Writing at USA Today, NAACP President Derrick Johnson says we should all be tested for implicit racial bias. And what, I ask, if we did that testing and discovered that an overwhelming majority of people of all races and ethnicities were, in fact, biased? What if we discovered that bias against those unlike oneself was a hard-wired part of being human?
Railing against bias is like railing against wisdom teeth, the vermiform appendix or the addictive personality. Or near-sightedness, for that matter. It is, COTTonLINE believes, an evolved part of being human.
Maybe bias is a part of us we’d rather not have in these “enlightened” times, but a part nevertheless. And one that had evolutionary relevance and value over the longer haul of human development.
Wishing it would go away is unlikely to make it do so. Fighting bias will prove, we believe, a Sisyphean task, endlessly frustrating.
On the other hand, its very persistence should provide total job security for an NAACP President. Unlike what preventing polio did to the March of Dimes, bias isn’t going away anytime soon.
