Everyone should be tested for implicit bias

NAACP president: It’s just a matter of time before next video surfaces

Everyone should get tested for implicit bias. And if you’re a public official or receiving public dollars, it should be mandatory. It’s just a matter of time before another black person is abused, arrested or shot dead for flying, golfing, driving, walking or drinking coffee “while black.”

We know that in another week, black Twitter will once again be enraged by another disturbing video of a black woman in Waffle House getting body-slammed to the floor by police, only to see a white man who killed four people and wounded four more at a Tennessee Waffle House brought in by police without the use of excessive force. Then there’s Starbucks.

How do we explain that racism still remains a much more popular drink in America than coffee?

We commend Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson for his deliberate speed in taking steps that many a Fortune 500 company would fear. At the same time, we ask why is our society continually placing training on unconscious and implicit bias into a red box that says “break only in case of emergency,” when we know it’s just a matter of time before another incident is caught on video and made public?

Soon enough there’ll be another young black man lost on his way to school shot at for asking directions. Or another Stephon Clark, an unarmed father killed by eight bullets in his back, shot at 20 times by Sacramento police.

America still grapples with the intense labor pains necessary for giving birth to an ever elusive colorblind society and the problem of the color line remains, like stagnant water polluting our ideals of justice and meritocracy.

It’s a conundrum wrapped inside a ball of hate, explicit bias, racism, micro-aggressions and subconscious fears that can only be unraveled through our nation staring down face to face its problem with racism — whether expressed explicitly or implicitly.

One thing is clear, America still remains very uneasy with black people, especially black men. Numerous studies and statistics bear this out. Wheth- er we are purchasing a car or caught in the criminal justice system, inexplicable disparities exist. African Americans will be charged more for a vehicle than whites, or steered toward subprime loans, or stopped by the police at a rate higher than that of whites, despite being less likely than whites to have weapons or drugs.

Research from the Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity found a tendency by civilians and police to “overestimate the age and culpability of black male youth compared with their white and Hispanic counterparts. For police, this tendency to implicitly dehumanize black boys was correlated with their likelihood of having a record reflecting more use-of-force instances with blacks than other races.” Kirwan found in another study that “the majority of test takers were more likely to implicitly associate images of weapons with black faces than white faces.”

How do we explain that implicit bias is a real thing?

It appeared recently when a former White House staffer moving into his new apartment on New York’s Upper West Side was mistaken for a burglar by neighbors who called the police. It appeared just this week when a white student called police because a black woman was napping in the common room of a Yale University dorm. It took the black woman more than 15 minutes, a room key and a Yale ID to convince police she was a graduate student.

The resources to test for unconscious biases already exist. More than 6 million people have taken the Harvard implicit association test, with varying levels of unexpected bias being revealed. The NAACP is calling for an expansion of the movement to demand mandatory testing for implicit bias, particularly for officials paid with public dollars. For major corporations, implicit bias training must become a part of corporate responsibility rather than a response to videotaped intolerance.

This is the beginning of a movement designed to awaken the soul of our nation in ways that not only make us better people, but also a society where we are accountable both for what we know and what we are unaware of.