In The Air We Breathe: Implicit Brain and Police Shooting, Shankar Vedantam speaks about the presence of implicit bias in everyone, the notion that people unconsciously have certain biases about one’s identity like stereotyping genders or race or religion. People want to believe that they have a neutral view of another individual, but humans have a preference for a group of people and more accurately predict the actions of a person. Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard, calls implicit bias a reason that people are acting prejudiced. These people can be not explicitly racist, but because of the influence of their surroundings, they aren’t even aware of their prejudice towards others. 

The podcast describes the most common example of implicit bias is people associating black people with criminality and danger. In the case of Terence Crutcher’s death, Betty Shelby claims that she only shot because he was a big man which seemed threatening to her. And deny any accusations about his race being an aspect of his death. However, if there is a trend of black people dying at the hands of police officers, race has to play a part. This exhibits the idea of implicit bias because police officers may believe that they are acting reasonably in an environment of danger. However, for humans, most of our activities are performed without our conscious knowledge. It is likely that Shelby shot him because of her unconscious bias. This bias most likely influenced her identity as a white woman, her future from her family, and her experiences as a police officer. Although Joshua Correll’s experiment shows that police have more cognitive knowledge to prevent their implicit bias to control their actions, under stressful circumstances, police officers will act like college students rather than acting on their conscious control. 

In Nita Mosby Tyler’s Podcast, she speaks about the concept of unlikely allies, and how people who need help are willing to accept the help even if they don’t identify with the same issues. “Justice needs an accomplice”, and if the same groups of people keep fighting then the same results will occur. Both the podcast and implicit bias speak about the change in social justice, and how it takes a long time for change to occur. Whether it’s the time, to figure out the presence of the implicit bias and how that can impact what one stands by or recognizing that those who aren’t discriminated against need to stand up for those who are.

While it is hard to alter one’s implicit bias because it would be erasing an individual’s cultural thumbprint. However, it is impactful just to be aware of your biases towards religion, race, or even social class. Implicit bias always helps identify the privileges one has and this would fit in with the unlikely ally. Humans are selfish, it’s human nature and we only tend to care about things that matter to only ourselves. But at the same time, claim how we believe in equity for everyone. The words can be impactful but the actions can make changes. Attending protests and walkouts are simple ways for an unlikely ally to show their support, and something I hope to contribute more of in the future. In modern society, the awareness of discrimination against the LGBTQ community, people of color, and women were only brought to the attention of the government when there are protests of people of different identities.