S2EP10 - Dolly Chugh - Implicit Bias & the Far-Reaching Effects of Systemic Racism

TRANSCRIPT

This is Make America Relate Again, presented by Better Angels Media. I’m Samia Mounts.

Before we get into this week’s special episode, a quick shout-out to Steven Johnson, who gave the show a 5-star review on Facebook, saying, “Meeting in the middle non-judgmentally is the only way for America to heal and move forward.”

I totally agree, and thank you, Steven, for your support of the show.

This week, instead of a conversation, I’m bringing you an interview with social psychologist and tenured professor at New York University, Dolly Chugh. Dolly has written an incredible book on implicit bias and how it can stop well-meaning people from improving and expanding upon their own perspectives to include those of others who may have had different experiences. The book is called The Person You Mean To Be: How Good People Fight Bias, and as of today, September 4, 2018, it’s available in bookstores everywhere.

Now, why am I featuring research on implicit bias on a show about politics? Because these hidden biases we all carry deeply affect our politics. If you don’t have a solid understanding of how our past of institutionalized racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ sentiment have affected those populations, it’s easy to think we don’t need policies designed to level the playing field or protect the rights of these groups. If you believe that the United States works as a pure meritocracy, where hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps works equally well for all people, regardless of race, sex, or sexual and gender orientation, then you may not support policies like affirmative action. You may not have an appreciation for efforts to introduce more diversity into our workplaces. If you are one of the majority - meaning, a white American - your position would be understandable, given your personal perspective. The idea of a perfect meritocracy is very appealing to all of us. I think it’s what we strive for.

But we don’t have a perfect meritocracy in our country, or in our world. There are a multitude of systems that have historically benefitted some people over others, and even though we live in a world  today that has progressed greatly since even fifty years ago, the ripple effects of those systems can still be observed - if you know where to look for them and how to see them. The fact is, most people are sheltered from this information, and we would all benefit from a better understanding of how our past is affecting our present.

Dolly’s book goes into all of that, and I’m thrilled to share some of her findings on the show today. Without further ado, here’s Dolly Chugh.

MUSIC

Samia:  Dolly, welcome to Make America Relate Again.

Dolly:  Samia, thank you so much for having me. I'm really honored to be here. 

Samia:  I'm honored to have you. Your work is incredible. I've been reading an advance copy of your book, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias, and I have to say, I've read a lot of articles trying to help people see where they might have bias and a lot of books on it, and I've never seen something where things were put in such a gentle way that I feel could actually reach people. 

Dolly:  Oh, wow. Thank you.

Samia:  Yeah. You did a wonderful job. I loved it. So, we're going to talk about some of the concepts in your book that I found especially compelling for me and educational. And I want to start with the concept of psychological threat. For a lot of people, especially people in the majority in the United States, the concept of privilege is really triggering to them. Can you go into some of the information we have on why that is?

Dolly:  Absolutely. So, let's begin with psychological threat. We sometimes also refer to that as self-threat. It's the idea that any identity you care a lot about, if anybody outside of you or any little voice in your mind challenges whether that identity applies to you, we kind of go into the red zone. We psychologically really flare up when that happens. If I have an identity of seeing myself as a great artist and someone's challenging whether I'm a great artist, I get defensive about it. And so psychological threat is just this mental defensiveness we have around identities we value. When we think about privilege, the word has come to be, I think, so charged, and it's for two different reasons, I would say. One is that the word privilege actually has multiple definitions and the definitions get confused. So the most everyday use of the word privilege is usually referring to socio-economic privilege, meaning you grew up in a upper-class home, upper middle-class home, lower middle-class... All the different iterations of that. And so sometimes people, when we talk about privilege, assume that's the meaning intended, when in fact it's not the meaning intended. It’s not referring exclusively to economic privilege. That's one place. But I think the richer, more psychological story around why the word privilege causes us so much psychological threat and self-threat is that it speaks to our desire to see ourselves as deserving. Two wonderful scholars named Taylor Phillips and Brian Lowery have done some really cool research, and they titled their paper “The Hard Knock Life Effect.” Remember that song from Annie, “The Hard Knock Life”? 

Samia:  Sure do. Sung it at auditions. 

Dolly:  Oh, I'm so tempted to ask you to sing a few bars right now. Will you? Will you?

Samia:  (singing) It’s a hard knock life for us!

Dolly:  Wow. There it is. 

Samia:  All right, go on. 

Dolly:  Okay. 

Samia:  We're not sidetracking. I want to hear your points. 

Dolly:  I know. But I also want to be the guest that gets you to sing. So I'm so far checking that off. 

Samia:  You did it. 

Dolly:  Yay! So, Taylor Phillips and Brian Lowery, they described the effects they were finding in their research, “The Hard Knock Life Effect,” and particularly, what they found - imagine this, imagine someone says to you, "How difficult was your childhood?" And then, before you answer the question, they say, "Well, hold on. Before you answer, most social scientists agree that even today, white Americans are advantaged in academics, housing, health care, compared to black Americans. Now, back to my original question. How difficult was your childhood?" And what they found in their research is, when white participants in their research studies were asked how difficult their childhood was and then, before they could respond, reminded about white advantages in certain domains or white privilege, their recounting of their childhoods was more difficult. They described more hardships. On a scale, they described it as a more challenging upbringing, and obviously, their childhood didn't change, their personal history didn't change in those mere few seconds, but in some ways, what happened was they just rewrote their personal histories a little bit, not in a deceptive way at all, but in a way that reflects that feeling of threat of being a deserving person. That identity I have that I want to feel what I have, I deserve. When that's threatened, we look for ways to kind of, "No, no, no really. It was a more difficult childhood." And it's not at all unique. That particular study looked at white privilege, but it's not at all unique to white people. I think that exact same phenomena would apply to any group of people if they were reminded of certain advantages and then asked to describe their childhood. So, the Hard Knock Life Effect is just an idea that this natural psychology, we fear others will think our advantages were unearned, that we're not deserving, and for that reason we push back. 

Samia:  Yeah, and it makes a lot of people feel psychologically unsafe. 

Dolly:  Yes. 

Samia:  How can normal, well-meaning people get past this kind of threat? How can we train ourselves to look inward more instead of pushing back with defensiveness?

Dolly:  Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest, that's my own struggle as well. That was a lot of the motivation to write this book, is exactly that question. How do we look for ways to grow and learn as opposed to shutting down? What I find in my research and the research of others is that a lot of it comes down to the beliefs we have about ourselves as a good person. I would say in most of our dialogue today, we have a really tiny little corner that we put ourselves in, that - the good person corner is one where there are no mistakes, there are no biases, unconscious or conscious, I don't slip up, I don't have blind spots. That good person version is so tight that's there's really no room to maneuver. The problem with that is that, as social psychologists, what we can tell you is a whole bunch of our human behavior is happening via our blind spots, and even the most well-meaning of us is going to mess up. I am a professor, I teach students, and I got an email from a female student telling me that I had assigned a sexist reading to my class. I'm a feminist, I have two daughters, how can... I totally went in to self-threat mode when I read that email. Or when I confused two students of the same race who look nothing alike, but I confused them for each other in front of the entire class. These are terrible mistakes, but they are mistakes that are potentially reflective of my own blind spots and the question is, if my definition of a good person is that tight little corner where there's no mistakes or bias, then when I get that email from that student about my reading, I'm not going to listen to her, I'm not going to learn from her, I'm not going to think about, how did I miss that in the reading? How did I assign that reading year after year and somehow never process the ways in which it was being perceived as sexist? Instead of learning from that, I am going to dismiss her, I'm going to label her a whiner in my head, and I'm going to keep assigning that reading. The place that I want to encourage people to go and the path and the tool I'm offering readers in my book is, rather than thinking of ourselves as good people in that tight corner, no room for growth or mistakes, what if we had a higher standard where we were good-ish people? Good-ish people are people who make mistakes, because that is what we all do, but good-ish people take ownership for their mistakes. They learn from them, they hold themselves to a higher standard when they make the mistake, and as a result good-ish people keep getting better. Good people in that narrow corner don't get better. And I think that's the place we want to go. It'll make it easier for us to hear about things like privilege. It'll make it easier for us to think about self-threat when it happens. When we go into the red zone, there's a path out. 

Samia:  So what I hear you saying is that the idea is to redefine what it means to be a good person to include, I guess, some humility about our own blind spots, as you said, and our own decisions and be able to say, "You know, I'm trying my best here and I'm going to give myself a break when I make mistakes, but I'm also going to learn from those mistakes."

Dolly:  I think that's right. But when we say "give ourselves a break,” it's not - yes, we're giving ourselves a break, but not like excusing it away giving it a break. Almost the opposite. It's in the good person mindset that we excuse it. Our minds are like Olympic gold medal gymnastic good at reconfiguring every series of thoughts we have and anything anyone else says to us, reconfiguring it, retumbling it, and making it somehow support that good person idea. We just find a way. Most of us care about our moral identity, as it's called, seeing ourselves as a good person. On a one to seven scale, most of us say a six or up. And so if we put ourselves in that tight corner, either/or a good person, we care deeply about being seen as a good person and feeling like a good person, then we shut down when anything threatens it. 

Samia:  Yeah. The idea is  wanting to always do better and being willing to improve and learn from those moments. Instead of shutting down, we want to open up. 

Dolly:  Super. That's exactly it. 

Samia:  Yeah. I struggle with all the things that you detailed in your book with your personal struggles with this, and I loved that you are so humble in admitting, "Yeah, I do these things, too. I am in no way this paragon of perfection when it comes to bias." And I thought that made your writing really relatable and easier to read, and hopefully for other people, too. 

Dolly:  Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. Thank you. And I do want to credit my editor, Stephanie Hitchcock, who helped me find a way to do that. And the way she described it is being the airbag for the reader. We're asking the reader to crash in to some stuff that's uncomfortable and that will hurt, but before they crash, I'll crash first, so I'll soften the blow a little bit. And I'm glad to hear that you responded to that, and I offer that as also a model for how we can, when we're talking to other people about their biases, their unconscious biases, their own blind spots, a way to have that conversation is to be the airbag for that other person. 

Samia:  Yeah. I love that. All right, another thing that I've really wanted to talk about with you, over the course of this show, and on one episode in particular, where I had a conservative white man and a liberal black man discussing the NFL protests, kneeling during the National Anthem. In that episode, I was trying to demonstrate how systemic institutionalized racism and the effects of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation all have ripple effects into today that really affect people who are young right now in ways that can't always even be seen by them. So, in your book you presented this thought experiment around this young woman named Colleen, who was very convinced of the boot strap mentality. You know, meritocracy, you work hard, you get the American Dream. And then you took her through, what would her life have been like if her family had been black, going back to her grandfather? Can you lead us through that thought experiment a little bit?

Dolly:  Absolutely. Absolutely. This is the idea of thinking about the what-if scenario. So, I too struggle with thinking about, how do we understand something that happened over generations and something that has such cumulative effects? So, the way we try to think about that, Colleen is a composite of three real people. I know who those three people are, but all three asked to be anonymous. And then I just combined their personal information so that it was clear that nobody was identified by the information I shared about them. The result was Colleen. And let's imagine that Colleen is a white person in her mid-30s today in 2018, and she looks back at a good childhood. She had her own room, she had her own computer, her family would take cool vacations, but sort of vacations she viewed as normal, vacations that all her friends took, Disney, Washington, DC, go see the national monuments. She grew up in a good neighborhood, as she would describe it. She went to what she described as a good school. And most of her friends, most of her neighbors, were white, just like her. And in her life, this upwardly mobile life she had was a result of her parents' and grandparents' very hard work. Her grandparents were born into immigrant families, they were a classic pull yourself up by the boot straps kind of story. One of her grandfathers served in World War II in the US Armed Forces, and when he came home, he was able to access the benefits of the GI Bill, which was, as a reminder, passed three weeks after D-Day, and was sweeping legislation that, when we read about it in the history books, it often speaks about the way the GI Bill created middle-class America, because it offered veterans home ownership through mortgages and zero down payment, or very low interest mortgages. It also offered college tuition, so veterans could come back from the war and go to college. So an entire generation, we saw a huge spike in home ownership and college attendance. The number of college graduates in America tripled within that generation, so it was a real tipping point in economic history in America, and of wealth accumulation. And as a result, so Colleen's grandfather went to college as a result of the GI Bill, and as we know, being a college graduate is very predictive of whether your children will be college graduates, and that your grandchildren, and whether you own a home will predict whether... is very predictive statistically of whether your children will own a home. And in fact, that's exactly what happened for Colleen. Her grandparents were able to own a home and go to college, and then her grandfather was able to go to college, and then her parents were able to do the same. And they were able to, as a result, provide her with a childhood where they could save enough for her college education. She didn't have to apply for financial aid, she didn't have to work during college to pay for her expenses. She drank in college like many people do, but she had a fake ID, and she never worried about the consequences if she got arrested. She didn't have to worry about supporting her siblings or her parents while she was in college. They had the financial resources they needed. And if she had a bad semester, her parents had been to college. They knew how to help her navigate what to do. "Go talk to your professor. Let's find an undergrad advisor and maybe get a tutor. Let's drop that course before it shows up on your transcript." They knew how to navigate all that. She graduates from college debt-free, and is able to take jobs that allow her to not necessarily make enough money to support all her living expenses, because her parents give her an old car, they give her generous holiday gifts that allow her to pay for nice work clothes, or a phone. They help her out with security deposits, things like that. And all this time, she's certainly working hard, continuing the strong work ethic in her family's tradition, but doing so with that tailwind of financial security, college attendance, and home ownership in her history. So we'll pause there and say, okay, that's Colleen's story as it actually happened. What if Colleen was black? What if her parents and grandparents had been black? What would have her story looked like? And it's in fact of course a thought experiment. We know that there's a wide range of experiences, but we can probabilistically kind of guess on average what were the experiences of a white World War II veteran versus say a black World War II veteran. And Colleen, in fact, she herself is the one who began walking me through this thought experiment when I interviewed her. She started just breaking it down. It began with the fact that first of all, her grandfather very well would not… may not have been able to serve in the armed forces, that it was very difficult for black applicants to the military to be deemed suitable for service. They were often deemed unsuitable for service. So he would have had to been extraordinarily lucky to even be allowed to serve his country. Chances are her family would have lived in the South. Three quarters of the nation's African Americans were living in the South at the close of World War II, because slavery was a very fresh legacy at that point. And so in fact, if we even really think about it, Colleen's grandparents' grandparents, maybe even her grandparents' parents, so we're talking about somebody right now, 35 years old, their great grandparents might in fact have been enslaved. So that's a pretty fresh legacy in a family. If they were enslaved, they might have been separated. Their families, mothers, fathers, and children were often bought and sold separately, may have been raped, may have born children into slavery. This would have been part of her family's legacy. Let's go back to her grandfather. If her hypothetically black grandfather - let's say he got lucky. He was one of the lucky ones who was allowed to serve his country, and he went, he fought in World War II, thankfully came back alive, and now the GI Bill is available, providing these amazing benefits that are going to change the entire face of America. Full tuition. So he might have tried to go to college. He knew that was going to be critical, but at that time, very few colleges were accepting black students. His chances of even finding a college that would accept him, very slim. They would put higher criteria on black applicants than white applicants, so he would have had to be not only more qualified, he would have had to be more lucky than Colleen's white grandfather. If he did go to college, if he was in that lucky group, he likely got a very hostile welcome. He might have been on a campus where they chanted, "Two, four, six, eight, we won't integrate," or he might have been on a campus where the black students were not allowed to live on campus where all the white students lived, they had to find housing elsewhere on their own. He very likely would never have seen a black professor, and he very likely would have had white professors who had never before had a black student, or a black classmate, or a black professor themselves. So he would have been a first in almost every way. And, you know, college is hard. College is hard for all of us, for anyone, and this makes it really hard for someone. So okay, let's say he pushes through. This hypothetical black grandfather is just the most exceptional. He somehow gets through, or alternatively, he goes to a historically black college or university, the HBCUs, but they had very few spots. One estimate from historians says that there would have been an additional 50,000 African Americans who would have applied to college had there... veterans who would have applied using the GI Bill to college if only there had been spots, but there were so few. In the white colleges and the black colleges, we had very few spots. But okay, let's say he somehow pushes through, what would he have studied? In the historically black colleges and universities, they had no PhD programs, they had no engineering programs. They had such limited resources. Their programs tended to be in fields that are deeply important, but also tend to be low-paying: education, theology, the trades. So even if he was one of the luckiest that got through, his education would not have been the sort of ticket to financial security that it might have been for Colleen's white grandfather. So right there, one of the seminal benefits of the GI Bill would not have been easily accessible, or accessible at all, to Colleen's black grandfather. Additionally, we have the home ownership piece of it, and this was one piece that I was just so... all of this, by the way, let me pause and say everything I'm sharing was stuff I learned through the writing of this book. I knew none of it. In fact, if you look at my book proposal, none of this appears in it. When I signed with my publisher, it was all learned through the process of writing the book. And it might be worth, once we get through Colleen's story, talking about why that is true. I'm not surprised I didn't know it, because I wasn't the world's best history student, but I've talked to others who know more, and they haven't known it either. So let's talk about his attempts to purchase a home using the mortgage opportunities made available by the GI Bill. Well, one of the agreements that historians have now documented when they look back at the legislative process that led to the GI Bill, was there was a big tug-of-war between whether states would control how the GI Bill was implemented, or whether the federal government would. And in the end, they gave states control over who would receive the benefits of the GI Bill. What that meant, is a number of states, for example, southern states, crafted eligibility requirements that made it difficult for African Americans to access those benefits. So one analysis looked at the first 67,000 mortgages that came out of the GI Bill. Fewer than 100 were taken out by people of color. So now we have the big home ownership boost that is meant to be carried by the GI Bill also not applying to the black veteran. We have localities that are explicitly excluding blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. Levittown, which is often referred to as sort of the classic first suburb in America, the first suburb on Long Island, Levittown, they very explicitly said, quote unquote, "Their homes could not be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race." So even if that veteran - Levittown is on Long Island, which is in the northern - it's a suburb of New York City - so even if you weren't in a southern state, but even if you could somehow get that mortgage, you still couldn't move into the quote unquote, "good," neighborhood. And I'm putting good in quotes. So we see today, if we bring ourselves back to where we are now, this is what we see. We see neighborhoods that have traditionally been white staying white. We see home ownership being passed down through families. We see wealth being accumulated. The black family of Colleen would not have accumulated wealth throughout the generations, probabilistically. Her mom, by the way, would have been... if she was like 85% of black women at the time of World War II, she would have worked in agriculture or in a domestic related job, perhaps cleaning homes, because those were the positions available at the time. And what that meant is that two other important laws at the time, social security and minimum wage, would have excluded her. Those laws explicitly excluded domestic and agricultural workers, so she wouldn't have made minimum wage, probably wouldn't have made minimum wage, and she wouldn't have had social security benefits accumulating to help her in her retirement. That would have fallen on Colleen. So in college when she could have been out studying, socializing, she would have been working part-time jobs to help support her parents, who wouldn't have had the opportunity to accumulate the wealth to protect their own retirement and support her other siblings. I'll pause there.