Implicit Bias: what should be our approach to it?

Charles Mills (1997) in its book “The Racial Contract” introduced the term “white ignorance”, which he believed would best explain white-people’s unconscious acts of prejudice directed to an out-group member, than the original conceptualization of “implicit bias” would. For Mills, white ignorance extends beyond a lack of knowledge or awareness to include group-level self-interests, that leads white people legitimizing racism a in favor of them. Accordingly to Mills, the white ignorance stems from what he called “epistemology of ignorance”, a type of knowledge that is based in denying that white people’s power and privileges come from periods of oppression, slavery and exploitation, leading further to white people not understanding fully the world they have created.

The “Epistemology of Ignorance” creates, then, a set of distorted patterns of thinking and perception that make white supremacy invisible to the very people who benefit from it. This leads, in turn, to the justification, protection and even resistance to what he also called “The Racial Contract” – the definition of who gets what based, solely, on race.

Therefore, Mills introduces us to a more critical eye into “implicit bias” conceptualization. Asserting that racism stems from implicit bias diminishes the power white supremacy still holds in producing the racial contract and the miss consideration of structural and systemic racism in maintaining power imbalances. Overall, Mills shits attention from the individual-nature of “Implicit Bias” in producing racism, to a political, social and cultural structure, in defining who gets privilege and power, and who does not. As Tate and Page (2018) stated, “(Un)conscious bias enables a continuation of white privilege and power as those racialized as white and non-whites who have been co-opted continue to benefit from the world which they have created and maintained” (p.9).

If you would like to delve deeper into the concepts that we here introduced, we strongly suggest you to read “The Racial Contract” by Charles Mills (1997), where he tried to introduce issues of race, racism and white racial domination into social epistemological discussion.