it was not even legal in a lot of states. And where it was legal, that mixing of the gene pool was taboo. Being gay back then was not just a high school slur, it was an actual disease. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) still classified homosexuality as a mental disorder.  

But it was more than just the general climate of the times. The religion that I was steeped in and was taught to believe as gospel truth treated its black congregants as back-of-the-bus Mormons. Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Mormon faith and supposed mouth-piece of God, declared in 1852 that black men were ineligible to hold the priesthood. He, along with leaders of other protestant denominations believed that dark skin was the Mark of Cain referenced in the Book of Genesis. He also believed that blacks were burdened with the Curse of Ham which biblically relegated them to be the “servants of servants.” Combined, those ideas were used to justify not only Young’s proclamation that black men could not hold the priesthood, but his enthusiastic support for slavery. In the late 1970s, during the height of civil rights tensions, another Mormon prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, supposedly had a revelation from God rescinding Brigham Young’s 1852 proclamation. The timing of that “revelation” is certainly suspect given everything that was happening at the time. But the more troubling question it raises is this: Is the Mormon God fickle and/or fallible? Or, was Brigham Young (and all those that came after him) really not a prophet “seer and revelator?”

My exclusively white extended family was not the most enlightened group of folks either when it came to race relations. I distinctly recall sitting around at family reunions as an impressionable child and listening to the elders banter back and forth. These were the patriarchs and matriarchs of the family, people that I loved, respected, and looked up to. During those chat sessions the racial slurs would fly because the “coloreds” (that was the polite term), “spics,” “chinks,” “towel-heads,” and/or “redskins” were always demanding something they didn’t deserve or weren’t entitled to. Or they were lazy. Or they were drunks. Or they had accents and spoke “broken” English. Or, or, or. There really wasn’t any need to justify the bigotry, but it provided a convenient entry point for spewing racial and ethnic pejoratives. As a youngster listening to this all unfold, I just thought it was normal. Because in my world, it was normal.

Although I don’t recall now my parents using those terms in our house, they did subtly reinforce those prejudices whether they realized it or not. And not just through the racist teachings of the Mormon faith. When I was a child of perhaps 9 or 10, Santa Claus brought me a series of jokes books that were stuffed into my Christmas stocking. One was a book devoted to jokes about “Polacks,” one was a book containing jokes about Italians (or “wops”), and one was a book filled with jokes about Mexicans. Thinking about it now, I can’t even believe that material like that was actually sold. But at the time, I thought it amusing. I didn’t know any better. Ho, ho, ho! Who knew Santa was a fucking bigot?

After taking the implicit bias test and seeing my results, I’m now wondering how much of that shit percolated into my inner being and remained. I’ve made a concerted effort in my life to not be the racist and bigot I was perhaps unwittingly raised to be. And yet, the scientists at some of the nation’s leading educational institutions are telling me that I’ve only moderately succeeded. So I still have work to do. Work that until now, I didn’t even know about. But maybe what this all says is that although you can overcome your past, you can never really escape it entirely. It’s there, hiding beneath the surface, waiting to come out in ways that you neither expect nor want. At least that is what I prefer to believe. Because the repulsive alternative is that I really am just a moderate racist.