One systemic injustice that I have become increasingly aware of in recent years is one of race and how heavily it is driven by implicit biases. Implicit bias is a concept that delves beneath the surface level of our casual, everyday experiences and resides primarily within the connotative components behind those experiences. Below is a video that does an excellent job of summarizing what implicit bias is and how it holds significant power through association and representation over time.
A couple of years ago, I remember helping my parents decide on where to move. There were many places that they immediately shrugged aside and said that they were in “a bad part of the neighborhood”. I specifically recall once being asked to open the surrounding neighborhood on Google Earth, as if the visualization would help determine this level of “badness”. At the time, my parents’ judgement gave me implications of drug-related incidents in the area.
Once I started attending college, I learned about the process of redlining—a legal determination of “mortgage risk” based heavily on connections to minorities within a surrounding area—that occurred in the United States throughout the early to mid-1900s. More specifically, redlining brought with it the implication that neighborhoods dominated by social minorities are in some way “bad”. Sections of residential plots were graded on a map-scale according to their mortgage risk. Interpretation of what this means can vary from low perspective property values, to poor, to unsafe for your children. The implications of these factors compounded with the inherent racism of the time period. Below is a 1936 map of Philadelphia with the so-called hazardous residential communities outlined in red, as the term “Redlining” was born.
A 1936 legal document containing sections of Philadelphia rated by their mortgage risk levels.
Although the legality of redlining has long since been dismissed, the communities that it helped to shape still exist today. By essentially locking minorities into less profitable living situations, redlining furthermore robbed those individuals of a myriad of socioeconomically beneficial opportunities that were given to other communities. This is just one facet of the increasingly complex issue of systemic racism that exists today. The practice of ethnography and critical thinking that authors like Adichie and Ortiz Cofer emphasize in their works have made me realize that back then, my parents were falling victim to some of the implicit biases connected to these communities. Through the knowledge and understanding of how these biases are formed, we may begin to weaken the hold that they have on both pre-existing and future communities.