 Usually, at this time, I give a pitch, but we didn't even say things to us. But instead of that done, we put a feeling of the time tonight. I will say that I know the new, who are interested in issues, and the series they're covering. There's a sheet in the back of the room, which is resources, so you can do further moving and finding out about these things. And now, I will turn it over to Savannah Davis, who will tell us a little bit. She's Executive Director of Racial Equity, and she will tell us a little bit about her job, and then I can move on from there. Thank you. Gracias. Buenos tardes. Buenos noches. Almost. I'm Savannah Davis. Very, very pleased to be here with you all tonight. And as was just mentioned, I am your Executive Director for Racial Equity for the State of Vermont for the last six months-ish and counting. So I am a seasoned Vermonter. And have learned quite a bit in these last six months. I will briefly talk about this role a little bit, but I know that I'm not who you really came to see, so I'll leave my comments brief. This is a role that was created by and after the legislature in 2018, signed into law by the governor in June of 2018. And it creates this role and an advisory panel of five appointees that acts in an advisory capacity to the person in this role. The tasks are numerous. The staffing, you are looking at it. Some of the things that I'm required to complete are top-to-bottom organizational review of all three branches of state government who identify systemic racism. Step two. Overseeing the statewide collection of raised data, developing performance targets and metrics, developing and conducting trainings for state agencies, developing model diversity policies and best practices, serving as liaison to the Governor's Workforce Equity and Diversity Council, the Governor's Cabinet, and the Human Rights Commission. And I've been made aware that there are at least three bills this session to expand those duties. Oh, and there's a five-year sunset on it as well. So we have a lot of work to do. Because one person cannot do all of that, it requires that all of you also participate. And in order for you to do that, you have people like Board who are here to help you understand the nature of the issues and have a tap with us. So I'm so happy to see that we have a full room here tonight because one of the most important things in my work is getting people in this state comfortable having conversations about equity. If we don't talk about it, we are guaranteeing ourselves not to do anything about it. But having a conversation can be hard, especially in a state like ours that's so homogenous. How do we have a conversation about equity as members of dominant groups without accidentally or intentionally centering ourselves in those conversations? It requires that we learn when to step forward and when to step back, when to take our guidance and our leadership from other people. And as you all know, there are two different kinds of leadership. There's leadership from people with lived experience, leadership from impacted groups. And then there's leadership in title and in positions of authority that are designated and carved out. Lucky for this crowd, Gory Ann has both. She completed her BA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and then her Juris Doctor from the University at Michigan. I'm sorry, Minnesota, and I apologize, I have a cheat sheet because she has a long illustrious career and I couldn't remember from University of Minnesota Law School. Before she came to Vermont, she was actually a college instructor for a legal studies program. There she practiced law and family law, government and social security administration and representing indigent clients and victims of domestic violence. She came to Vermont and in 2015 joined the Human Rights Commission as a staff attorney investigating claims of discrimination in housing, government, work, service and places of public accommodation. That's a lot of experience. It's a lot of experience as a person with lived experience working with communities, working with young people, working with impacted populations and then working with government to address these issues. Today, we are fortunate to have her as our state's executive director for the Human Rights Commission and as legal counsel to the Human Rights Commission. In that role, she supervises investigations. She litigates on behalf of the public good. She advances policies on civil rights. I have run into her a number of times. I've already testified with the State House just this session alone. And she conducts trainings like these on infestive bias, on fair housing, bullying, harassment, pacing. So I'm extremely excited to see her speak for the first time, actually, since my being here. I hope you all are too. And I ask you to join me in welcoming our Human Rights Commission executive director, Oryang. That was so nice. What an honor to be introduced by Susanna. Thank you so much. I always thought the work of the Human Rights Commission was way too big and not enough for the five and out six of us. But then I think about the work that you have to do for one of you. And I go, oh, at least somebody in state government is doing a lot more. Or has a harder, larger mandate than us. Thank you for being here tonight. It is cold and it is late. And I am so appreciative that this is a room that is full of people who are engaged and interested in this topic. So thank you so much. Can I ask for the light? Yeah. Also, I want to say that we do have recording tonight, and press is also here. And so I want to just share that in case anything that we talk about today sort of triggers a memory or encourages you to share a personal story is that sometimes people may not feel comfortable knowing that press is here. And also that I would ask press to sort of just be mindful that sometimes the stories that are shared here are personal and intended for this audience, but not necessarily intended for the larger audience. So just to be mindful of that. All right. So implicit bias. Oh boy. Okay. Anytime you talk about bias, wow. Okay. I would say that throughout this conversation tonight, and I really do call it a conversation, there's going to come a point where it might be a little bit uncomfortable. And I think that we need to start getting into a position of being comfortable with being uncomfortable if we're actually going to make change or see change happen. And so just kind of be mindful with that. Of that, if you at any point feel uncomfortable, one, I'm completely open to being challenged. I've done this training a lot to lots of different kinds of people, many of whom have challenged me. And that is great and perfect. And that actually helps the discussion. But also sort of just sit with that for a second if you're uncomfortable and ask yourself, why does this make me uncomfortable? And then if you're not like okay with wanting to challenge, we can certainly talk about it afterwards. So feel free to email me a challenging question or to raise a concern. And also this is a training that is constantly changing. And so I would appreciate any advice or opinions that you might have about it too. All right? Okay, so let's get started. So I'm going to start with a story because I like stories. I learned from hearing stories. So I moved here from Minneapolis about five years ago. And Minneapolis has been sort of this mecca or this city that has been very immigrant friendly. In the neighborhood that I lived in, we had a lot of Somali new Americans. I think Minnesota is home to 52,000 plus Somali Americans. And yes. And it so happened that my neighborhood was very diverse and had a lot of Somali Americans. And I drive down this street called Lake Street. And it's about 35 miles per hour, but I'm going 40 miles per hour down this, which is acceptable. Okay? So I'm going 40 miles per hour. The rule is if you go five, you're good. Okay? Some people say 10, but not me. So I'm going 40 miles per hour. On occasion, I would see a Somali man or woman step out into the middle of traffic and put their hands up. Okay? And at first it really shocked me because I was like, oh boy, this is very dangerous. Don't do that. And then after a few times, I'd go, what the heck, lady? That's not okay. Right? So you get to, I mean, getting angry. I'm a pretty compassionate person. But there was a part of me that was like, this is just plain dangerous. You can't just put your hand out in traffic and expect people to stop. So like a few years after that, I'm at a CLE and CLE for non-lawyers is a Continuing Legal Education. And I'm on the panel. And the purpose of this panel is to talk about how to serve immigrant populations. I'm there to talk about how to serve the monk. And next to me was a Somali-American attorney who was there to talk about how to serve the Somali population. And I really was just listening to him the whole time. And he was talking about how Somali refugees have really lived for like the last 28 years in a civil war and anarchy and how there really was no rule or law or order and how in America we live completely under rule law and order. Like red lights, stop signs, things like that. And I would say that that moment, hearing that really opened my eyes to like just trying to be more compassionate and understanding. And I saw a visual of the men and women who were like, stop. Fast forward 10 years. I'm traveling to Hanoi, Vietnam. I'm here. So I want you to look at this picture. There is no order here whatsoever. If you take a look, traffic is going in all sorts of directions and they are going very fast. And this is all of Hanoi too, but this happens to be a very busy intersection if you can even call it that. And our tour guide says we're going to cross this. Okay. And we are like, whoa, that doesn't feel very safe. Are you sure? So we are all holding on to each other's shirts while she's leading us. She steps out into traffic and I kid you not. She put out her hand. Okay. She put out her hand and traffic stopped. Okay. I thought that I got it until that very moment when I realized, oh, okay. So that's a really long-winded story to tell you that this is really the beginning of what I hope is many, many conversations about implicit bias and that this isn't it. You're not going to come here and have a two-hour training on implicit bias and that's going to be good enough. It really isn't. We need to seek out those experiences. We need to make real change by looking at our policies and our hiring practices. Those are things that really do make a difference. This is how we start that conversation. And so I just want you to remember this story for that purpose. Yes? Sure. Okay. Thank you. So what are our goals tonight? Increase our understanding of the nature and sources of implicit bias. Recognize our own biases. Understand how bias affects perceptions and behavior. Develop skill strategies for reducing or overriding our biases in two hours. Yes. Yes. So to understand bias, we have to start with human behavior and we have to understand that we have about 100 years of studies on cognition and the unconscious mind and 30-plus years of study on implicit bias that tells us that a huge, huge chunk of how our brain works is outside of our conscious awareness, right? It is below the surface. We're not necessarily even aware of it when it's happening. When you think about unconscious, I'm not talking about being asleep or not awake. I'm talking about not really putting a lot of mental effort into something. For example, I work in Montpelier, but I live in Pittsfield. Anybody know where Pittsfield is? Okay. It's 45 minutes from here on a good day. An hour in the winter. Okay. So it's far. And there are times during my drive on 89th South where I look up and I go, did I pass Randolph yet or didn't I? Yeah. Because I want to know how much longer is the drive, right? And I haven't paid attention necessarily to. And sometimes that's actually a beautiful realization because I go, wow, it's really pretty because it looks different than it does at other times. Also on the weekends, if I'm in the wrong lane and I want to go 89th South but I'm going 89 North like I'm going to work, I'm going to regret that, right? That's a really long regretful drive to turn back around. So a lot of what we do is outside of our conscious awareness. The things that are within our conscious awareness are usually things that are out of the ordinary. For example, planning a budget or planning a vacation. Things that you don't typically do, it requires some mental effort to engage in those things. But keep in mind that just because it is conscious doesn't mean that it is rational. Like my husband tells me, I plan way too many vacations that we should not be going on. So this is not very rational. And many times when we think of the conscious mind, we think of things that are happening in the neocortex. So the brain is divided into three relative parts. The neocortex, the limbic system, and the reptilian brain. And the neocortex here is represented in the purple or slash blue. This is responsible for our conscious thought, our language, our reasoning. The limbic system categorizes what we perceive and our emotions. And then the reptilian brain controls the body's vital functions, our instincts, our fight flight, our gut reaction. When someone walks into the room, you go, is he dangerous or not? Or you go, oh, she seems nice, maybe not. Sort of this initial reaction that you might have to someone or something that is different. And that's happening very fast. And there's no time to really process that. Whereas the neocortex is really that part of the brain that is above the surface that we're spending a lot of time utilizing when we have to do something out of the ordinary. When we think of explicit bias, we think of this. There's this 1927 KKK rally in Montpelier. Explicit bias here is reflective. It requires motivation. It takes effort. It takes a lot of time to get together and engage in this level of hate. This is usually what most people think of when they think of explicit bias. I have a question for you. What do you think they were protesting against in 1927 in Montpelier? Any guess? Catholics. Catholics, yes. Catholics. Yes, Catholics. Although some would say that Catholics is also connected to the immigrant population at the time. Right? Yes. Explicit bias can also look like this. This picture over here of the two boys is actually from an advertisement that came under fire for putting the African American kid in a sweatshirt that says coolest monkey in the jungle. But I wanted to show you this because oftentimes when we think of explicit bias we're thinking of the KKK or people who engage in this kind of hate. But explicit bias can also come in the form of someone who is beloved, someone who probably deserves compassion, someone who we know have known for a very long time. And I mention it because it's important that explicit bias can be extremely harmful even if it shows up in this form. So when you have a little kid that comes to school and they use a derogatory term for a certain racial group for teachers or staff or the principal to say he's just a little kid. He doesn't know what he's doing or he doesn't know what he's talking about or he learned it from home. Those kinds of excuses actually can create greater harm to the victims who hear those. And so not excusing it by trying to justify who it comes out of is important. Or this gentleman over here where we're saying he grew up in a different time, right? Not saying that. I think it's okay to call it out for what it is. If they make a racist comment it's a racist comment and let's not excuse that. If they make a sexist comment it's a sexist comment and let's not excuse that. That doesn't mean they don't deserve some compassion because there's opportunities here for learning as well. But let's sort of recognize that. Most of today we're talking about implicit bias not explicit bias which is the part of our brain that is working most of the time. It's efficient, it's based on exposure, things that we have connected over time in terms of our memory, outside of our awareness and like I said happening very, very fast. Types of bias, anchoring bias, confirmation bias and affinity bias. So anchoring bias is some of those initial experiences that you have. Some of your first impressions, they take a lot to change those initial reactions. Confirmation bias, lashing on to information that conforms to our beliefs. And affinity bias, we all have a bias for people who are like us. And sometimes it's pretty innocuous like I connected to other parents or I'm connected to people who are from Minnesota even though I moved here from Minnesota and I was okay with leaving it behind. But when I see a Minnesota I go hey! We're both from Minnesota, right? So we have that natural affinity bias but sometimes that affinity bias is based on race and national origin and gender and sexual orientation as well and so sort of being aware of that. I want to share a story with you about affinity bias. I'm sorry, anchoring bias. So I have a best friend and she and I grew up kind of differently. So when I was a little kid my mom was a machine operator and she worked the second shift and it was a really hard job and she would take the city bus home at night. And I remember her coming home and telling us this story of her waiting for the city bus at around 11 o'clock at night and this dog attacked her out of nowhere and she said that this African-American man came out of nowhere and rescued her from that dog. And I remember just having such warm feelings for this hero who had saved my mom from this. And I shared that story with a friend many many years later and she talked about her first experience being a little kid and shopping with her mom and seeing her mom's purse get snatched by a group of African-American boys and beaten up and being so scared as a little kid and we shared those stories and we talked about it and she openly sort of shared that sometimes when I see not one African-American male but a group of African-American men I still get this feeling she says and that's really important and I share these stories not to say that one is more true or accurately the other but that these stories that we first experience with people who are different from us stay with us a very very long time and if we're not willing to sort of dig deep into our history and recognize that we don't have an explanation for that gut reaction and we think that that gut reaction there is therefore truthful so we want to really be thoughtful and mindful of that I'm going to show you a video This is the children in the picture Marci and Renee learn school together and they're in the hallway and I'd like you to tell me what you think is happening in this picture She probably looks like she's going to steal it because Marci is like oh no what happened and he's like hey look 20 bucks so do you think that Renee is doing something good, bad, or just neutral I think she's going to take the money Do you think that Renee and Marci are likely to be friends or not? Not really and what do you think about Marci's parents do you think they'd be comfortable with her being friends with Renee or not? Well if they find out the situation that happened they might be a little concerned about if Renee is a thief and this one we have Erica and Allison and they're also in the hallway at school can you tell me what it seems is happening in this picture Allison looks like a sweet girl so I think that she would pick up Erica's money and give it back to her Okay so then do you think Allison is doing something good, bad, or neutral? Pretty good and what about Allison and Erica do you think they're probably friends or not so much? Yeah they're probably friends Okay do you think Erica's parents would like it if she was friends with Allison? Yeah Her responses according to our expert Dr. Melanie Killon could indicate a subconscious racial bias a bias that kids develop from messages they hear at school, at home the characters in the TV shows they watch and what they see online and Michaela's reversing the scenarios based on race wasn't unique 24%, almost a quarter of all children both white and African American saw their own race more positively than the other race and this happened across all ages and all school types no matter the racial demographics What do you think happened in this picture? I think they're a push team And what do you think is going to happen there? Brenna's going to hope her for votes So do you think that Randy's doing something that's okay, not okay or kind of in the middle? Not okay Not okay? Was Andre doing something good, bad, or just okay? Good Michaela's answers were very much in line with her Michaela's parents Jim and Jennifer agreed to watch their daughter's test and talk about her responses Well, if they find out the situation that happened they might be a little concerned about if Brenna is a thief Allison looks like a sweet girl so I think that she would pick up Erica's money and give it back to her When you see that, what goes through your mind? Is there a conversation you want to have with her? Is there stuff you want to know more about? I would definitely want to pursue that conversation with her and find out why her perception was different upon the color of the girl's skin What changed in that scenario in her head? It's a teachable moment It's a realization like well maybe we have to do a better job or focus more on distinguishing about racism and diversity and just influence our kids and let them know that you have to judge a person by their character not their skin color So what was going on there? Thoughts? They meaning her parents? Okay, alright Other thoughts? Yes She was a lawyer A greater culture? Yeah Other thoughts? Yeah Explicitly to their children Maybe they're hoping or they're feeling like what they think they know is going to be absorbed by the kids I think children need more direct input Is Makayla or her parents racist? Yes Other people say no I would say the answer to that question is it doesn't matter It doesn't matter if Makayla is racist or her family is racist or not The result is the same whether it's explicit bias or implicit bias We spent a whole lot of time talking about you're calling me a racist or I have the right to call you a racist The outcome is the same If you don't want to hire somebody because they are a woman or they are a transgender person or because they're gay or whatever the reason is They're homeless? Sure, whatever the reason might be why you don't want to hire somebody you're still not hiring them and if you have implicit bias against any of those groups and you don't challenge them or you don't even give them the interview the result is the same I would say that we need to stop having the conversation about the isms and who are we because that actually is a hindrance to us addressing that implicit bias even though it's unconscious actually could have the same result as having explicit bias So it doesn't matter but I would also say here was affinity bias based on race Notice that the African American kids in this study also favored their in group more than the white kids in the picture This is a whole lot different from the black doll white doll studies in the 1960s You all remember those studies? For those of you who don't they sat kids white kids and black kids in front of two dolls a white doll and a black doll and they described these dolls and both kids described the white doll as being kind and beautiful and nice and gave it a lot of positive attributes but when they described the black doll they said this was the ugly doll and the mean doll and gave it a lot of negative attributes and what was particularly sad about those studies is that after the fact they asked the kids which one of these dolls is most like you said the white doll is like me and the black kids after they just attributed all of these negative characteristics about the black doll said that doll is like me which is very sad and also it mirrors the studies called the Jewish hate studies after World War II where a lot of people of Jewish descent started to adopt what they had been hearing in the culture about themselves and started to hate themselves how do we measure implicit bias well the most popular study is the Harvard implicit bias study how many people in here have taken that test if you haven't I would encourage you to do it there's also other implicit bias studies that have been using MRI or using a way to test actually your hair and how your hair responds to pictures of different groups of people and so forth implicit bias test and what it is is it's a time test because we know that implicit bias shows up in that part of the brain that is very fast acting and so this is a time to test and so you're asked to sort of categorize words and pictures you're told these are stereotypically European American faces these are stereotypically African American faces these are good words that are good words that are bad and your job is to really just do that you get a lot of practice runs at the beginning and then you do a stereotype congruent test first where you'll be shown a picture like this and you're clicking on oh it's European American you'll be shown a word like kind oh that word means good so you're clicking on that and then you do a stereotype incongruent test where you're asked to do the same categorization but now positive words are associated with African Americans and European Americans are associated with negative words and you shouldn't there shouldn't be any lag in time in how you do this test so the idea is that you're categorized these words and these pictures just as fast you should be as those words in those pictures but if there is a delay meaning you're spending time thinking about it it's suggestive that you might have implicit bias and this study has been connected to actual disparate treatment by participants so people who score high in implicit bias actually do treat people differently than those who score lower and this study has also been replicated in terms of national origin and weight and other categories as well so disability so I would encourage you to go to the Harvard implicit bias website and to read more and then to if you're nervous about it just do it privately and don't tell anybody about it and you know because I know that some of you probably are a little bit nervous about it I'm sure I'm nervous about it sometimes too but you have to sort of like hey what is it going to tell me I need to know this and this is important alright so here's an example the red line represents explicit bias and the blue line represents implicit bias so when they ask participants whether they had any bias against people with disabilities a very small percentage probably 2% of the people said yeah right but we have close to almost 25% of people testing high and having implicit bias against people with disabilities same is true for blacks here we have 10% who might admit that they have implicit bias against black people but here almost 40% plus they have implicit bias notice that the two lines are much closer together when it comes to gay lesbian and legal immigrants why is that why are our implicit and our explicit biases much closely much more closely aligned when it comes to these two groups of people any thoughts about that sure they're more comfortable admitting it there's probably some more social acceptability around it if I said to you I don't believe in interracial relationships I think I hope most of us would go what the heck is wrong with you like that sounds really racist but if I said I don't believe in same sex marriages and interracial relationships there might be some people that go oh okay some of us would be like oh that's awful and some of us would go well you know that's your religion, that's your philosophy that's the way you grew up, that's okay so there's more social acceptability to having those conversations likewise legal immigration has always been a hot topic it is a topic that people talk about all the time we didn't like the Italians when we were rich when Americans were surveyed after World War II about whether or not Jewish immigrants and refugees should be allowed into the United States most of those participants said no okay so and now the conversation has just changed to a different immigrant group but the reality is that immigration has always been a hot topic that people feel very openly biased in for or against the Indians were the ones who were making the decisions about who was coming save that thought for later because we're short on time but yes what's gender value gender, gender, yes there are many studies that document implicit bias in every every aspect of life height we have an implicit bias against or about height what percentage of American men are over 6 feet tall take a guess 30, 10 9 4 relatively small numbers right 15% 15% what percentage of corporate CEOs are over 6 feet tall yeah like what 90, 80 okay 60, 60% this is true of US presidents in fact the last time we had a US president that was average height or below average height was I think William McKinley in 18 1896 I want to say and he was assassinated assassinated not that that's connected I just thought I'd share that back I just thought but this is true for admirals and people in the military as well where does this bias come from about height evolution yeah sure sure sure height yeah height is strength yeah we have sayings like we like to look up to people and so forth mind you this is not about women we don't feel the same way about women who are over 6 feet tall the way we feel about men who are over 6 feet tall am I right yes yes I'd love to bring in a turn we also have an implicit bias based on socioeconomic status these pictures are actually from an experiment where they had a little girl dress up as having someone who has a little bit more money or having not as much money and they had her act as lost and there was a huge difference in people's reaction to her if she looked like she had more money people approached her and said hey are you lost they showed her compassion and kindness and over here they ignored her very few people approached her and ultimately even when she asked for help sometimes they were like oh get away from me I want to tell you about a study involving a fictitious person called Hannah where they asked these participants to guess whether or not Hannah is smart or not smart based on some information about her being rich or poor and most participants said you can't tell whether someone smart or not based on her being rich or poor that's just not enough information right like whether she gets free or reduced lunch or she doesn't that's not enough information to tell whether someone smart or not so then they had the participants watch a 20 minute video of Hannah answering some questions and then they had the participants evaluate whether or not Hannah was smart or not smart based on that video and what they didn't realize is that everybody watched the same video and the only difference between participants is they were told that Hannah was rich to begin with or Hannah was poor and that the video was designed to be ambiguous and so those who were told that Hannah was rich to begin with watched that video and said she's smart and those who were told that Hannah was poor watched that video and said well based on this video she's not smart right yeah we know that there's an implicit bias in terms of names job applicants with names associated with whites receive a callback for one of every 10 resumes names associated with blacks were in 2015 if your name is Carrie and Kristen you might get a callback rate of more than 13% but Aisha, Keisha, Tamika less the study has been replicated based on gender men get more callbacks than women do and also a names that sound more stereotypically foreign like Jose versus Joe as well and the resume is the same that's really important the resume is exactly the same identical in qualifications so that the only variable here is the name this is really important if we are ever in a position we're rare on the hiring committee and we don't even realize that we might be evaluating someone not based on what shows up under education or experience but the first thing which is their name and sometimes where they live and so forth yes I was the director of a graduate program university and I forbade anybody on the evaluation committee from seeing a picture or getting a gender identification and the names were random numbers that was deliberately because of this kind of study sure that's great that's great other thoughts if sometimes we have a bias in Vermont where we think that people are applying from outside Vermont they might not stay so we only want to hire people with a Vermont address if you do that you're skewing in favor of white people yes yes but you have to I just wanted to say that part of the reason I applied for my job is because I didn't think I'd get it because I'm not from Vermont yeah glad you were wrong and when I was so I've been a long time renter in Vermont and every time I rent my husband does other stuff so he's not the one approaching landlords and rental managers I'm the one doing it my name sounds very foreign stereotypically foreign so I always say and my husband is white so I always say BOR and Christopher even though it's really just the email list for me and I don't want to deal with bias right now so we're very cognizant of that so whatever stereotypes we have about people outside of Vermont and inside Vermont those things tend to skew likewise housing discrimination is very prevalent in Vermont but it's really hard to detect and part of that is housing is very scarce in Vermont so if you have a landlord who doesn't want to rent to children well you have nine other single couples who are also renting and so you never catch that bias that explicit bias and the other reason why housing discrimination is very hard to detect in Vermont is because people rent through word of mouth most people don't even advertise and so if you're renting through word of mouth think for a second about who your friends and who your family members are and how you might already be skewing who can get in your housing if you're renting through word of mouth changing a hurricane's name from male to female nearly triples the storm's fatalities what exactly what okay so let me give you some background these researchers these researchers wanted to look at fatalities of hurricanes and they went back in history and they looked and they found that when the hurricane had a female name there were three times the amount of depth then when a hurricane had a male name okay now for those of you who don't know hurricane names are provided way in advance so we're not talking about the bias of meteorologists here right so what could explain this phenomenon yes yes so the researchers was like is that a possibility that people are actually judging hurricanes based on the names so then they had a subsequent study in which they had these participants sit down and try to guess or evaluate and rank hurricanes just based on names alone and it was true that when the hurricane had a female name they rated it as less severe low than when a hurricane had a male name so before we're really judgmental of these Floridians and these people who live in the coast this is unconscious it's also an ambiguous situation because it costs money if you live on the coast it costs money to leave and sometimes the meteorologist is wrong the hurricane doesn't actually hit and so you're like should I go should I not it's a last minute decision time constraints it's very ambiguous and they're making decisions without even realizing that they might be judging it in fact by the way in case you're concerned they removed a couple of hurricanes just not to skew the data like Katrina and I think it was Irene but but if the hurricane had it especially stereotypically feminine name like Dolly or Cindy that there were even more fatalities yes that we're judging the strength of hurricanes based on what it is called yes I don't know but I don't know that's really interesting we should ask yes like what is it what are some of the new names do you know sure yeah yeah yeah but or or we could be aware of our implicit biases okay yes so instead of fixing the hurricane name issue we can all be like hey what's going on here how do we feel about women okay why why is this doing this okay just a suggestion you know women act just being hysterical so much more than men but that might be conscious unconscious might be different from that yeah remember that unconscious is not necessarily connected to how we really feel about a group of people you might have a unconscious bias that african-americans are connected to crime but really like african-americans you might have an unconscious bias that asian-americans are really good at math but in fact hate them or dislike them resent them so it's not connected so yes you might have a conscious bias that women are this way but unconsciously still think they're weak identical applications for a science lab assistant were sent to faculty of various institutions applicants with male names were offered the position more often offered more mentoring opportunities offered thousands more in salary than identically qualified women and both this is important female faculty rated applicants similarly bias is not a phenomenon of the white straight cis gender male you are not immune from bias because you belong in a protected category we all have to be conscious of it including myself and my job every day is to think and talk about bias and that's because like you mentioned earlier Michaela remember Michaela there is a culture and an entire climate here that impacts Michaela here what is she watching on TV what does she read in the newspapers what is available to her at the local libraries so when I take my kids into a bookstore they're asian-american there are very few books with asian-american characters on them very few and if there are it's one story so like if one kid happens to really be into princesses and another kid is really into superheroes well I probably won't find a book in either of those genre for my kids too so that they could be represented in the book so mind you that is available to all of us those are we're watching the same movies on Netflix which by the way is getting much more diverse Netflix yeah Netflix right but we're watching the same movies we're subject to the same books the same textbook we learn from the same ones in the United States and so this is a phenomena that is impacting all of us and this is very interesting fact to keep in mind another example regarding gender bias participants are asked to evaluate two finalists for a police chief position a male and a female candidate's profile was signaled street wise meaning they had a lot of experience on the street and so it showed that they had done a lot of work and so forth and then the other candidate was considered book smart high education and so forth and they vary which profile attached to the woman and to the man regardless of which attributes the male candidate featured participants favored the male candidate and articulated their hiring criteria accordingly when the man had higher education they preferred them 70% of the time when the woman had higher education they only preferred her only 22% of the time what counted as merit was redefined in real time to justify hiring the man so education sounds like it's really important but actually only when the candidate that we actually like has it even the attributes of being family oriented and having children was deemed more important when the man had it because if a man has a wife and kids well he's responsible if a woman has a husband and kids she's a risk she's a liability she may not come to work sometimes but he's a responsible person yes the same attributes are consistently interpreted negatively for the women who have the same attributes that's absolutely consistent across our society in much of these studies they asked people to describe the female applicant the participants used really great words like competitive and ambitious and I'm blanking but ambitious, competitive leader really positive attributes and they still chose the man so the same attributes that make us like a male candidate are not the same attributes that make us like a female candidate just like that height that I told you we like men who are tall perhaps we don't necessarily like women who are tall although I don't think we like women who are short either who knows we just can't get it right that magic height is for women there is none I'm going to show you a video this afternoon we're going to draw people doing different jobs and the first job we're going to draw is a firefighter have a think in your head what a firefighter looks to you what's your firefighter called mine's called firefighter Gary firefighter's dad he's big and strong he's got a big helmet on that's brilliant isn't it next we're going to draw a surgeon have you thought of a name for your surgeon Jim Bob he's a brain surgeon I think he would wear a stethoscope he gives you medicine that's his ambulance okay next we're going to draw a fighter pilot this is his jet plane he rescues people he likes to do stunts on the air and stuff okay now who would like to meet these people for real my name's Tamzin and I'm a surgeon in the NHS my name's Lauren and I'm a pilot in the Royal Air Force my name's Lucy and I'm a firefighter in the London Fire Brigade so who wants to know how to do an operation I'm trying my stethoscope we'll put this in here there you go can you hear that it's much better than the kids one there was an accident and somebody and his father was killed oh right yes I remember that yes that's my mother right the video tells us that the stereotypes about gender show up at ages 5 through 7 so we're talking first grade second grade second grade we can tell the little girls that they can be anything they want but they're getting a completely different message elsewhere this video is very recent this is a recent video it's not from the 1970s that's really important to keep that in mind about when stereotypes start about people yes sure yes sure absolutely yes I think that's absolutely true exactly yeah yeah absolutely I was just sharing with some friends the other day that being introducing yourself and your pronouns has been helpful to me whose name is Boer because I've always been called Mr. Yang right because people don't know whether Boer is a male or a female name and when you're inclusive even though you think you might be doing it for one group you're actually including a lot more people so gender stereotypes does hurt everybody and likewise I also teach when we talk about fair housing laws there's a ramp for the one person in the wheelchair but that's not true that ramp actually helps the person who's pregnant that helps the delivery person that helps anybody else who's carrying groceries and needs an automatic door that ramp is inclusive of everybody and keeping that in mind so when we're inclusive it's for everyone's sake thank you for sharing that we know in Vermont is exercised differently based on who the students are students with disabilities are three times more likely than students without disabilities to be suspended African-American and Native American students two times to three times more likely than white students to be suspended the use of the exclusionary discipline restraints, exclusion referral to law enforcement, a school related arrest varies widely across schools in the state of Vermont we know that discipline is connected to incarceration a Johns Hopkins study showed that students suspended just one time in the ninth grade double the risk of dropping out other studies have shown the disciplinary removal increases the likelihood of contact with the juvenile justice system by three fold and other studies that connect dropout rates to even a greater likelihood of incarceration as an adult and higher poverty rates this tells us a lot about what we should be doing in schools so even though we're making decisions about discipline that decision actually impacts our decisions later about jails and prisons in Vermont and police practices and so forth it is all connected the lifetime likelihood of imprisonment men versus women white men versus black men men and Latino men etc doctors are more likely to recommend a heart catheterization to white patients than to black patients who show the same identical conditions and the heart catheterization procedure is less invasive and less costly black scented bargain for used car were offered prices $700 higher and got fewer concessions than identically qualified whites identically qualified African-Americans were shown fewer apartments and houses for sale than whites and on ebay iPods that were held by white hands received 21% more offers than those held in black hands we have no face no clothing just a hand holding an iPod we know that there's bias in courtrooms there's bias against judges there's bias that judges have if you're bringing employment discrimination case you're more likely to lose at every stage of litigation compared to any other civil case in pre-trial motions only 4% of the time versus 22% of other types of civil plaintiffs and so forth and it goes all the way down to victories that are appealed as well how we evaluate the credibility of evidence is determined our implicit bias impacts how we look at evidence as well in a mock jury study where people were showed 5 photographs of a crime scene including a surveillance camera photo that featured a masked gunman whose hand and forearm were visible the arm was dark or it was light so you didn't see the face only the arm and that arm was either dark or light judges evaluated how credible was this evidence and how guilty is the defendant they were more likely to evaluate the evidence as more credible and find the defendant guilty if the skin was darker so we have the same surveillance photograph and we find it to be much more credible if the skin is dark than if the skin is light when the standard is preponderance of the evidence which is the standard in all civil cases we are more likely to skew in favor of those who are in group and this is important because we often have that affinity bias but then we have to look at the makeup of our legislature and the makeup of our judges if people are making decisions based on affinity bias and if our legislature is mostly white also then that changes who is being heard by our legislature and our judges yes remember the case of two years ago about the white rich kid who was declared really not so guilty and it was his fault it was the parent's fault because he was spoiled after when right yes yes and we'll talk about that in a little bit too yes yes there were three experiments of the University of Arizona they randomly assigned participants to view male or female attorney presenting the same closing argument in a neutral or angry tone and they reported their impressions of the attorney and how likely they would be to hire the attorney well of course they reacted significantly more favorably to male attorneys who expressed anger compared to when they were calm less favorably to female attorneys who expressed anger compared to when they were calm and female attorneys who were seen as significantly less effective while angry male attorneys were seen as significantly more effective so you can't be tall can't be too short and you can't be too angry to women because the same things that we like in men we might get a really aggressive lawyer who is really angry in the courtroom when they're doing their closing argument we don't like women to show anger in the courtroom in the same way around half of all women lawyers reported that credit for their contribution was stolen by somebody else 80% of white men as opposed to 63% of white women 59% of men of color 53% of women of color reported that they had equal opportunities for high quality assignments women lawyers of color were 8 times more likely than white men to report that they had been mistaken for janitorial staff administrative staff or court personnel do you have, yes yes, okay let's hear your female lawyers of color unite two days ago I was mistaken for an Uber driver when two white men tried to climb into my car wow it's funny so much of this is really tragically hilarious but what's funny about it is that the car they ended up actually getting into looked nothing like mine but you see a person of color in a shiny black car and you think they're there at your service well what did you say to them I said I'm not your driver right, yeah well I'm really sorry that that happened that's terrible so my predecessor some of you might know her Karen she is a white woman and as Susanna mentioned I was a staff attorney at the human rights commission when Karen was the executive director and she and I were on our way to a meeting at a very secured building to talk about a case that I had investigated and closed and we were going there and you have to go through a security system and it turns out that if you are a lawyer you get to keep your phone and if you're a non-lawyer they take your phone from you so Karen and I are going through the security system Karen doesn't remember what the rules was so Karen goes oh do you need to take my phone and they go oh no no not if you're a lawyer right so I go by and they go we need your phone and I go I'm a lawyer too you're like oh okay real nice really nice people okay I just want to say that they were very kind so okay well it is what it is so we walked through no big deal we go upstairs we go in and there's two books to sign in lawyers for lawyers for non-lawyers I'm a lawyer so I look at the lawyer book and I go okay I'm going to sign in under this book and the lady stops me and she goes oh uh do you I think you might want to sign and then I go she looks at Karen for permission and I go well she's looking at Karen like are you guys we're both lawyers right so I say this or I forgot Karen says this so we correct her she's like oh okay really nice so we sign in under the book we go to our meeting we come out it's past 4 30 so the only book left to sign out of is the lawyer book which is fine that's the book that I signed in under there's a new person at the front desk now and he I see the book I get ready to sign out and he goes you must have signed in under the other book let me grab that for you three times in two hours there was this belief by three different people that Karen was a lawyer nobody ever asked for our ID it's not like you have to show your lawyer ID to anybody and if you do your picture is not on it so it's not like they would even know but there was sort of this maybe she's a lawyer and maybe she's not had Karen walk through that entire process by herself I don't think she would have noticed anything right and had I done it I might have questioned myself for three days thereafter and gone I'm having a bad here day it's something I was wearing maybe there was dirt maybe I don't look like a lawyer that day who knows but because we were similarly dressed and nobody in that law office by the way wears suits unless they're going to court so we were similarly dressed and because we had the benefit of comparing side by side every step of the way that we were able to see that implicit bias was there but most of the time we don't get the benefit of that comparison and so we go through life and many of us who experience implicit bias goes was that it or was that not I think it was it but you know and most white people I would say who experience that never notice that they have experienced a benefit at all right yes boyfriend yes consultant in security years of experience arrives in a three piece suit out of building in New York City and the security guard forced him into the freight elevator the clients found out about them had the guard fired that's explicit right right disgusting what are the factors that affect processing ambiguous or incomplete information, compromise cognitive load, time constraints and overconfidence and objectivity so remember that hurricane study well they were dealing with ambiguous or incomplete information you're just not sure so when and remember the study on Hanna and watching the ambiguous 10 minute or 20 minute video of her answering questions when we don't have information our bias tends to show up more to try to interpret that ambiguous information likewise time constraints and compromise cognitive load is really important if you're really busy your implicit bias is going to show up more than if you have time to think and use your neocortex and so forth our police officers under major time constraints when they're pulling somebody over by the side of the road part of the training for a police officers is take a minute to take a deep breath before you step out of the car okay that's really important because they're always operating under compromise cognitive load when they're on the road and so implicit bias is going to show up a lot more because of that and overconfidence and objectivity if you think that you are color blind and that you never see color you never see gender you always treat everybody fairly then you're actually less likely able to address implicit bias okay having a willingness to be uncomfortable and say might I have implicit bias maybe I should take this Harvard implicit bias test and maybe I should go to this implicit bias training tonight from 6.30 to 8.30 at the library says you know maybe it's a willingness to have a discussion about implicit bias and that's really important because you can in fact eliminate one of the big factors that affect your processes we're going to do a series of little exercises about whether we can trust our perceptions truly okay so I'm going to click on this and the arrow is going to go down I'm going to ask all of you to say the color of the text out loud remember here you're not reading the word you're saying the color you're identifying the color yes okay yes good okay so let's try it we're going to do an out loud together yes green blue yeah good job should we try was that sarcastic okay let's do that again okay let's do it again I'll give you another fair shot okay go okay let's do it now we're going to do it it's going to be a little bit harder you ready you failed miserably you failed miserably well why did I have you do this why did I make you do this sure yeah two competing things what did you want to do more of read the words right so if I had if I had a bunch of little kids four-year-olds three-year-olds do this they'd probably accomplish it because they navigate the world in no offense they they navigate the world through colors not necessary as you're reading but as adults we don't really do that anymore and our default is always read read read read read and I also wanted to demonstrate here that under time constraints your default is to do the thing you want to do and it is really hard if I had given you all the time in the world you probably would have accomplished this task as well right but I didn't and so it's sort of a demonstration a easy demonstration of time constraints and where our defaults and our biases usually are which is to read if you had listed the colors in Russian yes okay yes yes I'm gonna have you listen to something and try to make sense of it play it again any guesses R2D2 R2D2 yeah window okay the Constitution Center is that the next stop yeah what was the purpose of this exercise guesses other than to give us a break from all the really sad studies yeah so you're dealing with ambiguous information you have no storage in your brains to interpret it right you don't know what to make sense of it but this is how quick the brain works as soon as you hear something you can now interpret the ambiguous information mind you the ambiguous information hasn't become less ambiguous it is still equally ambiguous but we have something in our brains that tells us hey this is how I make sense of this now how fast it's happening right so we have to be thinking about what have I watched what have I read what are all those things I've learned because we're using that constantly to interpret an ambiguous situation like in Susanna's example of why are you the Uber driver right what was in those men's brains about what makes you where have they read that or heard that or listened to in all their years that made them look at you in your vehicle and go you must be the driver as opposed to the executive director of racial equity for the state of Vermont and the question I have is what made you realize that they were, did they say that or did you say you're not a good driver that's an excellent point because they didn't say it I pulled up by the way it's happened on MLK day it really was where I had been staying I was expecting my companion to come out into the vehicle but instead when I pulled up these two people came out and I actually noticed them because they kind of past smiled at me when they came out and they were walking a little close to my car and I'm like don't scrape it or anything in my head and then the one goes around the back and starts opening my trunk oh yeah yeah and the other one has the hand on the back door yeah but it's an excellent observation because nothing told me explicitly that they were looking for their driver I assume that strangers entering my car are living at home it turns out that optical illusions actually explain a lot about how implicit bias works oftentimes we use context and other information to explain something that looks like it doesn't make sense to make sense of things so for example these two table services are actually the same yes if we had time I'd have you do a little exercise but we don't the monster in the back is actually the same size as the monster in the front these two center circles are exactly the same these two lines in the center are exactly the same length and you'll notice here that there are multiple red colors here and in fact they're all the same color shade of red okay so even the B I is the same color as the A S which is also the same color that shows up in the banner here Susan Fisk a Princeton University a professor did a study using an MRI scanner to observe people's brain activities when they were looking at pictures of people and so what she did was she would show them pictures of tables and chairs and pretty much inanimate objects and she would see that the brain really wasn't very stimulated by that particularly the part of the brain that associates with compassion and people and so forth and then she showed them pictures of professionals lawyers and doctors and so forth and then she saw that the brain well was really stimulated by those pictures and then she showed them pictures of homeless people and drug addicts to see whether their brain activity was more like the way that our brain would activate with pictures of professionals or pictures of tables and chairs and what do you think she found yes that people's brains were stimulated in the same way when they're looking at pictures of tables and chairs why is that do we be more compassionate towards people who are homeless or are suffering from drug addiction why is it that we see them no more than tables or chairs cars other thoughts yes we dehumanize them exactly in fact it's a phenomenon that shows up during war time we're in order to pick up arms and bomb countries and stuff we have to dehumanize others but I would say that we don't do a very effective job actually of dehumanizing because our soldiers come back with PTSD yeah for many many many years after that any other thoughts or questions about that there was even a little experiment where they had family members dressed up as homeless people sitting on by the side of the road and then their family members would walk by them and they wouldn't even notice them yeah the prisoners in for breathing treatments and I never really knew whether to say hello to them or pretend I didn't notice them because I didn't know which and therefore I was sort of cutting them off cutting off their immunity also and if they weren't a prisoner you probably wouldn't have questioned whether to say hello or not right yeah absolutely that explains a lot of the things that happen at the department of corrections because we have a mentality of punishment in corrections that is hard for corrections to look at someone as someone who has mental health issues right we did some cases at the human rights commission involving people who had severe mental health issues who were segregated for prolonged periods of time we have one story of a gentleman who was in his late sixties dementia and the only thing he had done to get in prison was he spat at a police officer so they arrested him and they set bail he couldn't make bail some paperwork got lost he was sitting in prison because he was waiting a mental health evaluation and he there was no room at the hospital bed after Hurricane Irene we were short on hospital beds so you know what happens you go to prison so you have dementia you end up in prison and corrections don't know how to deal with someone with dementia who is looking for an evaluation so he keeps acting out and they keep seeing that as more need to punish him and that he ends up they segregate him for 14 days now segregation is not oh you're alone in a nice room by yourself it is you might not get more than an hour of daylight per day you're getting your food there and of course if you have any mental health issues that makes it that much worse so this is important because if we dehumanize people because they're prisoners or otherwise then we're not going to get them the services that they need and we're not going to treat them with the respect that they need and then we have all these other problems that happens which I'm not going to go into because press is here kidding so processing information the characteristics that we attribute to people come from stereotypes institutional bias of course press movies lack of contact with people who are different from us and of course history our personal history a familiar history and our national history scandals happen all the time the question is how do democracies respond to those scandals but therefore for the wider region I think one of your children has just walked in shifting sands in the region do you think relations with the north may change I would be surprised if they do my apologies where is the way for the region my apologies sorry North Korea, and South Korea's policy choices on North Korea have been severely limited in the last six months to a year because- Yes. People assumed that his wife was the nanny. Thousands of commenters were like, that nanny's in trouble, oh, that nanny's gonna get fired, and so forth. It's 2020, interracial relationships have been here since forever. And yet we still have an idea about what the mom would look like and what the nanny would look like as well, okay, stereotypes. We have a really difficult history that we can't even all go into about slavery and women as property of men taking land from Native Americans. Our US immigration laws were really, really racist just up until recently. We had laws at one point that said you could only come into this country if you were white, and then we had laws that said you could only become, come into this country if you could be a US citizen, but you could only be a US citizen if you were white. And then up until the mid-1980s we had laws that said the percentage of people we allowed into this country, dependent on the percentage of people who are already here from those various countries, which again was skewing more white and so forth. So if we are a state or a nation that is mostly white, it didn't happen naturally. It happened because of a very hard and racist history with racist laws and racist policies. And that's why we have come to be the way that we are, and that's really important to keep in mind. Paying women for less for the same job that is still true, denial of the right to vote to blacks and women, Jim Crow in segregation and housing, places of public accommodations and education, separate but equal, again, all of this history still informs the way that our minds think today. Institutional media bias is really important here. We know that the media has an incentive to be fast and create eye-catching headlines. If you lean more liberal, where are you getting your news? Okay, maybe NBC, maybe CNN, maybe NPR, maybe. If you lean more conservative, where do you get your news? Fox. Okay. Why should that be the case, right? If we see kids with brown skin committing vandalism the same way we see white kids committing vandalism, we might see different words used for them, protests and out-of-control fans versus riots and looting, or we're really quick to call someone a terrorist before the police have even finished the investigation, but if it's a white person, they're mentally ill, something is wrong with them as the individual, not their group of people, right? This is the same crime, the same day in the same news station. Now remember that story I told you about me and Karen? We have the benefit today of looking at this side by side. Normally when you open a newspaper or you're reading it online, you're not going to have this benefit. You're reading something and then you click away and then it's done. Today we get to evaluate this. So here we have three white men, three University of Iowa wrestlers arrested, burglary charges pending. Here, Coralville police arrest four in burglary investigation. What's the difference? One person at a time. Mug shots. Okay. Yeah. Mug shots. Fraternity shots. Pending. Yeah. Pending. What else? Say that. There was a lot of... University of Iowa, they get an identity. Yeah. They're just four. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And we don't know that none of these guys work or are students at the same university. Right? Right. But what if you're... So we know that there's differences between these pictures, identity, no identity, pending, not pending, mug shots, nice little pictures of you and your ties. Like what might this say to you if we're really going to go there? What might this say to us about these groups of people? Guilty. Guilty. Yeah. Criminals. Yeah. Right? This is the same old, same old, by the way. Yeah. This is a surprising story about these three guys who you wouldn't expect to commit burglary, but they did. That's the storyline. This storyline is, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This always happens. And this storyline is surprise. Okay? Now, just in case you thought that they didn't have mug shots for these guys, they have done some studies with the media where they had access to social media accounts and they had hundreds and thousands of pictures available to them. They still pick more menacing pictures for black men and they pick the more nicer-looking pictures for the white men because the story is still selling the surprise. And the story is still selling, yeah, this is who he is. This is who he always is. Right? Was it? Yeah. Yeah. That Lee Harris. You said it right, too. These two nearly identical photos, these two nearly identical photos with very different captions appeared almost simultaneously. Here we have a kid who has darker skin. Here we have two adults who have lighter skin. The reading, or I'll read it for you in case you have trouble. A young man walks through chest deep floodwater after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30th, 2005. Floodwaters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage, et cetera. Two residents wait through chest deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store, from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana. Isn't that interesting. Right. I do feel that the media may not even know that they're using these words. They may not even know that they have implicit bias, that they chose the word looting versus the word finding. And then we're, like, digesting it, as if it's also true, without even processing the words that have been provided to us, right? So here, looting is you're stealing. You don't deserve compassion. I may not even donate to the relief. But here, oh, you're so desperate. And you're finding it inside a grocery store, though. But you're finding it. And so, and by the way, they all deserve compassion. This is a hurricane, okay? After all. And they probably didn't leave because it was a female name. Okay? Yes. But here, again, they're getting a lot more compassion, right? This means that they're desperate. They're finding it and so forth. I seriously doubt that the media that took a picture of this went down there and interviewed these people and said, hey, did you steal that or did you find that? Okay? So very important. These pictures are being taken from above. Yeah. Okay? Yes. Okay. We can't talk about implicit bias unless we also talk about privilege. Okay? We're not going to give it the time that it deserves today, but we have to talk about privilege. What is privilege? There are many forms of it. What does it look like? What does it mean? Okay, I'll go first. So obviously, there's a privilege about being able-bodied versus being a person with a disability, right? If you're able-bodied, you have the privilege of being able to access any building that you want. We know that the ADA is in place, but there's a lot of buildings that are older in Vermont that are outside of those requirements. So if I want to go and have a drink with my colleagues after work, which we don't, but if I do, and if I were in a wheelchair, I might go, can I get in the building? Okay? Am I going to be embarrassed today? But if you're able-bodied, that's not something that ever crosses your mind. You're thinking about appetizers and drinks and who's got the best deals and so forth, right? We had a couple that came all the way from Pennsylvania to Stowe, and they had a service animal, and they went to the trouble of calling ahead of time to say, this is a service animal. I just want to make sure it's going to be okay, la, la, la. After a lot of discussion, the hotel's like, okay, fine. They show up. The hotel goes, no, no, no. I don't know who you talk to, but you can't stay here unless you pay so much money as a deposit. And they say, you can't do that. That's against the law. And the hotel goes, yeah, too bad. So they call the police. The police show up and the police goes, yeah, you can't do that. That's against the law. And they go, yeah, too bad. The police goes, well, it's not a crime. I can't arrest anybody. It's not a crime. It's against the law, but it's not a crime. Well, you can have a violation of a civil ordinance or a statute, but yeah. So there's criminal law and civil law, which we can't get into, but yes. They can't arrest them or take them to jail. All they can say is, call the Human Rights Commission, which is what they did. But what's really sad, it's leaf season, it's dough. There's no other hotels. They were rejected, and then they left. They left the state of Vermont, had to go all the way back. Yeah, it was really sad. So again, an example of privilege. When Karen and I were walking through that process together, she of course experienced a privilege. She experienced a privilege because probably her race. She was given the benefit of the doubt that she must be a lawyer, right? And if she wasn't, she would have corrected them. But me, I had to correct them that I am. And so privilege is inherent in a lot. Privilege, there is privilege and money. Of course there is. If you have money, you are very privileged. You can buy into any town, any home that you want. If you have kids, you can buy into a choice town, which by the way is a little bit more expensive than a town that has a school that is ranked less or something like that. But we also know that money is deeply connected to race. Money is connected to gender as well, single moms. Money is connected to national origin and opportunities, and those things are deeply connected. And we saw the two pictures of the four African Americans and these Iowa wrestlers and so forth. There was privilege there. And the privilege was you get an identity when you're white. So if a white person does something really bad, it does not change how we view white people at all in general. We just go, that's just one really bad at Apple. So when a minority person from any group does something bad, the rest of us who are in that in-group go, oh no, because we're going to be judged for that. All these men who are terrorists have not at all changed how white people travel. They have not changed police practices at all. They have not changed one bit about how we feel about white people and whether we feel safe around white people or not, even though they're all terrorists. That is one privilege of probably being the majority culture and being white in America. And I'll tell you a story about the first Asian American female judge in Minnesota. She had, I think one night she had one too many glasses of wine and she hit her garage and the police were called and blasted all over the news the next day was first Asian American judge, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we know that other white judges have gotten into trouble too but we never get 250th white judge slaps a kid across the face, right? Because he is an individual, she represents an entire group of people based on her action of having one too many glasses of wine. We can't talk about implicit bias without also talking about microaggressions and again here we're not going to give it the time that it deserves but what are microaggressions, brief commonplace statements or behaviors that intentionally or unintentionally communicate a negative message about a non-dominant group. It's not always obvious, in fact most of the times it's not obvious and it can be ambivalent. It can be well intentioned. Given what your husband does, do you really need this job? Can you be a dear and hey, I am pleasantly surprised by how articulate you are. I'm pleasantly surprised by how well traveled you are, Boer. Or where are you really from? Okay, honestly just say what's your national origin. I'll just answer that for you, right? Where are you really from? Sometimes it's really hard for me to answer that by the way. I have a funny quick story about that. I was driving in Bury one day looking for parking and I didn't know like whether I could park there or not and this woman comes up and I'm like, do you know if I can park here because I don't want to get a ticket and she's like, where are you from? Okay, now mind you, in that moment I was lost, right? So maybe it's a valid question but I honestly did not know how to answer that question because I just came from Montpelier but I also live in Pittsfield. But I just moved here from Minnesota but I was also born in Laos. So I was like, what do you really want to know? I'll just answer it for you. Yeah, yeah. So I never did answer that question because I was confused. But it can also be behavior. Like turning to a male coworker for the right answer or to confirm an answer to something when your female coworker knows the answer to that. Giving eye contact in the room to only a certain person or certain group of people to sort of check in with them. Like we don't even necessarily realize that we might be doing that. This also brings up like a way to check people when you notice implicit bias. So sometimes we're really uncomfortable as human beings to call out people's bias. Right, just like people are uncomfortable saying you're racist or that's racist and so forth. Or maybe because people get really concerned about that and then you've lost them in the conversation. Well, there's a way to check someone's implicit bias, especially let's say this one example, right? Let's say that your female colleague is the one who's done all the work and is the subject matter expert on something. But your boss looks to you as the male colleague to say, hey, what do you think? Or how do you feel about that? The best thing you can do in that moment instead of saying I think you have implicit bias is to go, actually, Sheila is the subject matter expert on this. Actually, Sheila has done all the work on this case. And it's a really nice way to go, stop asking me and this is the person who knows. But oftentimes what we do is we just answer the question. We answer the question, we may not even notice it. And then later we do and we go, I feel really bad about that. But the reality is in that moment you have an opportunity to draw out what is happening. And also to be inclusive and to be respectful of your colleague who is the expert on that. Yes? What if you're the one? Yeah, well, I always say that if you are the victim of bias, explicit or implicit, you get to choose whether you say anything or not. You get to decide for yourself whether you want to raise an issue. And many times as people of color or as minorities, as women, we often are in this conundrum because if we say something, we are perceived as problematic, we might lose that reference, we've made our boss really uncomfortable, they're very fragile, you know? And like, oh my gosh, right? Do you have a zinger for that boss? Yeah, yes. No, I don't. But I will say, well, because of the business that I'm in, I could try to just tell people I'll think of a zinger though. But when discrimination happens to other people, and this is the truth, and I'm being vulnerable here, I feel angry and I feel protective and I feel like an advocate. When discrimination happens to me, I just feel really sad about it. And it takes me a really long time to process that. And so what I do is, like a week later, I'm writing that email. Because that's when I'm done processing and I go, that was not right. And that really hurt me and I think that is bias and so. So I'm pretty open about it, but usually I take time to process that kind of stuff and so I really respect people from where they're coming from and when they want to do it and there is no magic zinger, unfortunately. If I said, if I did the zinger in the moment, probably cry, yeah, yeah. And then, oh no, she cries, she's not professional, even though she's a victim of discrimination. Yes. I would just get an age, you're gonna get into the weeds on the floor. And so it was interesting, I was finally, and this was a year. Finally after a year, I was like, I do not like that. Good. And I said, it just comes off kind of sexist that when the female say this, we're getting into the weeds. So of course, his response was, well, I have daughters, I'm not sexist. Right, right, right, yes. And then, even better, I then had to go meet the general council of the organization, because I guess I raised right flag. Yeah, yeah. And he's like defending this male thought. And he's like, he's not sexist, he's not sexist. Okay, well, maybe it's a bigger issue because I don't know if you notice, but the eight of us on this team are all the same order, are all the same line. So why is it all the females are in cubicles and all the men are in offices? I said, it might be something you want to look at. Right, yeah. He got flustered, and I said, I'm done having this conversation. I'm not going to see the organization as something you all need to really work on. Yeah, and I think that brings up a really good point about we focused in that situation on whether he's a sexist or not, as opposed to calling like his behavior out as having an impact on the women in the workplace. That that was discriminatory, even if, whether you call him a sexist or not. Like I don't want to focus on whether you get that title. I couldn't care less, but don't say that to us, yeah. That's what you said is not okay. Whether you call yourself a sexist or not, I couldn't care less about that. That does not matter. It's differential treatment that matters, right? An administrator, but very, very frequently never look at themselves. Yes. I heard a study on NPR about microaggressions. Yeah. They said that African-American children experience microaggressions 15 times a day. Wow, yeah, yeah. So that means like once every hour. Yeah, I believe that. Yeah, yeah, I believe that, but that's really sad. Yes. I know she doesn't think, she's an African American, she doesn't think it. Yeah, that makes me really sad, but unfortunately it's not surprising. I've certainly heard a lot of those stories where people just give up on Vermont. Yeah. Are we being too sensitive? No. We've talked about explicit bias, and now we're talking about implicit bias. Oh boy, it's unconscious. And now we're talking about like privilege and microaggressions, not even macroaggressions. Are we being way too sensitive here? No, we're not. Of course I'm HRC, so of course we're not. Yes. This is the pyramid of hate, and I know some of you are familiar with that, but most of the time when lawyers become involved, we're already at the middle stage. We're talking about acts of actual discrimination here, economic, employment, educational, political, housing discrimination instead of creation. That's when lawyers start to go, right? Oh no, something bad is here. And what often is our solution is to settle a case, get rid of the complainer, or get rid of the bad actor. In fact, that's the best you could sometimes even hope for in unemployment cases. We just fire the bad actor. That'll solve things, but what put the bad actor into place in the first place is all of the other things that we let go of for years, never doing training for 10 to 20 to 30 years, allowing jokes about women or minorities in the lunch room. Haha, it's off work times. It's no big deal. Yeah, it's just a joke. It's just a joke. It's not a big deal, and then they turn into something a lot worse than that. And by the time lawyers are involved, when the HRC is involved and general councils are involved, it is really hard to backtrack 30 years and fix a culture that is broken. It is really hard. That's why I'm so glad that Susanna is here to help us with that culture. But it is hard. It's going to be hard work. And you're going to need the commitment of everybody on board. And that's going to take a long time because we're trying to undo in a specific agency years. But in the culture of Vermont and the culture of the United States, hundreds of years, right? We're trying to undo that in our psyche. And that is going to be really difficult. I'll show you one last video. You see this and you wonder, did he lose his keys or is he blatantly stealing that bike? In broad daylight, he hammers and then saws on the chain. When that doesn't work, he pulls out an industrial-sized bolt cutter. And when he's asked, he passes up. He lost him a lock? Not exactly. But he's not a real thief. Justin Kelly is an actor and our hidden cameras are rolling. What happened? Nothing. I can't get through the lock. I mean, I know this is weird, but you wouldn't happen to know who's bike this is. Yeah. All right, good. Thank you. It was odd that somebody had all that equipment. But you didn't do anything. No? That's true. That's the bottom line. Lots of people stop and stare, a few even question the actor. I guess they have to ask. Is that your bike? I guess technically no. OK. Bye. In over an hour, about 100 people pass by. Only George and Arlene try to stop him. Some tell us they plan to call the police later. Others say they're scared. Keep moving. This woman and her friends give our thief the benefit of the doubt. When we ask why, Bisa Washington tells us first impressions matter. I remember thinking young white men don't usually carry burglar tools. So we all make assumptions, huh? I'm thinking maybe he works for the park. We replace our white thief with this young man, Matlock. Remember, both actors dress in a similar way and are about the same age. Is that your bike? Nah. What do you cut the chain for? Right away. Right away somebody yells. Wow. Within seconds, another person confronts our thief. Is that your bike? Technically it's not, but it's going to be mine. More people converge. Go down the south, but when you call the police, he says to answer me. Are you taking that by that your bike? No, it's not, sir. Why are you doing that? Is this, I mean, is this any of our bikes? Is this your bike? No, but what is it? It belongs to someone. So who? Well, not to you. And sure enough, one man whips out a cell phone to call 911. Yeah, there's someone not taking a bike. Our actor triggers more reaction. Some people are even snapping pictures for evidence. I got you, sir. I got you. You guys steal the bike. You bike's over here. Once everyone moves away, we reset our cameras. And within minutes, another outraged man is yelling. Are you trying to steal that bike? Excuse me, sir. But the bike's been here for days. Like, no one's going to take it. Well, that's not your bike, then. Yeah. You can't just come in and take something from somebody. Excuse me, sir. I don't like it. Okay, I'll just take your tools later. You sure, sir? Please, sir. Please, sir. Do not touch my stuff. Please, sir. Do not touch my stuff. Please. Yeah, all right. But this has been here. Like, who's going to take it? Well, that doesn't make it your property. Technically, it does. No, it doesn't. Technically. It's not yours. It's the tape. All right, sir. When we bring out our cameras, David Rob wants us to go after the thief. That kid in the red shirt. He's hacking away at a bike. And he has the right to take it and steal it. She may not look like your average bike thief. But this is Ashley Carpenter. Make sure anyone who asks knows she's up to no good. Need a hand? You don't know who this is, do you? This bike it is? Yeah. Yeah. With a little help from Ed Fitzsimmons, the bike chain easily falls away. Drop everywhere. Oh, my goodness. What a strong man you are. And he isn't the only man who stops in his tracks. What's this guy thinking? If you pull up, you don't know if she lost her key. If she's trying to actually take the bike, but then again, she's a girl. And would you ever see a girl doing that? You never know. Most of the times the guy couldn't do something like that. Reginald pedals right past his appalled wife, straight to our actress, asking her if she needs a hand. Yeah. Okay, I'll eventually get it. I just need time and roll away. I can steal it. Oh, you can steal it? You can help me steal it. So let's talk about it. Yes. Let's talk about it. What do you see happening here? It's pretty obvious, but let's use some of the terms that we talked about already or some of the concepts that we've talked about during this presentation. What might show up? Okay. Privilege. Right. Who's receiving the privilege here? The whites, right? So remember that we also have some ambiguity here. Is this their bike? Or is it not their bike? We're not sure. But we're interpreting the ambiguity in favor of the white person. So for example, with the white actor, the white male actor, some of those women said, well, you don't usually see white men carrying burglary tools. I didn't know if he worked for the park. Right? So we're like, maybe he does work for the park. Maybe this is legitimate. So we're thinking about it's an ambiguous situation. Do we have a storage of information from our history to try to explain this? So when they see the African-American male actor, they go, it's an ambiguous situation. It must be criminal. Okay. And notice here that with the female, it has now become okay to steal. Right? So she's also a very attractive female. And I think there's been studies on attraction and the way people look. And we don't have here a African-American female to really do that comparison to it. Because I would guess that it's not the same thing. Yes. And if there wasn't part of the stereotype, cultural stereotype of attractive and so on, there would have been yet another bias. Perhaps. Sure. Perhaps. Yeah. Just to connect back to something you showed us earlier, when they had that throng of people around the person of color, I saw some children in that group. And so when we think about, where's Makayla getting the idea that this person was stealing the money, this person was going to give the money back. Right. When she's learning this from those of the situations during teaching children, these people steal and these people find in return. Yeah. Very good. And also they felt the privilege of being able to go and ask the black boy what he was doing while they didn't speak to the white boy. Yeah. Or there was a woman with a dog and she did. And she was like, oh, I just have to ask. Is that your bike? And he goes, no. And she goes, OK. Right? So she's just like, well, it's wrong, but I'm also not going to call the police on you. And I'm also going to move away. Whereas I am calling the police on you. And this is not OK. And this is totally wrong, et cetera. OK. And taking his property. Yeah. And taking his property. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It looked like they were angry mob. It was a mob. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But before, go ahead. Yes. Yes. Outside of how he realized he's the one on camera. Sure. You know, not really the bike. Now, don't hate me. I'm going to say this. Those people are us. Yeah. We are those people. We like to judge those people as like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they did that. We don't know that we wouldn't do the same thing if we saw this experiment in real life. And that's really important. We all probably have some implicit bias. And we have to be open to that. It's incompatible with our explicit attitudes, good, well-intentioned people can have implicit bias. It does not make us bad people. We are the products of this culture. And it can influence our perceptions and our behavior. And it would be very unfair of me to tell you, hey, go find out about your implicit bias if I don't also share my own implicit bias with you. OK. So I used to teach at a community college. And when you're a teacher, you have a ton of discretion. Right? Do I let them make up their exam? Do I let them come lay? Do I let them get out of this work and that work? And you have entire discretion to decide that for yourself. Do you carve out an exception in your syllabus or not? So forth. And so I thought I was reading an article one day and I thought, no, I should take this Harvard implicit bias study because I want to be fair to my students. But be sure that I'm treating people fairly when they ask me for these exceptions and so forth. And I took it. And when I found out that I had no implicit bias in favor or against African Americans, white people, I was like, yeah, boy. And then I took the disability one. And then I discovered that I have an implicit bias in favor of able-bodied people. Now, I have this crutch because I had polio when I was younger. And I'm very comfortable talking about that. I've had a disability my whole life. And I thought, how is that possible? So of course, I'm questioning the test. It can't be true. Even though earlier I was just like, yeah. Yeah. Right? So oh my gosh. How is that possible? Well, the more I sat with it and thought about it and evaluated my life, I realized my gosh, I have spent an entire lifetime rejecting having a disability. Right? I was like, I'm going to ski. And I'm going to kayak. And I'm going to travel. And I'm never going to be held down by this disability. And in doing that, I adopted this idea that being an able-bodied person was better than being a person with a disability. And that's really important for me to know because I am the executive director of an agency that hears a lot of complaints from people with disabilities. I cannot judge them by my own standards for myself or my implicit biases. I have to be really fair. So I try to be aware of that. And I force everybody that works with me to be aware of their biases so that we can be fair to the people that come before us. So I would encourage all of you to do the same thing too. Well, if it's unconscious, can we really do anything about it? Yes. Of course we can. Anyone want to take a guess? And I almost regret that this is at the end. But nevertheless, still important. And we do do a deep dive. Yes. We can think. We can challenge ourselves. Yes. We can look at an individual as a person, not as a member of some label. Yeah. Sure. No, that's great. I love passion. Passion is wonderful. If it's unconscious, you can actually bring it to conscious awareness. That's the most important thing you can do is take something that's unconscious and make it conscious. Find out your implicit biases. Go take that Harvard test. Be concerned about your bias and willing to have discussions about it in the workplace, schools and businesses. So when you're brave enough to have a discussion that says what you've been saying for this last year is just not okay, you're actually starting a conversation that is really important in the workplace about bias and the way that we talk to each other and the respect that we have for each other. Slow down. We know that implicit bias happens like when under time constraints and so forth. So you want to slow down and be mindful and be very thoughtful. When someone new shows up at the library or the front desk, take a minute to take a deep breath before you help them because your implicit bias might be showing up. Increase opportunities for contact. Educate yourself about bias, microaggressions, white fragility. Consider, and this is the most important, practical changes to policies, practices and systems. Being aware of implicit bias is the first most important step, but it is not enough. Remember what I was telling you, going tying back to the very beginning, you've got to do more and it doesn't matter if you're a sexist or a racist. We don't actually care about those titles. What we care about is what are you really doing to make change and to bring about change? Change your hiring practices. Standardize questions and processes. Analyze past results. How many people come here who have been treated this way or that way? So being willing to look at your history. How have we skewed our data? What are we collecting from? And so forth. And this is all going to differ depending on your particular agency or where you work or your neighborhood and your community and so forth, but all still very important to do. We don't forget that number seven is an important thing to do. The Human Rights Commission does do a deep dive secondary implicit bias test where we actually go into agencies and go what are your hiring practices? What are your policies? And how do you mitigate implicit bias in those? And so we offer real practical things. This is the first thing, the first part of the discussion. I want to end tonight with a very positive story. I'm sure many of you, some of you have heard this story before, but it was about the orchestra. So the top five orchestra in the 1970s realized that the makeup of their orchestra was primarily male. And they just became interested and curious about that. And so they decided that they would institute blind auditions. They'd put up a screen so that they wouldn't know who was playing the music. And just by doing that alone, they significantly changed the percentage of women that made it through all the auditions and finally made it through the final rounds onto the orchestra. Years later, they realized, you know, we can still hear high heels walking across the floor. So then they used a carpeted floor. And again, by doing that, they changed the percentage of women that made it through each round and onto the final orchestra. Had they not been curious, they never would have discovered that knowing who was playing the music was impacting how they heard the music. Thank you for having me here tonight.