Racial, ethnic, and gender biases are alive and well, yet not at the surface level you might imagine. Most of us don’t realize how insidious bias is until we examine our own conditioned judgments. We’re all products of our environments, and those environments influence us in subtle, usually subconscious ways from before we even develop conscious memory. As a result, our brains fill in the gaps around facts with context—context provided by our conditioning.
The problem is we’re not taught, and most of us don’t think, to question what’s down in the basement of our subconscious minds until we catch ourselves in the act of watching how they work.
Read these ten double standards about the Democrats and Republicans (mostly Obama and McCain) and take the bias test yourself. How many statements do you find yourself agreeing with and do you even know why? How many have you seen perpetuated by mainstream media and have you ever wondered why the journalistic profession—the hallmark of which is supposed to be unbiased reporting—has taken sides?
It’s time we all answer. Dig deep. A successful future not only for America, but especially for each of us as humans depends upon developing better visual acuity. Let’s learn to see past ingrained double standards in order to arrive at a clearer vista from which we do not judge shallowly, but instead use our critical thinking to the best of our ability; then perhaps decide we are not qualified to judge at all.
Or at least, from which we do not judge until we have gathered the facts and weighed them with a well-developed sense of our own individual discernment, in more than ten seconds. Until we have investigated ourselves rather than taken on faith what we hear in a thirty-second sound bite on CNN.
1A) If you’re a minority and you’re selected for a job over more qualified candidates, you’re a “token hire.”
1B) If you’re in the majority and you’re selected for a job over more qualified candidates, you’re a “game changer.”
2A) Black teen pregnancies? A “crisis” in black America.
2B) White teen pregnancies? A “blessed event,” or the subject of heart-warming movies like Juno.
3A) If you’re a Democrat and you make a VP pick without fully vetting the individual, you’re “reckless.”
3B) A Republican who doesn’t fully vet is a “maverick.”
