In 2018, I was challenged by a Black friend (as part of a weekly anti-racism practice) to take the implicit bias test on the Harvard University website. After warming up with another test, and discovering that I have a moderate automatic preference for Judaism over other religions (wink), I took the race test and scored “your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans.” Huh, really? I had assumed that this test would uncover lurking, unconscious bias against Black people, learned early in life and impossible to uproot. Concerned that I might have somehow gamed the system, I took the test again. The second time, I scored “your data suggest no automatic preference between black people and white people.” Like measuring your blood pressure more than once – slight variation, but basically similar.
At the time, I generated an optimistic conjecture as to why I scored this way: that the effort I had been making for several years – to become aware of my automatic negative reactions to Black people and intentionally replace them with more positive ones – had led to a diminishment of those automatic negative reactions. I have an additional conjecture now: that as a Jew in this culture, my identification with whiteness is partial and complicated, and so my visceral reaction to white people is not uniformly positive.