Julien Davis: Implicit bias and systemic racism are widely misunderstood

To The Daily Sun,

A recent letter to The Sun claimed that the very fact that Black people migrate to the U.S. disproves the notion that racism is still alive and well in this country. This letter is a direct response to that claim.

Black people from Africa and the Caribbean Islands are not moving to the U.S. because they believe this country is free from racism. Rather, Black people from these regions are coming here because, in many cases, the areas in which they are born lack basic amenities such as running water, internet, electricity, and other public infrastructure. That is, in fact, the distinction between our first-world nation and the second or third-world status these poorer nations bear. For example, Haiti is a Caribbean nation with one of the highest rates of migration to the U.S. If you’ll recall, Haiti is devastated by severe hurricanes on a near annual basis and, given its low GDP, is not capable of making complete recoveries after each and every one. Jamaica, another top Caribbean country in terms of emigration to the U.S., hosts an economy that isn’t strong enough to provide many of its citizens with adequate employment, resulting in the diaspora of Jamaicans to the United Kingdom and the U.S. to seek employment. These may only be two examples, but immigrants from other countries in the region report similar reasons for coming here. Case in point, these people aren’t coming here because they believe that they’ll be treated with equity: they’re coming here because they need better jobs and living conditions, regardless of whether or not they’re subject to racism thereafter.

It has become clear that, whether deliberate or not, there has been a misunderstanding of the terms “systemic racism” and “implicit bias.” Implicit bias refers to the underlying prejudicial sentiments that all people (not just White people) carry regarding a demographic of people whom they have rarely or never interacted with. To say that all White people carry implicit biases is not to say that all White people are racist, at least not in the direct, vitriolic sense. What this actually means is that, because no White person has firsthand experience on how life is as a Black American, and because many lack intimate secondhand testimony to that experience, most White people have biases against Black people that they don’t even realize are biases. If you or someone you know has ever said something along the lines of “he’s handsome for a Black man,” this is an excellent example of the aforementioned phenomenon. By ending the sentence with “for a black man” the implication is that his Blackness somehow devalues his appearance. This is implicit bias. Systemic racism is when a legal system, founded on blatantly racist values (such as those which enabled slavery and segregation), is now under the control of individuals who largely accept these biases as the status quo.

Understanding one’s own flaws is the first step to genuine improvement and discovery of truth.

Julien Davis

Gilford