LOL What I appreciate even more is that the polite discourse between us is an example of the civility we can and should expect as Americans. It is honest and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Your article, in the way that it is framed, presents a rarefied opportunity to deliberate on the topic of implicit bias from the perspective of race. In trying to prove that argument to be reasonable you would have to negate the extenuating circumstances that attribute to the bias being reinforced in the subconscious and not in my opinion innately of the unconscious.
The realm of the unconscious serves more to the instinctual side of the human equation. If we are both stranded on an island and looking to survive until rescued, racism is not an instinct that would kick in unconsciously, because its motivation bares no significance nor effect to our survival, unless the thoughts and beliefs preconceived of me based on race is so endangering as to be repressed causing an involuntary action to execute me at some unsuspecting time. At that point congratulations your chances of survival has diminished dramatically. If it weren’t repressed you don’t identify the threat from merely the color of my skin but in the facial and behavioral attitudes exhibited. This is as close as we can get to testing this in a vacuum.
My near brush with death in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of a small beach Jacksonville, Fl would preclude me from hunting fish because it would not bode well for my survival to have this memory accessible in the subconscious. It is therefore repressed in the unconscious in this aspect and inaccessible.
In other words its not in the pre-programming it is in the re-programming that the bias resides and it is usually preserved in the subconscious level.
There is little overlap between the two states of mind but it usually is a result of context or semantics. However, unconscious bias is more forgiving than subconscious bias — especially from a legal standpoint. This is probably why you tend to cling to this notion that implicit bias via race is unavoidable. Race is socially constructed, just as groups are, and groups tend to want to preserve themselves from the threat of other groups. And in all instances the threat imagined from other groups is actually a figment of the oppressive or authoritative group leader’s imagination.
So let me get to the the part where you say … “In my own experience, I’ve become much more likely to be suspicious of the intentions of Whites than before,[…]”. I believe you. I believe this stems from you recognizing the illusion behind the notion of the White Man’s Burden in particular. (By the way if your wife is from the Philippines then this is 100 percent coincidental that I bring this up. (lol) I mean no disrespect by it.) Embedded in that immoral premise is the vanity and insanity of whiteness and another allusion to white supremacy or patriarchy under the guise of false charity. In your approximations to other whites you are probably more intimately picking up on their guilty, yet resentful sentiment or attitudes which makes no sense to you the more you think about it.
As Mr. Shultz put it in a recent Medium post I happen to come across as recent as earlier today.
The white man’s burden is that he thinks he’s superior to everyone else when he actually isn’t. His feeling of superiority is illusorily based in regularly dominating others in order to cover up the scandal that he is no better than anyone else. When he cannot dominate he becomes enraged because failure to dominate exposes the ultimate futility of his endeavors to be or become superior.
That takes tremendous group buy-in and apparently you ain’t buying that and neither am I, or any other minority for that matter who resists the notion that we are the so-called “White Man’s Burden”. Why would you as an individual take it upon yourself or commit yourself into thinking that all of these non-white people around you is a burden to you because you were born with or blessed with according to Kipling with white skin? Why would internalizing this as a virtue (a false one) make you even more virtuous? That sort of altruism would not make you feel better about yourself it is just another form of cognitive dissonance. Capitalism allows you to think that this is somewhat plausible, but acts of false charity actually reinforce oppression and thus racism. Charity is unnecessary if we have complete solidarity and equality.
It is this level of awareness that is effective in how you lessen any type of bias.
Once again I appreciate the polite dialogue.
