Diego Rosario Norberto

English 11
B5
1/09/2013
Final Draft

Unconscious Bias

During this this time as a junior I have never really ever thought about racism or I
never really thought about the biased things I said. I suppose that before this
discussion I didn't care and thought such biased words were considered normal among
the society i live in . After our conversation and research about unconscious bias i was
rather disturbed by the way i would say things and to be honest, after our class had
talked about this subject I was able to see it or hear it more and more among my fellow
classmates. I really wanted to know about how I thought of people and their skin type so
i decided to take the bias test that was made from many Harvard students to test if one
individual was unconsciously biased.
The result was that I slightly prefered European Americans over africans I was
rather and this result got me surprised. I thought that being exposed to many of these
biases in high school and in junior high, would have led me to prefer european
americans even more than what i do now. I think it was mainly because I would have to
hear all the jokes and tales about people that were well darker skinned. For
example I remember some joke that went like this what do you do if you see your tv
floating in the air in the middle of the night?....you say drop it n***a these jokes and
more where said that well I noticed people thought funny but I never heard any jokes or
tales that were about lighter skinned people. I always thought that these jokes would of

made me more preferable of lighter skinned people despite the fact that I didnt think
they were funny like they did. I felt more like I was being unconsciously pressured by my
peers to think this way when I was younger because of not agreeing to the things that
they said. During that time I just let those jokes and tales pass by my ears without really
thinking of how wrong that was.

When this discussion about biases came out I became more conscious, more
serious, more attentive to the things happening around me. Maybe I knew that
everything people said was wrong but given that most of the people were heard saying
it , I took it as a normal thing in my lifetime and ignored it up until now. This test and
discussion surprised me so much , because I found out things about myself that I never
really considered a problem and that they were just normal. I hope to learn more about
myself and be able to correct my mistakes and biases, it might take long but it is worth
the effort.