Implicit racism

     In Just Walk on By, by Brent Staples, we see the reactions that white women have while passing him on the street. Staples uses many anecdotes to show the number of times he scares a white woman. He also uses irony to demonstrate how foolish it is to mistake him for a mugger. For example, Staples describes himself as a softy who isn't able to hold a "knife to raw chicken - let alone hold it to a person's throat". However, people's reactions to him forces Staples to adapt. He has to whistle Vivaldi to put others at ease much like a "cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country".

     This essay made me think of implicit bias which is the unconscious attribution of certain qualities to certain groups of people. I read the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, during silent reading time last year, and in it, he describes how people are able to make decisions very quickly. One of the decisions that he analyzed was the association between white people and positive words and between black people and negative words. There is a test to see if you make these associations at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/agg/blindspot/indexrk.htm. According to Gladwell "more than 80 percent of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations" (Gladwell 39). These implicit biases can come from a variety of sources such as movies, TV shows, books, and music. In order to fix these biases, we must have equal representation in the entertainment that we consume.