Pat Stuart

I’m not prejudiced,” I’d once say if anyone asked me. I truly believed that was the plain, unvarnished truth. After all, my job required me to work with and make friends within diverse places and cultures, which I did. So how could I have prejudices? One day I might be sitting on the floor of a rough dwelling, eating out of a common pot using my fingers or a piece of bread. The next could find me at a reception in a presidential palace making careful small talk or a briefing at a military headquarters or in a helicopter with a special forces unit. Black, yellow or red ... Muslim, Hindu or Christian Scientist. I’d learned to enjoy people on their merits. I even married a Christian Scientist.

In the process, I learned a lot about biases because even people who claimed to be unbiased mostly weren’t, and I had to deal with that. Now, psychologists call those “unconscious” bias or “implicit” bias, telling us that we all have them and that these are learned assumptions, beliefs or attitudes.  Pesky things, they are.  

At an early age — for me, around the time I  entered high school — we begin to notice these biases. Personally, I found that people reacted to my gender, looks and height (for good or bad) more than to my qualifications or credentials or intelligence. Later, when I entered the workforce the biases extended to nationality and status.  

The question anyone who’s on the wrong end of a bias faces ... I certainly did ... was to figure out how to make some of those biases useful and put them to work offsetting the negative ones.

For the latter, I got a tip while still in my 20s. I’d found a man — an aide to the Emir of Kano in northern Nigeria — who didn’t seem to have problems working with me as a woman, so I asked him why. We were sitting in the Emir’s box at a polo match at the time, ponies racing up and down the field, well-dressed people filling covered seating and cheering politely. Nearby, round-topped huts spotted the area, each a stall for one of the ponies, each pony with its own full-time groom. Outside the polo grounds, soldiers wounded in the then raging civil war begged for food.

“It would be different if you were one of us,” the aide answered in faultless British English. “But you are American and tall, and Americans are different.” He thought a bit more, then added, “And you are a representative of your government ... a very special one. Your president would not have sent you, a woman, if you were without influence. Therefore, we give you status as a chief, just as we do your ambassador. This makes you quite acceptable.”

Well, I thought then. OK, then. That works for me. And, it did.

(I offer this, just in case you have biases against women. Treat them like chiefs and all will be well.)

The thing is, while I became quite good at discovering biases in other people, I failed to consider my own.  

Yes. I was wrong. I do, in fact, have my own biases. Who knew? I didn’t until I took a gender bias test online some years back.  

As I ran through the exercise, I realized that it was not going to turn out the way I’d expected. I was answering questions like: (on a scale of 1-5) Would you feel confident in your commanding officer if you were a soldier and she was a woman? Uh huh!

The test forced me to face the facts. I was probably as prejudiced as the next person. Maybe, more so.  

My biases? I find myself responding either positively or negatively to people’s ages, their names, their gender, their appearance, their status and my own personal affinity to them. Note racial bias isn’t on the list, perhaps because of growing up here.

Whatever. Your list may be different.

The good news is that we are coming to recognize that our brains are mini-hotbeds of holdover prejudices from our childhood and more recent ones from our influencers. More, programs designed to reveal and deal with those prejudices abound. Which is great because while most of say and sometimes believe we’re not prejudiced, the truth is ... .