Mom: There are mostly mixed race and black families next door in the apartment buildings and there are two other guys who go out to smoke too. I see them sometimes and we nod to each other
Mom: Jesus, I see these things on the news and I just wanna. I don't know. Ask if I can do anything or check up on the neighbors and go "I'm white but I wanna do stuff to help you out."
Me: That's better than a lot of people. Proud of you, mom. We're just like. Consciously trying to fight against unconscious bias here, especially on a personal level. Like, racism isn't born with you, they did a bunch of studies with kids and everything. I was definitely much less prejudiced than I am now, I think. I have to be constantly evaluating my brain
Mom: There's this guy in the park and he's black. And he was wandering back and forth and I was watching him. Come to find out, he's fucking exercising.
Me: Same with me sometimes. I think we're not overtly racist but we have a lot of privilege and where both of us grew up, it was extremely segregated so we weren't exposed to other people who weren't white. Part of the reason I liked this neighborhood was because I knew it was a mixed one and my kids would grow up around people with different culters
Me: Practice, I guess. Reevaluate ourselves every time we make judgement calls - start expanding the social circle to include people who you get along with through shared hobbies but who might not be white or something.
the number one way to reduce implicit/subconscious bias is to get to know other people in the relevant groups, and best of all if you can do non-hierarchical teamwork with them
they use reaction times and sorting tasks to figure out how strongly you associate two things, like "women and homemaking" or "black people and weapons"
I'm really bummed because the Lowell Folk Festival was canceled this year for obvious public safety reasons but it has so much cool shit from all over too
yeah the best part was that they had all these different food stands with the country names on them so you could go around and meet people and eat the food from their home countries
my company just made us all do a training on this