“I have recognized and seen implicit bias all my life without understanding that being white immediately gives you ten more points than I have,” said Caldwell, a community organizer in Chapel Hill’s historically black Rogers Road neighborhood. “I’d like to see Chapel Hill become what it says it is in the liberal South: first in freedom. Freedom for who? Liberal for who?”
Chapel Hill’s Justice in Action Committee is in the middle of its two-part series on implicit bias at the Rogers Road Community Center.
The first installment of the series was presented Thursday by Keith Payne, a UNC psychology professor.
Implicit bias is one of Payne’s main areas of research and one of the topics he teaches about at UNC.
During the talk, Payne defined implicit bias as “what happens when we let automatic associations lead to disparate treatment, even when we intend to be fair.”
“People have this idea that prejudice is a thing of the past because they’re thinking about a very blatant Jim Crow type of racism,” Payne said. “People often fail to realize that we are all vulnerable to unintended biases that have big effects in daily life, even if we are not trying to discriminate.”
Allison De Marco, an adjunct professor in the School of Social Work, said the idea for a town discussion on implicit bias evolved from community conversation spurred by the recent events in Ferguson, Mo.
“We have been talking about how we might better respond to those kind of events and provide services that are more responsive to communities of color,” De Marco said.
