Would you Shoot?
You’re a participant in a video simulation featuring images of people either holding a gun or a harmless object. Your objective is to press the “shoot” button whenever you see someone holding a gun, and “don’t shoot” each time they’re holding the harmless object.
How do you think you would do?
It turns out, as researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder found, race matters. We are quicker to respond “shoot” to a black person holding a gun than to a white person holding a gun. We are also more likely to err and “shoot” a black person without a gun.
These participants are regular people, just like us. They likely want to think and act in a fair and objective manner – and yet, their actions demonstrate a clear racial bias.
The wrongful death and murder of black and racialized people is an atrocity that must stop. And stopping it requires seeing something within ourselves that we’d rather not see – for example, that we more easily connect blackness with criminality or immorality. That we’re instinctively more likely to tag black men as aggressive or threatening and to demonstrate less respect toward them.
Or, as numerous studies have shown us, that we’re less likely to see racialized candidates as qualified or competent.
How willing are you to face what you’d rather not see? That within your own, well-intentioned mind, you hold mental associations that lead you to see and treat certain groups of people less favourably than others.
Because it is only when we have the courage to peer inside of our own minds that we have the capacity to change our own behaviour. And that is how systems change. That is how societies change. It starts with us and it needs to start right now.
Two practical actions you can take:
Follow and learn from the incredible work at @outsmartinghumanminds
Take the IAT https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
