Читать книгу UNBIAS - Stacey A. Gordon - Страница 17

You may have made assumptions about what I believe, who I am, where I'm from, and how those things might affect the information you're about to get. But bias isn't only about race and no matter where in the world you are, there are hundreds of ways we can be biased. However, race always enters the discussion because it's easiest to spot.

But consider this. I am black and I am female, two things you can usually tell just by looking at me. What you can't possibly know just by looking at me is whether I'm heterosexual, where I was born, my status as a citizen in the United States, if I have children, how old I am, where I live, how much money I have in the bank, who I pray to or whether I pray at all, who I voted for in the past presidential election, or whether I have a college degree.

So I'd like you to take a moment to ask yourself what you actually know about me. And if that is nothing, I'll ask you not to put words in my mouth before I've had the chance to say them.

More than 150,000 individuals have gone through my course on unconscious bias on LinkedIn Learning in English. It has also been translated into Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese and the number one comment I receive can be boiled down to “It was surprisingly informative.” I make an assumption that the course was “surprisingly informative” because viewers took the course with the expectation that it would not in fact be informative at all. I may even go so far as to say that many may have believed it would push an agenda that was different from theirs and they were ready to hate it. I say that because I have also received those comments from quite a few individuals who were mandated to take the course and they have blatantly said as much. Comments included:

I just finished taking your unconscious bias course through my company and it was better than I thought it would be. Great job on delivery.

Thank you for putting together a training on bias that was actually unbiased.

I really enjoyed your course on “Unconscious Bias”… it has made me pause and think and hopefully change my actions going forward … It was unexpectedly insightful!!

All that is to say, if you're at all skeptical about my motives for this book, I'd like you to know I understand why you might feel that way, and I'm still going to ask that you save your assumptions until the end.