Impactful Inclusion Toolkit

ACTIVITY 12Strive to See the Whole Person

“[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately … But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level—the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And … we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.”

—Malcolm Gladwell

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Many of us consider ourselves to be well-intentioned, egalitarian, fair-minded individuals who would never allow our biases to negatively inform our interactions with people we work with. Consciously, we are absolutely determined to be kind, objective, and nonjudgmental. Unconsciously, we often do just the opposite. Meet unconscious or implicit biases. They are triggered involuntarily and without our awareness. The truth of the matter is that while we mean well, the workplace is rife with implicit bias. We pack them up and carry them around with us every day. We can size people up in a matter of seconds and ...