One of the more stressful and yet life changing courses I took during my doctoral training was an unconscious bias course around racism and diversity. The intent of the course was to help budding psychologists to get conscious around the biases they may have acquired throughout their lives. This was essential learning because in psychology, and also in the iPEC coaching training I completed later, the focus is on raising my consciousness and helping others to do the same. If I wasn’t conscious about the biases I learned and incorporated into my life, how could I possibly be a good therapist?

Becoming more conscious and aware is both exhilarating and humbling. Once conscious, you can then choose what to do with your awareness. Despite the benefits, nothing felt more painful and scary than to delve into my own life and look at the racism and bias I held. In order to protect myself from that fear, I had convinced myself my biases were small and insignificant. Bias training taught me to confront my fear and look at the harm my biases caused no matter how small I thought they were.

We all have biases! We all carry some racist or “ism” types of thoughts and feelings. How could we not? Maybe we picked it up from family members, friends, the media, famous people, or even unique situations that occurred in our lives. What if we gave ourselves, and others, the space to open those doors and look in? What if, without judgment and yet without excuse, we looked at the messages that we may be carrying about others? 

How Do We Confront Our Racism?

Raising our consciousness means we dig deep and allow our thoughts and feelings to not only come to the surface but also to examine where they came from and how true they might be. So how do we do this? We look at our history, at our family, at the messages that we were given as children and even now as adults. We get out of the silo of agreement that we often surround ourselves with and look to consider other ideas, other’s feelings, and other’s experiences. What racist ideas did you hear as a kid? Which ones do you still hear now? Which ones did you buy into and how might they be affecting you right now? 

By raising your own awareness you not only release many biases that you may be carrying but you also relieve the pain and tension of holding on to feelings that are painful and damaging to you and others. The class I took changed my life. I catch racist and biased thoughts popping into my head fairly frequently. I let those thoughts come in and then I ask myself, “Where did I get that idea?” “How true is it?” “How is holding onto that idea helping me or those around me?”

In the big picture of having a more equal and loving world, my little bias awareness and consciousness raising might not sound like much and yet what if we each did this? What if we all worked on raising our awareness and consciousness and ultimately chose to release the bias and racism so many of us carry around? What if we actually chose to listen, to show empathy, and to truly, deeply care for each other? What if we increased our consciousness and decreased our racism? What if we stopped asking our brown and black friends to teach us how to not be racist and actually learned how to do that on our own?

Love,

Lisa Kaplin Psy. D. PCC