Implicit Bias Training

“More than 8,000 Starbucks® company-owned stores and offices across the United States will close in the afternoon on May 29 for a conversation and learning session on race, bias and the building of a diverse welcoming company. On Wednesday, May 23, the company shared a preview of the May 29 curriculum, which serves as a step in a long-term journey to make Starbucks even more welcoming and safe for all. 

As Starbucks executive vice president, U.S. Retail, Rossann Williams shared in a note to all U.S. partners yesterday: 

“Our hope is that these learning sessions and discussions will make a difference within and beyond our stores. After May 29, we will make the curriculum available to the public and share it with the regions as well as our licensed and business partners. Starbucks is a company built on nurturing the human spirit, and it’s on us to harness our scale and expertise to do right by the communities we serve. May 29 isn’t a solution; it’s a first step. By educating ourselves on understanding bias and how it affects our lives and the lives of the people we encounter and serve, we renew our commitment to making the third place welcoming and safe for everyone.”

Curriculum advisers Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative; Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Heather McGhee, president of Demos, are among many, including researchers, social scientists, and Starbucks own partners, who have provided their advice, counsel, connections to other experts and recommendations to the company for the May 29 training. The day’s curriculum will set the foundation for a longer-term Starbucks anti-bias, diversity, equity and inclusion effort.

Recognizing that there are many ways to deliver racial bias training, Starbucks worked with advisers and experts to come up with a collaborative and engaging experience for store partners to learn together in a way that is right for the values and scale of the company. From the design of the curriculum, to new technology being deployed to stores, the company is investing in each store so that the experience for all partners is meaningful and significant on May 29 and beyond. Each store will receive a tool kit, which will allow for partners to learn together in small self-guided groups. This first training will focus on understanding racial bias and the history of public accommodations in the United States, with future trainings addressing all aspects of bias and experiences.

Starbucks will share training content and curriculum with other companies, organizations and individuals interested in training their audiences. The company will also share a new original film by award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson, who has more than 20 years’ experience as a producer, director, and writer of documentary films and videos examining African American history and experiences. 

From there, employees will discuss how they define biases, how biases exist within each person and how they have been personally affected by bias. The conversations will be accompanied by video interviews with implicit bias experts and Starbucks board members. Employees will also go through the U.S. legacy of racial discrimination in public spaces and efforts to address it, beginning with the civil rights movement.

While Starbucks is closing all 8,000+ company operated Starbucks® stores on May 29, most of its 7,000 licensed stores, like those operated by major grocery stores, hotels, universities or airports, are expected to remain open. Starbucks is sharing its training content with its licensed business partners, so they may have the option to make it available to their employees at a later date.” Washington Post

Unconscious (or implicit) biases are learned stereotypes that are automatic, unintentional, deeply engrained, universal, and able to influence behavior. Unconscious bias training programs are designed to expose people to their unconscious biases, provide tools to adjust automatic patterns of thinking, and ultimately eliminate discriminatory behaviors.

A critical component of unconscious bias training is creating awareness for implicit bias. Since 1998, the online Implicit-Association Test (IAT) has provided a platform for the general public to assess their unconscious biases. Although the IAT measure has come under scrutiny, it has sparked conversation about unconscious bias in both popular media and the scientific community. In addition to the public’s increased awareness of the influence of implicit biases, the reality of racial and gender inequalities in our society has led to the creation of many unconscious bias training programs. Facebook designed a webpage to make unconscious bias training videos widely available, Google has put about 60,000 employees through a 90-minute unconscious bias training program, and the United States Department of Justice has trained 28,000 employees on techniques to combat implicit bias.

Bias is prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.

Biases can be learned implicitly within cultural contexts. People may develop biases toward or against an individual, an ethnic group, a sexual or gender identity, a nation, a religion, a social class, a political party, theoretical paradigms and ideologies within academic domains, or a species. Biased means one-sided, lacking a neutral viewpoint, or not having an open mind. Bias can come in many forms and is related to prejudice and intuition.

In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. Statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average.

Prejudice is an affective feeling towards a person or group member based solely on that person’s group membership. The word is often used to refer to preconceived, usually unfavorable, feelings towards people or a person because of their sex, gender, beliefs, values, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, nationality, beauty, occupation, education, criminality, sport team affiliation or other personal characteristics.

Prejudice can also refer to unfounded or pigeonholed beliefs and it may include “any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence”.

Gordon Willard Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioral approach, which he thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. He emphasized the uniqueness of each individual, and the importance of the present context, as opposed to past history, for understanding the personality. He defined prejudice as a “feeling, favorable or unfavorable, toward a person or thing, prior to, or not based on, actual experience”. For the evolutionary psychology perspective, see Prejudice from an evolutionary perspective. 

Lene Auestad is an author and a philosopher from the University of Oslo. She has written on the themes of prejudice, social exclusion and minority rights, and has contributed to public debates on hate speech. Her book Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice combined critical theory with psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, examining the underlying unconscious forces and structures that make up the phenomena of xenophobia, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and sexism. It provides an overview of how social prejudices, and the discrimination and violence that often tends to accompany the latter, come into being. Moreover, It argues that in order to fully understand how a complex phenomenon such as prejudice works, we need to alter our traditional Western philosophical understanding of the subject as a supposedly fully rational, autonomous and individual agent. Auestad argues that we need a more situated and relational understanding of subjectivity and the subject, as prejudice and acts of discrimination always take place in a contextualized setting between subjects whose thoughts and actions influence each other.

Auestad suggested that psychoanalysis can be used to think about the invisible and subtle processes of power over symbolic representation, for example, in the context of stereotyping and dehumanization, and posed the question of what forces govern the states of affairs that determine who is an ‘I’ and who is an ‘it’ in the public sphere.

Auestad defines prejudice as characterized by ‘symbolic transfer’, transfer of a value-laden meaning content onto a socially formed category and then on to individuals who are taken to belong to that category, resistance to change, and overgeneralization.

I personally applaud Starbucks for the PR move and no dubitably costly afternoon session to try and change bias with a movie and a speech and some pamphlets and a sit around session of kumbaya and probably lots of coffee (do Starbuck’s baristas get free coffee? No wonder they are so jacked!).

If it works there are a bunch of others on the left and the right that need to sign up.

I’m afraid this is much deeper than a guidance session and then back to work. Here is an example:

 

Here is a junior high school math class from 1963. This was the class who was seeing Vietnam War, the Beatles invasion and a president shot. They had never seen a person of color except the janitor. Everyone in their house of worship or school or baseball team or beach looked just like them. This was also the Woodstock generation who witness a president resign, the women’s revolution, the gay revolution, the civil right enactment while the teachings of their parents and their clergy and their teachers and their peers made life so confusing they turned to drugs to find the answer. This was the generation that watched integration at school and diversity training at work handed down by laws with fines and punishment for not following the rules.

Still I appreciate the TedX effort to erase implicit bias without violence but through mild intimidation.

I’ll have a Mocha coffee Frappuccino® is enveloped between layers of whipped cream that's infused with cold brew, white chocolate mocha and dark caramel. On each layer of whipped cream is a dollop of rich dark mocha sauce. These layers ensure each sip is as good as the last; all the way to the end and where is the bathroom.