Josephine Kwhal discusses unconscious bias in her UCU Witness film (2016). It is a short video, but her point is well made: with the plethora of initiatives, policies and race equality charter marks designed to address racism in Universities, what will it take for “the unconscious to become conscious”. Institutions, she says, have consciously made changes that benefit white, middle class women, although this hasn’t necessarily benefited women of colour. The concept of unconscious bias should not be seen as a ‘get out of jail card’ for universities.
Her argument echoes Shirley Anne Tate’s lecture: Whiteliness and institutional racism: Hiding behind unconscious bias. Tate arguesthat unconscious bias is used as a cover or excuse for institutional racism and that it perpetuates whiteliness (a term coined by George Yancy) in institutions such as universities, which consider themselves to be liberal, tolerant spaces. I undertook the online unconscious bias training at UAL a couple of years ago and seen in isolation, it did indeed feel like nod the problem and definitely not an end in itself. But Tate goes further – unconscious Bias training places “self-forgiveness and white fragility as the institutional approach to anti-racist practice”. White fragility dictates that we must not offend those who are ‘unconsciously’ racist, and we must forgive ourselves for that which is unconscious and therefore can’t be helped. Confessing to the sin of racial bias followed by self-forgiveness maintains white supremacy within the institution.
Tate argues that we should move beyond the idea that we can be trained out of our unconscious bias and then move into a kind of post-race university through unconscious bias training, “to think instead about what would happen if we decolonise unconscious bias, if we decolonise white fragility, if we also decolonise self-forgiveness … so that we can begin to see the hidden basis of institutional whiteliness within unconscious bias itself”.
It seems to me that unconscious bias is a discredited proposition, which is used as a cover for institutional racism and is a way for institutions to show that something is being done. Universities are still largely white institutions that are slow to decolonise and to create truly inclusive environments. Tate argues that whiteliness is maintained through curriculum design and the recruitment of staff etc. and is underpinned by a plea of ignorance, that institutional racism and discrimination can be explained by the fact that it came from the unconscious and was unintended. But what is needed is alertness, and conscious shifts in the make-up of our staff and the content of our curricula.
What us noticeable in Josephine Kwhal’s talk is her sense of quiet but firm exasperation, which finds echoes in the frustration and anger expressed by the audience of academics in Shirley Anne Tate’s lecture. As Kwhal puts it with a sardonic smile: “a little bit of consciousness might be very welcome”.