Over the last year, I helped with the chapel service for the local college football team. As I got to know one of the coaches who attends our church, he told me about his first seven months in the area. After playing in the NFL, he joined the coaching staff to work with the running backs. He got pulled over by local police four times within those first months. He never received a ticket since he committed no violations. He was an African-American driving a Mercedes. Sometimes bias (in this case, racism\/profiling) is easy to see, but Pragya Agarwal believes the issue exists in many ways, far beyond the obvious.<\/p>\n
Sway <\/em>includes Agarwal\u2019s personal experiences but mostly presents research in a popular scientific style, to unravel the issue of unconscious bias. This book, categorized under the social sciences, examines social processes. She states her thesis early when she writes, \u201cIn this book, I am looking primarily at examples where a bias is misdirected and creates prejudice and discriminatory behaviour through a negative association with a certain group or community.\u201d[1]<\/a> Agarwal, a data scientist, details the social implications of the extensiveness of biases beyond what we often believe to be the apparent components of race and gender. \u201cDisability, sexuality, body size, profession and so on all influence the assessments we make of people, and form the basis of our relationship with others and the world at large.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n Her book divides into four main sections. She relies heavily on evolutionary psychology and the development of the human brain to explain the emergence of bias. She writes, \u201cOur brains have evolved to reason adaptively rather than rationally or truthfully.\u201d[3]<\/a> By this, she means that we tend to bypass cognitive processes in a way reminiscent of Daniel Kahneman and his ideas about heuristics (mental short-cuts based on assumptions) and System 1 thinking that does not involve significant careful reasoning. This book also reminded me of Kathryn Schulz\u2019s Being Wrong <\/em>and the influence of confirmation bias we all carry. The reality and the presence of bias come to people naturally. Agarwal argues that \u201cstereotypes are acquired effortlessly\u201d and become even more attractive options when tired or stressed.[4]<\/a> She cautions against putting hopes for objectivity into technology as the biases exist in that realm also.<\/p>\n I confess, this reading left me overwhelmed at the reality of bias. The Epilogue offers suggestions on tackling unconscious bias. That closing section is three and one-half pages, while the part of the book that examines bias is four hundred and nine pages. As an observation, not a criticism, there is a lot more diagnosis than cure in Sway. <\/em>I am not much of a Calvinist, but I embrace \u201ctotal depravity\u201d as a reality of the human condition. That doctrine asserts humanity\u2019s brokenness in every part of its makeup. It does note mean the extremes of that brokenness manifest at all times. Agarwal does not sound like a person of faith but I assume she would agree with the all-inclusiveness of human brokenness as revealed by pervasive bias.<\/p>\n So, what are we to do in light of the sobering reality of bias? Since my leadership context is the local church, I look there and to its early history once again. A Time <\/em>article on the early church relates a statement made at baptism: \u201cYou are all children of God; there is no Jew or Greek; there is no slave or free; there is no male and female; for you are all one.\u201d[5]<\/a> That statement conveys the vision of Galatians 3:28 and stood in direct contrast to the common distinctions embraced in Greek culture. The article goes on to state, \u201cSameness wasn\u2019t the point. The point was \u2018oneness\u2019 \u2013 solidarity<\/em> that transcended race, class or gender.\u201d[6]<\/a> It is not hard to imagine how a community so positively different than the surrounding culture reached its culture. Sadly, the article goes on to show how that oneness dynamic got lost early on. Is it any wonder that the similar, more recent words of Martin Luther King, Jr. still cast such a compelling vision for the value of one\u2019s character and not one\u2019s color? Will we do the hard work to produce needed change? I don\u2019t want to quickly offer the obvious answer to that. Virtue-signaling is much easier than adaptive change. It’s also easier to see bias in “those people” rather than myself.<\/p>\n A few questions came to my mind about our context during this reading: Does our church\u2019s demographics reflect those of our community? Do our leaders represent the makeup our community? Who gets to speak into a microphone? Who gets to make the important decisions? May leaders heed Agarwal\u2019s call to \u201cactivate our logical and rational thinking and actively bust any biases that can affect our decisions.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Pragya Agarwal, Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias <\/em>(London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020), 13.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Ibid., 18.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Ibid., 44.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Ibid., 106.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Stephen J. Patterson, \u201cThe Early Christians Were Focused on Solidarity Across Race, Class and Gender. Then Things Changed.\u201d Time <\/em>https:\/\/time.com\/5410308\/early-christian-solidarity\/<\/a> accessed March 9, 2022.<\/p>\n