Making the Unconscious, Conscious

Tiredness is a word I have heard in many posts online from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) as I tuned in, and listened to the voices where this is their daily experience with racism, hatred, prejudice and behaviours of explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) biases. As a Psychologist what I hear from their words and voices is a trauma response. It’s a word I am very familiar with when people have experienced long term trauma. It isn’t just tiredness it is chronic exhaustion that is physical, psychological and emotional.

The term ‘racial weathering’, by Arline Geronimus, showed how discrimination is bad for your health. Years of dealing with the Psychological allostatic load that is the wear and tear that comes with being black or in a minority. Arline likened it to how weather cumulatively erodes away just as chronic stress erodes at the health and longevity of black Americans and minorities. The physiological ‘racial weathering’ amongst black people's immune system from years of being in a constant heightened state of adrenalin-fueled stressed hormones lead this hypothesis to understand racial health disparities in terms of premature health deterioration and longevity, having had to maintain high coping efforts to manage living within a race-conscious society. Noting that; African Americans have the shortest life expectancy across all ethnicities in America.

It’s time to lean into the discomfort and ask some major questions of ourselves.

Unconscious Bias

What image do you see when I say the word ‘unconscious’? I see someone, possibly lying on the ground, completely unaware. They can’t see, hear or know of any distress, fear or panic happening upon the observers' faces as they look at this person as they lie there completely unaware of what is happening to them.

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘bias’, and no I don’t mean the cut on a dress.

Unconscious bias are hidden beliefs.
For one very important moment I am going to ask you, gently, to stop here. Breathe into this thought.

Implicit or unconscious biases are those that are out of your conscious reach. This article will only start you on a preliminary opening of our minds. Unconscious bias is deeply complex and multi-layered. Perhaps this will offer you compassion as to why behavioural and attitude change is so hard, even in the face of facts. Let me introduce you to your first cognitive bias ‘the status quo bias’ whereby you want things to stay the way they are so you ‘fit’ even incorrect information or prejudices to keep the status quo. You may think that you’d never do that, and that is your second bias which is the ‘fundamental attribution error’ whereby you think other people may do that, but you think you wouldn’t.

Cognitive biases are tools that are useful when they serve you such as categorising a kitchen chair and an armchair under the grouping of ‘furniture’, but not useful when it leads to a gap in fully being aware of how your unconscious perception is skewed.

In a world subsumed in an Infodemic, our brains shut the noise out by filling in the gaps. It is within these gaps that we can change or unconsciously fall between.

No matter how ‘woke’ you are, you do not have access to your unconscious, but trust me, when I say to you as a Psychologist it drives, impinges, and influences every perception you have, and the subsequent response you have, in relation to people, places and events.

Your number one goal is to stay aware, challenge assumptions and listen to people who live their lives through racism.

Catch yourself with compassion, and then change.

Anti-racism training

I remember my first day of anti-racism training as a trauma counsellor for asylum seekers all who had been persecuted based upon one, or more, of the nine protected characteristics to stop discrimination. I thought ‘I don’t have a racist thought in my body’. As I listened, I learned; as I learned I knew the time had come to unlearn. The message was clear and repeated, we all had unconscious biases.

To identify, name and call out micro-aggressions that are so imbedded and accepted in Irish society was my first experiential lesson. Every single time I sat in a taxi I disappointedly anticipated the horrible responses that would come after I was asked what I did for a living. ‘Economic migrants’ was contemptuously spat back as one of the milder responses straight to heinous, hate filled racist assumptions of people whose story they had never heard.

I didn’t just hear a few stories. I heard from 254 people whose names I can still remember, stories of explicit trauma. Beautiful names with life stories that would make your jaw and heart drop and break. I still have that sinking feeling in my soul of the horror that was, and is, done onto another human being based upon hatred, intergenerational racism and propagation of ‘this is just the way it is’, and the nonsensical idea of your life being a certain way based purely upon the colour of your skin.

BEING Mute and Blind

The last week of being ‘mute’ has been an exceptional behavioural experiment where you may have found yourself frustrated or chomping at the bit to have your say as you are an ally who wants to help. But by being silenced for the first time in your life, where your opinion wasn’t asked for, you might have had the tiniest morsel of what that is like for a community who have been silenced for too long. It is our privilege to help elevate those voices to be heard.

Unconscious Bias is all of our blind spot.

What if, to be seen we need to make ourselves blind?

‘Discretion elimination’ occurs when rational decision making can be made without it being subjective or predetermined by our implicit biases. In the 1970’s The Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and New York Philharmonic symphony orchestra held blind auditions. Originally this was to eliminate preference to certain preferred schools, the unintended results proved very interesting whereby the amount of women chosen went from 10% to 40% from 1970 to the 1990’s and they weren’t even looking for gender differences. My fear is how will that work on the street, when split second profiling is made that is prejudiced and racist?

We all need help with our blindspots. We need to learn, and this is only the beginning as you can’t understand, but we can learn and listen and yes we can change.

Starting to specifically know what your unconscious biases are, and to name them, is where we start. This image is not to overwhelm, but to clarify an important point, real behavioural change requires consistent effort. One week being mute may have felt good, now let’s all start with the real work. Compassion, understanding the difference between equality and equity, to help us see what we couldn’t see, will help reveal what we never knew. That is where change lives. This world needs to change and it starts with all of us. Wouldn’t it be a privilege to do this for our common humanity?
Hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, let us unite and stand together in a revolution for man and womankind.

Allison Keating, June 2020.

Read another piece on overcoming our unconscious bias & another from two friends with opposite life stories; one black, one white, both living in the US…