A Hindrance to the Solution

I retired last year after serving four decades as an educator in a public school in Ohio serving a low income urban/rural mostly African-American population.

I’ve spent a lot of my time this year trying to figure out why my school failed its community. Our school failed by every measure - test scores, future employment, and student empowerment.

Most of the teachers were white. Some were firmly committed to America's racist traditions and were proud Republicans and Fox News watchers. (Thanks Australia, but you can take your Murdock back. Please!) But the majority of the staff were decent people, who wanted to serve the children in their charge. People who considered themselves "colorblind.” I’ve come to realize that racism runs too deep in my country to just announce that it’s over because we elected a Black President. We missed the most important step of really examining how our minds work. How we really see each other or don’t see each other accurately here, and how those inaccurate perceptions affect how whites and black interact. I’m taking an xEd course"Think101x The Science of Everyday Thinking" that is confirming what I suspected to be true - much of the time we don’t really know WHY we are doing. 

Here’s a quote and a link to an excellent article from Salon:

"A large mass of data has been collected over the past 10+ years showing that roughly 70% of all Americans have an unconscious racial bias, compared to only 20% who are consciously aware of it. That means that roughly half of all Americans are colorblind in a very different sense from how the term is usually deployed: they’re blind to their own color biases. This is one of the most striking findings from the implicit attitudes test, introduced by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues at the University of Washington in 1998, an online version of which has been taken by more than 10 million people." http://bit.ly/1kF9c6I

I’m hopeful that if at least 20% of us know that we are affected by racial bias, then some of those people, like myself, are willing to work on the problem. The other 70% are not just complacent, they are blind to the true nature of their actions and that is a real hindrance to a solution.