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.