This week New York school districts vote for board members and on budgets. Because of rightwing Republican efforts to mobilize white voters in a prelude to the 2022 mid-term Congressional elections, local elections are more contentious than in the past. In response to vitriolic campaign rhetoric, an editorial in Newsday, the local Long Island newspaper, made the following very important points.
- What should be taught in history classes is simply the truth of how the United States pioneered an evolving democracy and built tremendous prosperity, but also enslaved Blacks, slaughtered Native Americans, and repressed women.
- What ought to be taught about diversity is that everyone deserves equal rights, and that being treated with dignity and kindness and tolerance and acceptance cannot be based on skin color or sexuality or gender or ableness.
- Schools are not grooming kids, or devaluing them for whiteness or straightness.
The heated battles over the legitimacy of Critical Race Theory (CRT), affirmative action, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in universities, state legislatures, the courts, and K-12 school boards highlights the deep discomfort felt by many white Americans over any discussion of race and racism, in both the past and present. Instructional practices, course materials, and curriculums are scrutinized for any suggestion that they portray United States history and society in less than a positive light. K-12 teachers and university professors are condemned for introducing ideas that ant-CRT groups find disagreeable resulting in the creation of policies and new laws that threaten to cut off state university and school district funding if administrators fail to take action.
While these campaigns are often political efforts to rally conservative white voters as we saw in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, the public response to these appeals needs to be understood on a deeper psychological level if the United States is going to address lingering individual biases and systemic racism.
The application of the psychological concept of cognitive bias provides useful insight into the persistence of racial biases and helps to explain why some white people feel they can honestly claim, “I don’t see race” or “Racism no longer exists.” Everyone has learned ideas, usually unconscious, that allow them to make meaning of the deluge of information that continually inundates our brains..
The problem with a cognitive bias is that individuals and groups of individuals create their own subjective reality that may not correspond to what is happening in the actual world. Typical cognitive biases include listening to sources that affirm pre-existing beliefs and jumping on the first piece of information received. There is also a tendency to overestimate the number of people who agree with you because of the sources of your information and the network of people you are connected to. These cognitive biases reinforce stereotypical beliefs about other religious, racial, and ethnic groups. They contribute to beliefs in conspiracy theories and justify seeing people with opposing views as opponents who have to be defeated. Cognitive bias can explain the vast differences in how Americans understand the events in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.
Cognitive biases are continually confirmed as people generalize from limited experience. There is a crime in your neighborhood committed by someone you suspect has a prior criminal record or is an undocumented immigrant, even if these are rare occurrences, becomes proof that your fears and biases are legitimate.
A very powerful cognitive bias is the belief that the social system is fundamentally fair and that people who fail, fail because of their individual poor choices. This cognitive bias has been used to justify opposition to Critical Race Theory, affirmative action, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. It is difficult to challenge because it is continually reaffirmed by systematic racism in American society that keeps many African American and Latino families trapped in poverty with low wage jobs and living in crime infested areas, without access to quality housing, education, or health care.
The educational system, including the university, has a limited ability to challenge cognitive biases. Many sources impact on a student’s beliefs, their parents and peers, religion, and news and social media. As long as these other factors remain in place, fundamental changes in underlying attitudes may be exceedingly slow. These barriers have resulted in the battles for racial equality and social justice by the African American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s being refought over and over again.
CRT lessons and DEI workshops will never be enough to change how adults and children think about race and racism. Educational philosopher John Dewey, writing in the 1930s, argued for the primacy of experience in determining what students learn and that expanding and enriching student lives required that they have new and challenging experiences. Applying Dewey’s perspective to today’s classroom and world, in racially and economically segregated schools and communities, whatever teachers may say about the importance of equality and justice, students will learn that some people are better than others, that they made better choices, that they deserve what they have, and that inequality is just the way it is. Living in a segregated world reinforces these cognitive biases. University students then bring these cognitive biases with them to college.
Dewey also believed that the preservation of democracy requires a probing, critical, disciplined habit of mind that students must develop in school and that democratic movements for human liberation were necessary to achieve a fair distribution of political power and an “equitable system of human liberties.”
If Dewey was right, the most effective way to challenge cognitive bias and racism in American society is to change people’s experience. In the current political climate that will be a difficult task, but it is what has to be done to create a more equitable society.
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Dr. Eustace Thompson contributed to this post. He teaches school administration and policy at Hofstra University.