Racism - Unconscious Bias and How it can Bite You

This is one of the dogs I had at the post office

I went to the post office. I had our dogs, Emily and Aggie, with me. Aggie gets nervous if I go out of sight, so I tied them up just outside the big plate glass window, where they would be able to see me at the counter. I had to spend a bit of time in there, because I was sending off some books.

A man I know slightly - let's call him Fred - came in after a few minutes. Hey Tabitha, he said. There's an Asian man out there, he's afraid of your dogs. 

I looked out, and sure enough, there was a man looking rather tentative to go past the kids. Well, they are quite big. Not everyone's comfortable with large dogs. I went out to reassure him. I stood between him and the dogs, so he would feel safe. Don't worry, I told him. They're really gentle, they wouldn't hurt a fly.

'Oh, yes,' said the man. 'I was just worried I'd step on his little paws.' I noticed he did not have an accent. That is, of course everyone has an accent, but he didn't have a foreign acccent; not even a trace of one.

I think it's worth looking at this. The first thing I notice about it is that, although Fred described this guy as 'an Asian man', he had no accent, and was therefore as Australian as Fred and me. In my book, anyway. If you haven't got an accent, you're not a foreigner. This has always worked for me. So Fred assigned him to a category based purely on his features. That's the first thing. Why was it necessary, or even of interest, to comment about the person's racial type? Was this the first thing Fred noticed? If so, why?

The second thing, arising from the first, is that Fred made the assumption that the man's hesitation to walk past the dogs was caused by fear of them. I have no doubt whatever that this was connected to the first thing. Fred is a dog man, as I am, and being frightened of dogs wouldn't be the natural first thing to come to his mind. I think Fred assumed that because he was Asian, the guy was frightened of dogs. 

Let's not get into whether a lot of Asian people are, in fact, afraid of dogs. It's really beside the point. Lots of Europeans are afraid of large dogs. Whether this fear is more a feature of Asian than of European societies, I don't know. I don't care, either. I don't need to know that to be considerate about my dogs upsetting someone who is nervous. It's quite sufficient to deal with the individual case.

What I am getting at here, in my circuitous way, is that this is a thing. This making of automatic assumptions about people, based on racial characteristics. And it's not the kind of thing where we can smugly write it off, saying, oh that guy, he's such a bigot. Because Fred is not a raving bigot. He's a good man. I've known him for years. He'd be utterly mortified at any suggestion that he was racist, and I'm quite, quite sure that he never consciously is. Consciously. And yet.

We can all catch ourselves at this from time to time. The human brain is prone to categorise and generalise; if we didn't we'd be far at the other end of the spectrum. A certain amount of it allows us to go about our daily lives effectively. But when we allow ourselves to apply it to humans, we fall short of what we should expect of ourselves. Just because a person is Dutch, their house isn't necessarily going to be super clean. A person with red hair isn't always quick-tempered. An African looking person isn't necessarily frightened of dogs. In fact, he might not even be African. Who hasn't seen someone who looked Japanese or whatever and then came out with a Scots accent?  Personally, I think accent is a really good way to assign people to a catgory. Accent, speech patterns, language in general come from culture, and that's a much better guide to what someone is going to be like, although of course that too is fallible and will trip you up when you least expect it.

My big point, and I know I've been a while getting to it, because it's New Year's Day and a fabulous party has left my brain a little on the fuzzy side, is that each individual human is unique. I think we all expect or even demand to have that individuality recognised by others; that's why people who speak from a script are so offensive. And, as with any right, the flip side of it is a duty, so we should always be on our guard against our tendency to fail in recognising the individuality of others.

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