Stereotypes Have Surrounded Me Everywhere.
Why we need to do more to confront unconscious bias in school
By Niyah Holt
As a Black girl, stereotypes have surrounded me everywhere. Whether it was that I was “too loud” or that I was “too angry,” they still have placed me into a category and have affected me, mentally and academically. School should always be a fun place for learning and making friendships, but how can it be a good working space when some students feel targeted?
Stereotypes are everywhere and aren’t just made by racist or judgmental people. It is common for others to base their way of seeing another person off what they have seen all throughout the media. In school, minority stereotypes play a huge role in how students are viewed, and it affects us greatly.
Unconscious bias is real, and it has to do with when people don’t even realize they are judging someone based on their race or gender and feed into common stereotypes.
In a Harvard edcast, author and educator Tracey Benson described a time where he had to observe a classroom full of 25 students in which fewer than a quarter of them were Black. He recalls how the teacher in the classroom had her back turned towards the students that were Black and how they weren’t paying any attention to what she was writing on the board. He said that in turning away from the students and not calling on them directly, the teacher hinders learning.
I said, “Did you notice that your body faces away from these students, the Black and brown students?” She said, “I’d never noticed that before.” I was like, “Well, why don’t you try changing your position and see what happens as a result?” The teacher hadn’t realized what she was doing until it was pointed out to her.
This is a good example of unconscious bias because the teacher was basing her way of teaching on how she felt the students were acting and assuming they weren’t paying attention but in reality, the students felt as though they weren’t being seen enough to participate.
Academic research shows that teacher expectations matter a lot in student success. In a classic 1965 study, Harvard professor and psychologist Robert Rosenthal wanted to see how teachers would react when they were told that some students in their class showed “unusual potential for intellectual growth.” Rosenthal gave an IQ test to the students and randomly selected 20% of them so he could tell the teachers they had potential for intellectual growth. Towards the end of the year, he then re-tested all the students, and his studies illustrated that the random students he had shown to the teachers in the beginning of the year actually did get better results on the second test than those who weren’t chosen for attention.
Rosenthal’s research suggests that teachers’ expectations can strongly affect their students. A later study done by the Center for American Progress reinforced what he found. The study followed a group of 10th graders from 2002–2012 and showed that students who had teachers with high expectations for them were more likely to graduate college.
In the recent events of the past year in which racial inequality was in the national spotlight, there have been even more stereotypes surrounding Black people and Black youth. The Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 protests around the world for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have greatly impacted minorities. For a lot of Black students, the protest gave them motivation to start talking about how they felt with everything going on in school.
I recall an experience when I was expressing how I felt about what was happening to protesters during the protests.“Those were not protests, they were riots,” one of my peers responded to me. “And people like you were just trying to find a way to steal from businesses.” I remember feeling ashamed and confused as to why he was comparing me to what others had done even though I had never participated.
Some people might say stereotyping and unconscious bias don’t exist and that they are indirectly a way of calling everyone a racist, or that unconscious bias is just prejudice, and there’s no scientific fact behind it. But here’s the problem with the claim that unconscious bias “does not exist”: it does. I know this not only from reading the research on it but because I have confronted it myself.
Here’s the problem with the claim that unconscious bias “does not exist”: it does. I know this not only from reading the research on it but because I have confronted it myself.
Unconscious bias and stereotyping affects many students in school, especially minorities, and what you may think are harmless assumptions can actually be harmful to another person. They can make students feel out of place and as though they aren’t good enough for learning challenging material. Schools should do more to teach faculty and staff about unconscious bias, and they should also teach students how it can affect themselves and their peers. That is the best way to ensure that confronting unconscious bias in schools is not unconscious at all.
Niyah Holt is a part of the Kentucky Student Voice Team and Young Authors Greenhouse’s 2021 Education Justice Writing Cohort. She is an eighth grader at Leestown Middle School in Lexington, Kentucky.
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