PDF Summary:Biased, by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

When you hear the word “bias,” you may think of a conscious form of prejudice—but the most potent biases are actually subconscious. These implicit biases are normal neurological responses to the culture you grow up in. In the United States, everyone encounters and encodes antiblack bias to some degree, even in black communities. This racial bias doesn’t just influence how you make decisions—it determines what you notice in your environment and what becomes invisible. And in high-stakes situations like police encounters, the consequences of racial bias can be devastating.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how your brain creates bias; how that bias impacts every area of your life, from where you live to how you post online; and, most importantly, how to combat implicit bias to create a fairer world for everyone. We’ll also compare Dr. Eberhardt’s research on racial bias to other popular books on racism such as How to Be an Antiracist and White Fragility.

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The Many Dangers of Racial Colorblindness

Eberhardt examines the “colorblind” approach to racial bias in the context of education, but colorblindness is a common problem in all types of conversations about race. For example, in How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi argues that ignoring race won’t eradicate racism because racist ideas stem from racist policies, not the other way around. Therefore, to fight racism, we have to start by attacking racist policies—and it’s impossible to identify racist policies if we can’t see race.

Similarly, in The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that colorblindness is dangerous because it keeps us from seeing just how deeply entrenched racism is in public institutions like the criminal justice system. As a result, it’s easy to make the mistake of over-emphasizing personal responsibility and ultimately blame individuals for what is really a systemic problem.

Bias in the Workforce

Racial bias in the workforce is another massive, widespread problem. In fact, the unemployment rate for young black people is twice as high as it is for young white people.

The main driver of this disparity is racial bias in the hiring process. In one study, researchers sent out thousands of resumes in response to real job applications and discovered that applicants with stereotypically black-sounding names were half as likely to be contacted about the job than applicants with white-sounding names. Another study found that, regardless of gender or education level, white people get 36% more callbacks for jobs than black people.

(Shortform note: The racially biased criminal justice system is also a major driver of black unemployment. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how people with criminal records have a harder time getting hired. In Chapters 4-5 of this guide, we’ll see how black Americans are more likely to be arrested and face harsher sentences than white Americans, which means black job seekers are more likely to have a criminal record.)

Bias Training

Many businesses looking to reduce workplace bias are following the example Starbucks set in 2018 after police arrested two black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks for the simple crime of asking to use the restroom before purchasing anything.

Starbucks’s corporate response to this incident is a model for addressing racial bias in the workplace on a large scale. Instead of just addressing the incident itself, Starbucks committed to confronting racial bias head-on by holding a four-hour implicit bias training for all 175,000 Starbucks employees. This training required closing down 8,000 Starbucks locations for the day, costing the company roughly $12 million.

“From Privilege to Progress”

The Starbucks incident also sparked change in another way. Melissa DePino (the white woman who filmed and tweeted the whole encounter) and Michelle Saahene (a Black woman who was the first to speak up during the incident) connected over their shared horror and frustration at the injustice they witnessed that day in Starbucks. Together, they launched "From Privilege to Progress," an organization devoted to bringing white and Black people together to fight systemic and interpersonal racism. Through speaking engagements and online activism, they empower people to push past awkwardness and have hard, necessary conversations about racism.

Bias in Cases of Police Brutality

Although bias forms as part of a natural process, it can be a dangerous and even fatal component of police encounters. To examine the ways racial bias impacts police brutality, Eberhardt breaks down the 2016 murder of Terence Crutcher (an unarmed black man from Oklahoma) by police officer Betty Shelby. Here are a few key ways that bias escalated that deadly encounter.

Deciding to Pull Over

Officer Betty Shelby and her partner were en route to a domestic violence scene when they first saw Terence Crutcher’s car stalled in the road. Why did Shelby abandon an actively violent situation and decide to pull over? Because racial bias can dictate where people focus their attention.

Scientists study this effect using subliminal priming (flashing words or images on a screen so quickly that participants don’t consciously realize it happened). When researchers primed police officers with either crime-related or neutral words before showing them photos of white and black faces, the officers who were primed to think about crime looked longer at the black face than the white face, but officers in the control group looked at the two faces equally. That might explain why Officer Shelby was drawn to the sight of a random black man while she was responding to an active crime scene.

(Shortform note: The link between racial bias and selective attention is well-established in science; however, Terence Crutcher’s death may not be the best example of this principle in action. Crutcher’s SUV wasn’t pulled over to the side of the road—it was stalled in the middle of the street, blocking traffic, which created a dangerous traffic situation. Under those circumstances, it makes sense for an officer’s attention to be diverted to the scene.)

Seeing Surrender as a Threat

Officer Shelby shot Terence Crutcher while he was walking away from her with his hands in the air, indicating surrender. But Shelby later testified that she fired the gun because she genuinely feared for her life. Why? Because racial bias primes people to see black people’s movements as more threatening by default. Research on the New York Police Department’s controversial “stop, question, and frisk” program (where officers had the liberty to stop anyone on the street if they deemed that person suspicious) showed that black people were more likely than white people to be frisked and to have physical force used on them, but they were less likely to have a weapon. It’s likely that Officer Shelby interpreted Terence’s movements as more suspicious than she would if he had been white.

(Shortform note: Some reviewers of Biased criticized Eberhardt for not mentioning that Crutcher's autopsy revealed he was high on PCP at the time of the shooting, which may have contributed to his erratic movements. According to her lawyer, Officer Shelby had completed drug recognition training and was aware that Crutcher was likely under the influence of the drug.)

Pulling the Trigger

The most crucial impact of racial bias is on behavior, especially for law enforcement officers, whose actions can have deadly consequences. Racial bias makes officers more prone to use violence against a black suspect than a white one. In a computer simulation study featuring pictures of people of different races holding either a gun or an innocuous object, police officers hit “shoot” faster for black people with guns than white people with guns. This explains why Officer Shelby was so quick to pull the trigger when she assumed Terrance had a gun, an action that had deadly consequences.

(Shortform note: Eberhardt doesn’t touch on the fact that Officer Shelby’s partner shot Crutcher with his Taser just seconds before Shelby fired the fatal shot. This begs the question: Why was Shelby’s first instinct to grab her gun rather than her Taser? Implicit bias may have led her to choose the deadlier weapon, but police training also plays a role: Experts say most officers get extensive firearms training but only “a few hours'' of Taser training. Officers are taught to think of their firearm as their “best friend.”)

Bias in the Criminal Justice System

Bias creates racial disparities at every level of the criminal justice system, from police stops to bail to death sentences.

Discretionary Stops

Police officers’ officially-sanctioned biases are on display when they make decisions about who to pull over for equipment-related violations (like expired tags or a broken tail light). It’s often up to the officers’ discretion to decide if a minor equipment issue is worth the time and resources it takes to stop someone. That freedom often becomes an excuse to act on unchecked biases: An analysis of 18.5 million traffic stops over six years found that black drivers are more than twice as likely to be pulled over for equipment-related issues than white drivers.

(Shortform note: Surprisingly, this type of discrimination isn’t illegal. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how, according to the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, it’s legal to use perceived race in the decision to pull someone over so long as race isn’t the only factor.)

The Cash Bail System

In the United States’ cash bail system, bail is money used as collateral to ensure that, if they’re released, the person in jail will return for their official trial and subsequent court dates. (If they don’t return, they’ll lose that money for good.) If the person can post bail, they’re free to go home until the trial; if not, they’re stuck in jail—sometimes for months. The court decides the bail amount for each person based on things like job stability and criminal record, which puts anyone who isn’t rich and white at a disadvantage. Young black men face the most discrimination in bail charges—on average, they’re charged 35% more bail than white arrestees.

The effects of pre-trial detention can be devastating, even for people who ultimately aren’t convicted of a crime. When people are locked up for months awaiting trial, they’re unable to work, pay rent, or take care of their children—and can lose their jobs, homes, and custody rights as a result. (Shortform note: Opponents of bail reform argue that, without collateral, people won’t show up for their court dates and so won’t face justice. However, states that have implemented bail reforms didn’t see significant changes in court appearances—most of the time, people still showed up, even without having money on the line.)

Unequal Sentencing

If a case does go to trial, the outcome is heavily influenced by racial bias. This is especially true in the states where the death penalty is still legal. When a murder victim is white, the murderer is significantly more likely to receive a death sentence than if the victim is black. That disparity both reflects and reinforces the biased belief that white lives are precious and deserve justice, but black lives are expendable.

Racial Bias Influences Jury Selection

One reason juries may be so prone to anti-black racial bias is that they are often overwhelmingly white. A 2010 study of eight southern states found evidence of widespread racial discrimination in jury selection, especially in cases where the defendant is eligible for the death penalty if they are found guilty. In some places (like Houston County, Alabama), this discrimination is so extreme that prosecutors dismissed over 80% of qualified black jurors in cases involving the death penalty.

From Implicit Bias to Explicit Racism

Until now, we’ve focused on the role of implicit biases that people often aren’t even aware they have. However, in the right circumstances, those implicit biases can bubble up to conscious awareness and become explicit racism. This was the case in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) before a “Unite the Right” rally. That march and its aftermath marked a fundamental change in the national conversation about race.

On the morning of the rally, following a night of widespread violence and white terrorism, hundreds of heavily armed far-right protesters clashed with several thousand counterprotesters. The tension between the groups quickly escalated from shouting to all-out brawling. That violence turned deadly when a self-professed neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

The Resurgence of Explicit Racial Bias

The Charlottesville march was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades, but the hatred that fueled it had been simmering beneath the surface for generations. Experts think that the sudden resurgence in white nationalism and explicit racial bias has happened because suddenly, white people are “outnumbered.” The population is diversifying more and more, and white people (particularly white men) are no longer the unquestioned rulers of society. No longer being the dominant social group makes many white people feel threatened, so they embrace white supremacist ideas more openly as a coping mechanism.

“Unite the Right” Was a Prelude to the 2021 Capitol Attack

The Unite the Right rally marked a cultural shift in part because it was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades. Four years later, on January 6th, 2021, pro-Trump extremists stormed the United States Capitol building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Some commentators argue that the president’s failure to condemn white supremacy in Charlottesville emboldened the far right groups who ultimately participated in storming the capitol (indeed, many of the same protestors attended both events).