In my education (BSW/MSW) I was asked to take the implicit bias tests more than once. Truthfully, I went into them expecting some bias to pop up because of my background and life experiences. I grew up in a very small rural town with little diversity. However, I do consider myself to have worked hard on anti-racism, educating my self, and opening up my eyes beyond my first hand experiences. My biggest surprise was actually that many of my results came back with no bias at all (even ones that I feel like I do have a bias on-i.e. politics). Initially it brought me great joy, but I think the greatest thing is to use these simply as a guiding principle and instead of focusing on where no bias came back, looking at the ones that did and educating myself to hopefully help lessen my implicit thoughts.
Yeah, I don't think these tests are a perfect reflection of reality. I think they can be easily skewed, especially if you've taken them more than once. The things that makes me realize that I definitely have bias are things like being surprised by what the folks look like in some of these videos, that they don't match the images I have in my head, or how I often expect certain behaviors from people just because of the way they look. I try to catch myself, but it's difficult to fight the conditioning. I think the only thing I can do is keep at it, and eventually, it will become second nature.
As I took the Implicit Bias tests, I wondered how our own experiences and/or past traumas reflect in responses.
My biggest surprise was not that I had a slight preference towards African Americans, but that I strongly associated Asian Americans with Foreign and European Americans with American. I cringed through all four IATs but I'm glad I took them.
These tests were very anxiety provoking but also helpful
I was finding myself not breathing during the test because they were causing me stress. I had to keep reminding myself to breathe during the tests. I was unsurprised that I was moderately biased for race and skin tone because of my up bringing and I have been working to lessen my implicit biases. But I was surprised that for Native Americans I was slightly biased to associated native Americans with USA landmarks and white Americans with foreign ones. Which I thought was very interesting. Perhaps because this is the one type of racism I have been aware of the most, they taught about this in school to some extent how awful we have always been to natives, and I have always tried to think of them as being more native to this land than white Americans. I definitely have some work to do and it did make me a little uncomfortable.
I got the same result with the Native Americans and USA landmarks. I think it's because I have visited several of those places and all of them, even Niagara Falls if I remember right, have exhibits and displays about the native population of the area. Maybe this is a illustration of why that type of education is important?
These tests were eye opening to me and I want to examine my biases or lack of even further. I was a little surprised that I had little to no association of Asian Americans with Foreign. I am part Chinese so perhaps that is one indicator but my great-grandparents were the generation that emigrated from China so I've always thought of that part of my family as being semi-new to America.