Apatheia and Anti-Bias Training: Part I

2020 was quite literally apocalyptic—an “uncovering” or a “revealing” (the literal meaning of the Greek word apokalypsis) of many uncomfortable truths about the world and especially about the United States. Feelgood myths about our economic security, prosperity, health, and control have been shown to be half-truths or outright lies. Of course this was a revelation inconsistently applied, ranging from full and painful confrontation with a radically new reality for some to the painful highlighting of a constant lived experience for others.

2020 continued the unmasking of a particularly pernicious myth for many Americans—namely, the idea that we belong to a “post-racial” society in which racial discrimination is either a thing of history or relegated to marginal, backwards (and, as far as the myth goes, stereotypically backwoods) bigots. Certainly many people of color have known this “post-racial” or “post-racist” myth to be laughably untrue for decades. Likewise, a number of events, such as murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and the unleashing of public and explicit displays of white supremicist ideology have forced the larger public to reckon with the falsehood of this myth. In many ways, though, 2020, turned the public’s attention in a way I have not seen before to the fact that our racism problem is not just a matter of having a lot of racists.

The murder of George Floyd and the ensuing nationwide protests highlighting the systemic, disproportionate police brutality against people of color and the the ways in which COVID-19 so radically and disproportionately devastated black, latino/a, and Native American communties highlighted how truly unequal and unjust so many American systems are and how that inequality and injustice follows racial lines. For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, 2020 was an occasion to realize that racism as a systemic reality may rely on individual actors (it’s hard for any social system to do things to people without individuals acting on its behalf), but the shocking reality beginning to dawn on many people is that these systems can make use of people who sincerely avoid or even morally abhor conscious racial prejudice.

Part of what makes up this systemic reality of racism is the fact of persistence of bias—in this case a propensity to judge people more positively or negatively based on their perceived race. Racial bias persists despite the best intentions of individuals to “not be racist” for a number of reasons. For one, people may act on conscious racial stereotypes that have for them masqueraded as facts, such as the mistaken ideas that certain racial groups are more prone to crime, or laziness, or athletic performance, or academic achievement. But even if these mistaken ideas are corrected, there is still the issue of unconscious bias to be dealt with. A complex set of familial and social messaging goes into forming our conscious and unconscious modeling of the world, and for those of us raised in a racialized society such as that of the United States, we can do everything within our power to correct conscious racial misperceptions and falsehoods and nonetheless still be formed in a way that biases us for or against certain people based on their perceived racial identity.

This bias, whether conscious or unconscious, extends beyond judgements related to people’s perceived race to include other groups that people can identify or be identified with. Material from the Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison points out research that certainly reinforces systemic racial bias, such as the fact that “when asked to choose counselors from among a group of equally competent applicants who were neither exceptionally qualified nor unqualified for the position, students more often chose white candidates than African American candidates” or that “randomly assigning different names to résumés showed that job applicants with ‘white-sounding names’ were more likely to be interviewed for open positions than were equally qualified applicants with ‘African-American-sounding names” (Reviewing Applicants, 3-4).

However, biases related to perceived gender or sex also affect people’s decision making. This can manifest in the seemingly silly, such as the fact that when shown photographs of people of the same height, evaluators tended to overestimate the height of people perceived to be male subjects and underestimate the height of those perceived to be female (Reviewing Applicants, 3). However, this bias can also have serious professional and material consequences, as demonstrated in a study where it was found that academic psychologists evaluating CVs randomly assigned male and female sounding names ranked the male-named CVs better and were more likely to hire those applicants than the female-named applicants (Reviewing Applicants, 5). If bias manifests in judgements about race and gender, it is not a huge leap to see that there are also biases we all hold related to other kinds of perceived group identities such as age, ethnicity, region, ability, class, or sexual orientation. What’s more, at least in the instance of gender bias, it does not appear that there is a significant difference between the gender of evaluators: Both men and women “share and apply the same assumptions about gender” when evaluating others (Reviewing Applicants, 2). What this means is that, at least in the instance of gender, if one were to try control for bias in some kind of selection committee, merely including more women would not suffice. This is not to say that there are not very good reasons for seeking diversity in hiring and evaluative groups, but it does mean that diversity in and of itself is unlikely to neutralize the effects of bias and make processes fairer for those being evaluated.

But before turning to what we can do as individuals and larger institutions to correct for these conscious and unconscious biases and the prejudices that undergird them, it’s important to turn to the question of why we should seek to overcome them in the first place. Pragmatically, our biases negatively impact us by limiting our access to the immense pool of talents and experiences that the world’s variety of people offers. How many congregations have missed out on their best clergy leader because they underrated women or people of color who applied? We can also look at the ways in which unaddressed biases propagate unequal and unjust social and economic systems. This is in part an issue of representation in positions of leadership: In a world with a limited number of such positions, those with an unfair and unearned advantage will likely be overrepresented and those with an unfair and unearned disadvantage will be underrepresented. Moreover, bias, insofar as it often advantages those who already are socially and economically advantaged and disadvantages those who are socially and economically disadvantaged, adds an additional obstacle to the means of rectifying social and economic inequality such as access to decision-making power, material resources, and education.

Finally, and most importantly, there is a deep theological issue with the prejudices that undergird and enable biased decision making. Stereotypes, whether they are “good” (all of x group is athletic; all of y group is good with money) or “bad” (x group is a bunch of criminals; y group is crafty and untrustworthy; z group is lazy), reduce the irreducible depth of individual human subjectivities to caricatures and objects. It hinders us from doing the hard work of building relationships with this person at this time that their dignity as bearers of the image of God affords them. Moreover, more often than not, these stereotypes are based not in fact (contrary to conventional wisdom) but in pseudoscience, unfounded anecdotes, self-referential hunches, and cognitive biases, and in this sense, giving into them is to give into untruth, a direct affront to the God who is Truth and the fount of all truth.

Given that I’ve tried to address a) how we all likely suffer from some kind of bias, whether conscious or unconscious; b) that we should seek to correct for this bias; and c) that increased representation by the groups for whom negative bias is an issue may not suffice to eliminate the bias, you’re likely thinking “ok, so what do we do about it?”

A good start is to try to persuasively make people aware of common stereotypes that may masquerade as facts. This strategy may go a long way toward helping them disavow themselves of such notions. Similarly, simply making people aware that they almost certainly are biased in their judgment and the actions that flow from that judgement actually goes a long way toward mitigating bias—especially if you already have a person or group that values impartiality or fairness.

This awareness seems to combat bias in this way: bias, and especially unconscious bias or bias at odds with one’s explicit or conscious values and beliefs, functions like a kind of instinct or gut feeling for directing one’s behavior. Awareness of possible bias gives one enough distrust of one’s impulses to critically evaluate them before acting rather than going on autopilot whenever an impulse arrises. For instance, when one is faced with the temptation to instinctively evaluate a woman’s work as unrigorous, awareness of bias should cue that person to step back and ask whether the work is truly unrigorous or whether there is unconscious bias at work. Implementing this awareness strikes me as an essential part of the self-knowledge that Rowan Williams describes as part and parcel of Christian discipleship as applied to our sinful, other-denying propensity toward stereotyping. Historically described as apatheia in the Chritian tradition, what this applied self-knowledge really is is the discipline of “taking my intense feelings, positive and negative, out of the depths of my guts for a moment, and putting them where I can look at them—and where Christ can look at them” (Being Disciples 78).

While this attempt at awareness or self-knowledge or apatheia may be all that is desirable or possible to reduce bias in interpersonal encounters, we should be working toward reducing bias also in those critical moments where we are called upon to help discern what people will best fill particular roles (especially leadership and decision making roles) in our power-wielding institutions. All too often negatively derided as “gate keeping,” it is vitality important in a world of limited material and temporal resources that there be some way of determining who will best be able best use those resources to further the goals of the institution. Moreover, bestowing such power on individuals inevitably comes with the capacity for them to use that power to abuse others, and thus it is essential to do what one can to identify abusers and predators and keep access to power away from them. At the same time, this task of discerning the best people to manage limited resources while trying to reduce the possibility for predation seems a time rife for bias to affect such decision making.

Navigating this Scylla and Charybdis in the Church often involves decisions related to who is ordained and how leadership responsibilities are distributed among the ordained—although it also applies to lay leadership such as lay professionals and, in the Episcopal Church, members of vestries and diocesan or denominational committees. This can be done by reducing the chances people have to make decisions about who will be ordained or who they will call as their next rector or priest-in-charge or Bishop based on instinct or gut. One of the best ways to do this is to have such decision making determined by a method called behavioral based interviewing. My colleague, the Rev. Liz Easton, Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese of Nebraska, has strongly advocated for its use in parish clergy searches as part of a larger effort to encourage anti-bias training in these processes and has convinced me of its effectiveness.

What I’d like to suggest is that we should take a similar approach even earlier in the life of clergy discernment—specifically during Commission on Ministry Interviews.

The second part of this essay will be published on Wednesday, February 10th, 2021.

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