By Sam Louie
Psychology Today
As a psychotherapist, our training teaches us to be aware of our bias and prejudice when working with clients. It’s not that we don’t have it but what is critical is acknowledging it when it occurs and thinking if this negatively impacts our work with clients. If so, we must refer out and/or do more work on ourselves.
I recently took an implicit bias test (link below) to see how I view Whites and Blacks and some of the questions that came up gave me more understanding on how I came to be.
Questions included (answered on a scale of strongly disagree to neutral to strongly agree):
“I prefer White people to Black people?”
“How warm do you feel towards White or Black people?”
“At a party, what is your comfort level starting a conversation with a Black person?”
“Do you have anxiety interacting with African Americans?”
“If you were in a room full of African Americans, what would be your comfort level?”
First off, the test forced me to acknowledge my bias which oftentimes goes against how we want to appear before others as being non-biased or neutral on issues of race or religion.
RELATED: Project Implicit
The also reminded me of a comment an ex-girlfriend made when I was working in a Midwest newsroom during my early journalism career. She said something to the effect, “How come you only hang out with the African American employees?” I initially was caught off-guard as I didn’t realize that was my primary circle of friends outside the newsroom and then it dawned on me.
Similar to my results from the implicit bias test, I had not realized I had developed a comfort level with African Americans having grown up in a predominantly Black neighborhood of South Seattle. Consequently, I had not developed these same feelings with White people.
People often joke or make references to the “White, middle-aged, man” but until I was in my mid-20’s, these people were scarce in my life. The only ones I knew growing up were school principals who doled out corporal punishment (permissible at the time) so I developed a healthy respect and avoidance from them. Thus, on an unconscious level, my own implicit bias was that White men needed to approached with caution as I had not developed enough trust to let down my guard and seek relationships outside of work with them. Fortunately, once this was revealed to me, I took steps to build relationships with White people.
Another example has to do with Asian-on-Asian bias. As a Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong, I had a negative bias towards Chinese from the mainland who speak Mandarin. The bias or stereotype I had was that mainland Chinese are uneducated, uncouth, pushy, and rude. Since the community I was familiar with didn’t have mainland Chinese, these stereotypes persisted. It didn’t help when some of the stereotypes got confirmed in my first interactions with them overseas in Europe.
Yet in the years since, I’ve been able to find others who defied those stereotypes and have been gracious, warm, and educated. I share this because we live in an age where there may be great fear in offending others with our bias or stereotypes, but until we first acknowledge them and make it permissible to talk about these issues, then we stand the chance of staying stuck and disingenuous with our thoughts and feelings.
It takes courage and humility to acknowledge our negative bias and a desire to work through them. Some people and/or generations of people have been traumatized by others of a different ethnic background through war, genocide, slavery, and other atrocities so the journey could be longer in those instances as healing must also be addressed.
Sam Louie is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in addictions, Asian American issues and Christian counseling. Prior to therapy, he worked more than a dozen years as an Emmy Award-winning television news reporter where he researched and reported on a number of stories related to addictions, culture and psychotherapy. You can reach him at www.samlouiespeaks.com.
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