Here is the full transcript of Melanie Funchess’ talk titled “Implicit Bias – How It Effects Us And How We Push Through” at TEDxFlourCity conference.
In this TEDx talk, Melanie Funchess addresses the pervasive nature of implicit biases and their profound impact on individuals and society. She begins with a personal anecdote about her husband’s misdiagnosis due to racial bias, highlighting how doctors’ preconceptions led to a life-threatening delay. Funchess then shares her childhood experience of facing racial discrimination from a teacher, revealing how these biases can manifest in educational settings.
She connects these experiences to the broader issue of implicit bias, defining it as unconscious attitudes and stereotypes influencing behavior and decisions. Funchess emphasizes that everyone, including those who consider themselves open-minded and impartial, harbors implicit biases. She shares another personal story about her daughter facing discouragement from a guidance counselor, underscoring the lasting impact of bias across generations.
Finally, Funchess advocates for self-awareness, open dialogue, and intentional actions to combat implicit biases, fostering a more equitable society through transformational activism and the philosophy of Ubuntu.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
I would like to begin my talk with an important message. You know, like the ones for the pharmaceutical companies when they see people walking lazily along the beach, or running in slow motion through fields of flowers, when they tell you the side effects of their product? Nausea, vomiting, arrhythmia, constipation, impotence, erections lasting more than 4 hours. But seriously, I’m going to say some things during my talk that may make you uncomfortable, and they should.
Critical Self-Examination
So, what I ask of you in this time is to stay present with me through this and ask yourself some critical questions. To really listen closer and really question your own thoughts and behaviors, and be open to a new view of yourself. You may ask, as I start to present this, “Oh Melanie, I’ve got that, I know this, I read the book. This doesn’t apply to me.” I would like to challenge that belief.
And you may say, “What is this concept that is so controversial that she feels she needs a preface statement?” The concept is implicit bias. Let me tell you a story. A young couple, college sweethearts, graduate school, begin their careers, get married, and start a family.
A Family’s Ordeal
As they start to approach their 30s, they begin to say that they’re closing in on the American dream. They purchase their first home. Three weeks after they close on this home, the husband becomes violently ill. So, this family, husband, wife, three children, ages 5, 3, and 1, and a baby on the way, goes searching for the diagnosis that has stricken this otherwise healthy and vital 32-year-old man.
“Turn to your neighbor and say, four weeks later, as this man lays critically ill and dying in a hospital, doctors are circling around a cluster of diseases that they know must be the thing that is killing this man, despite the fact that all the tests for these diseases have come back negative.” They begin to harass the husband, ask him to tell the truth, and to really open up and let them know about his IV drug use and his secret unprotected sex with men. You see, they were trying to make the case to continue looking for HIV despite multiple negative tests. Finally, the wife comes and says, “What are you looking for?”
Medical Bias Exposed
To which the doctors reply, “We’re looking for HIV and sarcoidosis.” So the wife, kind of perplexed because they thought they’d already ruled those things out, says, “Well, why are you looking at only those diseases?” To which the doctors say, “Well, as a young African-American male…” She becomes irate and says, “Stop right there. I want you to check my husband for things that white people get.” And magically, within days, they have a diagnosis: Stage IVB non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and a prognosis, two weeks to live.
You know, the implicit bias that existed within these doctors resulted in the behavior that showed what diseases they chose to and not to look for. The implicit bias of these doctors said how much value they placed or did not place upon the information that they received from the patient and his wife.
You may say, “Melanie, how does this happen? How do we, as good activists and hardworking, progressive, open-minded American citizens, continue to fall into the story of these stereotypes?” Implicit bias, those unconscious things that have been flowing through us since childhood.
Defining Implicit Bias
You may say to me, “Well, what is implicit bias?” Well, I’m going to give you an academic definition. Implicit bias, otherwise known as implicit social cognition, are those attitudes and stereotypes that affect our behaviors, our decisions, and our attitudes unconsciously. It’s related to, like, the Matrix. Anyone here seen the Matrix? When you’re in the Matrix, you don’t know you’re in there. You’re just happily walking along, thinking everything is okay. Well, I’m here today to yank out the plug and disconnect you from the mainframe.
A Classroom Incident
Let me share with you another story. There’s a fourth, picture it, I feel like Sophia Petrillo, picture it. Fourth-grade math class, a teacher asks for volunteers to go up to the board to work on long division. One young girl and two of her friends go up and they start working on the board. The little girl is the first one done. Since she’s the first one done, she starts checking her answer and looking over it, and now that she’s very convinced that she’s gotten the right answer, she waves to the teacher to check her work. She hears a sound from the back of the room, “The answer is wrong. Check it again.”
The girl, quite perplexed, because she checked it twice and she knew it was right, goes back to the board and she checks her computations again, getting the same answer.
So she goes back to the teacher and says, “Teacher, teacher, I know it’s right. I checked it three times.” Now at this point, the teacher, being very stern, sharply says, “I said it’s wrong. Check it again.” Now the girl is thoroughly perplexed.
A Shocking Revelation
“It’s math. It’s either it’s right or it’s wrong.” So she goes to her desk where she has a calculator. So she starts working on her computation, and it’s the same one that was on the board. So now she’s thoroughly convinced. She said the teacher cannot think of anything. So she holds up her calculator and says, “Teacher, teacher, look, I got it right, all the way to the thousandth place.”
Now this teacher, thoroughly upset at this student continuing to challenge her, says, “I said the answer is wrong. You niggers can’t do anything right.” The student is struck dumb by the words that just hit her like a cannon. She didn’t understand. Why is the teacher saying this to her? “I don’t understand. Why is this happening?” Her father was a mathematician with a Ph.D. from a prestigious university. She had learned long division in first grade and a different method for doing it. She didn’t understand. Why was her teacher saying this to her?
This little girl learned the first of many valuable lessons that day. First, she learned that her teacher did not see her as a gifted student. Two, her teacher didn’t see her as the child of educated parents. The teacher did not even see a correct math problem on the board. Some people may say this one was a raging racist that only saw the child as an uppity nigger who could not conform and do right.
A Different Perspective
But what I’d like to offer to you today is another frame. Could it be that this teacher, her implicit bias is so ingrained to her that blacks were intellectually, so intellectually inferior and unintelligent that it was impossible for a child in an urban school to not only get the problem correct, but do it in a different method?
So then when faced with something that all her life her biases had told her was impossible, that could not possibly be, we act from such a primal place to protect that worldview that she had held sacred up until that time. There’s another quote, ‘Some people are just not ready to be unplugged. They are so inured, so dependent on the system as it stands that they will fight to protect it.’ Again, the Matrix, that’s Morpheus. Implicit biases are pervasive.
We all have them. Even people with avowed commitments to impartiality, like let’s say judges. Now you may say to me, “Melanie, these are wild stories. These are extreme examples. We are good people. Good people don’t do these things. That can’t be real.” Let me tell you today, this is very real.
Personal Experiences
I’m going to share a piece of information with you about these stories that’s going to tell you how real they are. These are both stories out of my life. In the first story, I was the wife who, big and pregnant, as my mother said, big with child, had to fight to get people to check my husband for things that white people got. The implicit biases those doctors could have left a woman without a husband, children without a father, and a mother without a son.
I was the gifted fourth-grade student in the second story. In that story, in the end, it led to my first act of nonviolent social protest. I stayed to sit in for 100 days in my living room. Now, just so, I’m going to share one more story with you, just so you can understand that this, you may say, “Well, Melanie, you’re kind of old, and these things may have happened long ago in a land far, far away, like Tatooine, you know, but I just want to let you know that this happens right here in River City.”
So, this September, a beautiful, gifted African-American ninth-grade girl enters school. Because she’d been in a region, in an honors program, she entered ninth grade with enough credits to technically be a 10th grader. Now this young lady has a goal. Her goal is to go to Cornell and study neuroscience. She has had this goal for many years, and all the people in her circles, you know, nurture her in this goal and make opportunities for her to start to build the building blocks to make her goal a reality.
A Guidance Counselor’s Bias
So as she enters ninth grade, she goes to meet the guidance counselor, as ninth graders do, and as guidance counselors do, she sits down with the student and says, “Well, what is your goal?” And this young lady, she’s very confident of her goal, as 14-year-old girls can be. You know how that is. “You know, she goes and says, ‘I want to go to Cornell and be a neuroscientist,'” to which her guidance counselor reacts, “Well, that’s a big dream, but let’s look at something more realistic, like MCC.” In that moment, the student stood stunned as she watched her goal crumble.
And people may say, “Well, Melanie, he’s just one person, but he’s so much more than that.” He was the guidance counselor. In the schools, just so you know, the guidance counselor is the person who is charged with setting the academic plan to help students get from point A to point B, to get to their goals.
So if he didn’t believe in her, how was he going to help her? And if he didn’t help her, how was she going to attain her goal? This was the match that ignited a forest fire of self-doubt, negative self-talk that resulted in depression that manifested itself in school avoidance, a decrease in grades, and the eventual lack of ability to engage in the everyday life of this child.
You know what the ironic thing is about this story? This is my daughter’s story. Forty years later, the words may have changed, but the bias, the power, and the potential impact remain the same. But you know what’s even worse about that? Is that my daughter’s story is not unique. This story repeats itself hundreds of times every year in the Rochester City School District for hundreds of students going in with dreams and goals. And the thing is, the counselor did not look at my child and did not look at her academic record, but just because of the way he saw when she walked in, crushed her dream.
A Message of Hope
So, I don’t want to leave you on a downer, and I’m going to tell you, there is hope. Because what has been done can be undone. Our brains are malleable; they’re these incredible, incredible, even though my brain is farting right now, they are these incredible capacities for growth and change. And so you may say to me, “Melanie, how do I do this?” First, what I want you to do is to call yourself on your own stuff.
When you’re walking down the street and you see that person coming and you cross over to the other side of the street, call yourself on it. Ask yourself, “Why did I do that? What did that person do to facilitate that response from me?” And then once you’ve done that and you start looking at this, and I don’t want you to think I don’t understand it, this takes you being extremely self-aware.
The Path to Change
But once you do that, you start having these conversations with your family and friends. It’s very easy to have these conversations in the nice, warm, fuzzy places of a TED Talk, but it’s much more, and it’s much different to have it at your Sunday dinner with your mother-in-law, okay? What we’re looking for, we say we want to be better, but in order to have this better world we’re talking about, we must be better ourselves and be better to each other. We have to move into what I call transformational activism.
In order to create a world with equity, we must do some things. First, do your own personal work. Two, make some connections with people that don’t look like you. Three, when you have privilege, use your privilege to create equity. And guess what? Many of you in this room have it. Use it. And four, intentionally and deliberately engage in non-biasing activities.
That means get out of homogeneous groups, get into some heterogeneous groups where not everybody’s the same, and start learning some stuff. Take that stuff and share it with others. I want to leave you with some new language, Ubuntu. It’s a Nigeri Bantu word that translates into the idea of “I am who I am because of who we all are.”
And we are who we are because of who I am. It talks about the interconnectedness of us all. It is one step beyond “I am my brother’s sister’s keeper.” It is “I am my brother and sister, and they are me.”
“I see you, I see myself. When you look at yourself next time, see me.” Thank you.