The Real Reason White People Make Me Uncomfortable

I’m a black woman married to a white man raising mixed raced children and I struggle to understand my own diversity biases.

My entire life, I have either been surrounded by people who look just like me or surrounded by people who look different than me. I’m either wholly in the majority or woefully in the minority. I love our intimate family get-togethers. I respect, admire and honor family members from both sides that I have known for decades. But there are moments where I feel out of place; like I have no connection to these strangers that I call family. Why?

I became a Cognitive Coach to help me (and my clients) understand the ‘why’. Breaking cycles of self-destructive behaviors and habits requires a fundamental understanding around the essence of the ‘why’. This fundamental understanding is the key to bringing about sustainable and meaningful change.

So, while trying to get to the root of the ‘why’, I learned that biases begin to form over time through our own experiences and interactions. When we are surrounded by and engage almost exclusively with people who look just like us we begin to view the world through a similar lens. Those experiences and interactions shape our ways of thinking and become the basis for our subconscious formation of automatic mental associations; or our implicit biases. Because these biases are formed at the subconscious, we aren’t even aware they are happening. So, how can we be expected to bring about change?

Here are three simple steps we can take to re-frame our subconscious mental connections.

Step #1: Acknowledge that we are not immune to unconscious biases resulting from life experiences. This doesn’t mean we're prejudice it just means we're human!

Step #2: When encountering people that are different, we need to engage from a place of curiosity. Ask about their life, interesting stories, their experiences.

Step #3: Model for our children how to behave while in the presence of people who look different to get us to a place where different becomes the new normal.