by Dee Holder

Created on: April 26, 2010

For a long time I assumed that everyone who was racist, or biased was a bad person, stupid, ignorant or all three.  Someone who decided that the knew everything important about a person based no race, culture, religion, body shape, looks, gender or sexual orientation could not be a rational, good human being.  There had to be something wrong with them.  Then I moved to the United States of America.  When I first came here some 20 plus years ago, I was bracing myself for the overt racism I had seen in movies and on television.  To my surprise I experienced very little of that, mostly due to the fact that I was on a very liberal campus that had a sizable black population.

What I did encounter was much more subtle, refined, corrosive and difficult to pinpoint.   It took me many years before I understood what was going on, and a few more to really understand that this form of discrimination was just as harmful and in some ways more harmful than what I had expected. I also had to come to the realization that there were times where what I thought was discrimination really was not discrimination, that most of the people that were helping me, a black woman, advance her career through science were white males, and many that tried to hold me back were women and often (but not always) women of color.

I had to come to terms with the idea that my initial thoughts about racism, prejudice and bias were all wrong, and that in dealing with bias I had to hold many diametrically opposing ideas in my brain at the same time.  Our brains don't like doing that, and I think this is the reason why discussions around bias often go nowhere.  Most people want to think that all racists are bad people, or that Racism does not exist any more, or that people that talk about bias are over sensitive, or that people that don't see bias are stupid and/or ignorant.  The truth is that none of these things are true and all of them are. 

My second Thanksgiving in the US was spent with a racist family.  The odd thing about that visit was that, while they openly admitted this to me (as a foreign black person I was not seen in the same category as an American black person), they were also the nicest and most hospitable family I have stayed with while being here.  They attended to my every need, they offered me food and the comfort of not spending a holiday by myself.  I had a wonderful time during that visit.

It was after that visit

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