Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 19, 2016)
PAGE 26 | August 19, 2016 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS Unionists waking up to bias By Don McIntosh Associate editor I’m racially biased. Or at least the Harvard Implicit Bias test says I am. In the conscious part of the test, I was asked ques- tions like whether I think blacks and whites are equally worthy, and I said yes. But I flunked the subconscious part of the test. Basically it meas- ures your reaction time when you’re asked to associate black or white faces with negative or positive words. Take it your- self, online, at bit.ly/1m808ph. You may be surprised, and pos- sibly disturbed. Like many other white people, I had a measurably faster reaction time when the association was be- tween a black face and a nega- tive word. And I’m not happy about that. For me, the test was prepa- ration for a day-long training for union staff led by Barbara Diamond, a Portland labor lawyer who’s won countless cases for unions over the years. Since 2014, she has made a se- ries of short films and organ- ized a dozen trainings for union staff or legal professionals. The films and trainings aren’t just about race. They look at attitudes about gender and sexual orientation, per- ceived foreign-ness, and phys- ical and mental disability. If they make participants uncom- fortable, that may be because we’ve all got work to do. Race might be the clearest example. In our society, a ré- sumé with a black-sounding name is 50 percent less likely to get a call back from an em- ployer … black drivers are twice as likely to be pulled over by police, and black men are six times as likely to be incar- cerated … and pediatricians are less likely to prescribe pain- killers to black children. And it may be that none of the indi- vidual decisions that contribute to those disparate results were made by people who were con- sciously racist. That’s where the “implicit bias” theory comes in. Accord- ing to the theory, unconscious racial preferences like mine are producing real-world disparate impacts. And if that’s true, then just outlawing obvious racial discrimination isn’t going to be enough to achieve the equitable society that most of us say we want. In her films, Diamond inter- views union members about their experiences of “microa- gressions.” Microagressions are mostly unintentional slights, snubs, or insults direct- ed at people based on their membership in a disenfran- chised group. For example, a black person will hear, “I don’t see you as black,” and that’s supposed to be a compliment. Or a native Oregonian with Asian features might be told she speaks very good English. The May 12 training I at- tended got very emotional at times for the dozens of union staff who attended. Some white union staffmembers said they felt guilty, or thought that they were supposed to feel guilty. “I think it’s normal for people who are diving into this stuff to feel a moment of guilt,” Dia- mond told me afterward, “be- cause you realize, ‘I have un- earned privilege, and I’ve had an easier time with my life.’ The problem with guilt is if you’re stuck there, you’re looking at yourself. You’re thinking about your own feelings, when what you really need to be thinking about is the affect of your ac- tions and how you can show up to change things.” “I walked away from the training thinking maybe I can be a little more conscientious, so I don’t inadvertently make someone feel uncomfortable,” says UFCW Local 555 repre- sentative Sam Gillispie.“As union reps, if we can make one individual less uncomfortable by our awareness and sensitiv- ity, that’s a good thing.” 5 questions for anti-bias trainer Barbara Diamond Why have you been making films and organizing train- ings about microagressions and implicit bias? After 30 years of doing legal work and working in the labor union movement — which I think of as being part of the civil rights movement — I realized we weren’t as far along as I thought we’d be. We have a lot of the same issues — gen- der equity, racism. I started educating myself and started realizing that I wanted to do something that might affect people in the labor movement on a broader scale. I felt like there was a role for me espe- cially as a white person to step up to the plate and start work- ing on issues like this. Do the trainings make a dif- ference? I think they’ve en- abled union staff and leaders to represent members in a more effective way. I trained a union staff person and within a year they were having to ad- vocate for a transgender mem- ber who was being mistreated by management. The semi- nars have also led to proposals at the bargaining table to pro- tect transgender rights. What’s a microaggression? It’s typically an unconscious slight or subtle snub, between a member of an empowered group and a member of a dis- empowered group. Some peo- ple call it death by a thousand cuts. It’s a tiny distancing communication of some kind or another. Why are we worrying about paper cuts when people are still losing limbs? Why sweat the small stuff when there’s so much unsolved big stuff, like the statistics on disparate treatment? I like to think of microaggressions as the tip of iceberg that is im- plicit bias. I view implicit bias as the cause of those statistics. Microagressions are the part of implicit bias that’s visible because they’re above the wa- ter line. I doubt that the pedia- trician who dispenses less pain medicine to an African- American child realizes that’s what he’s doing. If you’re committing a microaggres- sion, it means that your im- plicit bias is unchecked, be- cause if you were aware and studied and worked to become aware of your unconscious bias, you wouldn’t say or do those things. Some of the terminology at your training sounds very academic, like intersection- ality, cisgender, affirming language, micro-invalida- tion. Is this a college-edu- cated middle-class attempt to police the thoughts, words or behavior of working class people? If you believe that, you’d have to think that sex- ual harassment is also a clas- sist attack. Until we devel- oped a vocabulary and a way of understanding sexual ha- rassment as a form of discrim- ination, we didn’t even have the concept of sexual harass- ment. You can’t combat it un- til you have a vocabulary to describe it. Microaggression theory is developing a vocab- ulary. It was developed in the counseling and teaching arena to try to explain to white peo- ple who are counselors and teachers and doctors how to relate to a patient who is dif- ferent. In your films, black people talk about white people touching their hair, and a woman in a wheelchair re- counts being asked by a stranger if she’s able to have sex. Are these just examples of really bad manners? This is about bias; you really can’t view it as just about manners. Some people will view this as being about “Don’t hurt peo- ple’s feelings by using words that might hurt them.” If that’s all people bring away from it and they change their behav- ior, then they’ll have to be constantly updated about the list of what’s appropriate and what’s not. They’re going to see it as a behavioral thing. I view this as a process of lis- tening. That’s why I made the films: I want people to listen to the voices of people who are from these different com- munities whose voices are generally not heard. — Don McIntosh ONLINE EXTRA Watch trailers for Diamond’s films on race, gender, and disability at diamondlaw.org/film-trailers. Her film on race is viewable in its en- tirety at youtu.be/ayBlSQxxKWM.
