How I learned about my white privilege through the Implicit Association Test

 After reflecting a lot on last friday's conversation- I thought about how much harm and ignorance I had just witnessed and why we were all just exposed to that. While listening to the discussion and frankly, the dismissal of one of our peers opinions and real-life experiences, my instant reaction was to think "why do you not understand that it is white privilege to be educated in, and be able to practice "good parenting" techniques? Also why don't you understand that these systems or "options" as they were referred to as- where put in place for middle class white families, not a working black single-mother? Then after writing our media lit Haikus' about "what is your why" and "how to you believe students learn?" so many of you wrote about giving their students a voice and about the importance of connection and relationships- but I had just watched you be told a story of of someone real-world experiences and you didn't want to here it- they just don't get it. Some of you discounted the experience of a black person because you thought that you knew better- someone who was not even a mother, dared to tell this person how they should have acted instead. When racism happens in front of my face, I tend to argue not just type docilely in the chat- and I do regret that I did not do more- I should have done more. So here is what i'm going to do, i'm going to tell you about how I began my anti-racist journey and what knowledge this has afforded me: 

1. I have white privilege. 

2. This white privilege is harmful and damaging to black and brown youth when I do not recognize it and don't to the work and take the steps to do better. 

3. For me, this meant I needed to take myself out of these spaces to allow room for educators who my students will connect better with and learn better from. 

I worked for 5 years in lower south Providence elementary schools running OST programs and I was accepted into the Youth Development MA program the same month that George Floyd was murder and I first heard about the Black Lives Matter movement. I really had zero exposure to anti-racism and had always been taught "color-blindness" in child care, or to see each child as 'equal' regardless of the color of their skin I also had a white-savorist complex thanks to my father a school teach in Pawtucket (this is wrong, if you didn't know). I started off at ground zero, ignorantly and subliminally racist without even know it, but once I did- I have never looked back. 

The single most important tool that helped me recognize how I was unknowingly racist and what finally made it all click in my head was by taking Harvard University's Implicit Association Test.  <<< I've linked it here, please PLEASE PLEASE, consider taking this test before or after reading my blog post- I am really hoping it will help it all click for some of you as much as it did for me!  

What is it? 

Malcom Gladwell summarizes it best in his book "Blink":

“[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately . . . But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And . . . we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.”

So I took this test thinking "i'm a good person, I treat everyone equally and am kind to all- I already know how I am going to do on this test." Needless to say after taking it and thinking over the questions (I don't want to give too much away as not to prepare you for what questions are asked) I realized that everything in my white upper middle-class life: my family and friends, my private school education, the religion I practiced, the sports I played, the hobbies I held, the books I read, the media I consumed, the national leaders I listened to; had conditioned me to think that White people=Good and Black people= Bad- and that no matter how I thought I treated people my subliminal racism could still manifest in hurtful ways. 

It has been a long journey since then and I still have a lot of work to do, every day. I relied heavily on my Youth Development Community and my fellow YDev majors to guide and teach me and was lucky enough to have this space to grow and learn- but I did it all without doing harm to others. This was the most important part of my process- if I wasn't absolutely certain of the opinion I had- I asked questions or kept my mouth shit and LISTENED to what my other, more educated peers had to say, and learned from their example. This is something I still practice everyday. 

Again I would highly encourage anyone who had the slightest interest to take the Implicit Association Test, it may just change your life, but it will 1000% change the lives of the black and brown students you work with.