What seemed like a long time ago, I took a quiz put on by Harvard that tests if you associate African Americans with violence. It showed you weapons, and ordinary objects, as well as White and Black individuals. Your results were based on your reaction time sorting the two categories to either side. I was told I had a slight association between African Americans and violence. I was devastated.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how that could be. I explained it away as residual distrust from being badly bullied as a little kid in a predominantly black school. Afterall, my parents weren’t racist and I wasn’t around racist people, so there’s no way I picked up a bias from them.

What seemed like a long time ago, seems too recent today. On the Be More website, there is a link to another implicit bias test. This one followed the same procedure but the categories were White/Black, and Pleasant/Unpleasant words. They used children as the individuals. I noticeably struggled to connect the black children and the pleasant words. I was told I have a moderate automatic preference for European American children compared to African American children. Children. I feel sick.

I’m racking my brain as to how this could be. Have I devolved? How could learning about my prejudices, understanding the institution of racism, understand the racist conditioning I underwent lead to increased prejudice? They aren’t the same test, so they could be using different scales. I could have a similar level of inherent bias as I did before, but that isn’t better. I was supposed to be unbiased. I was supposed to be above the systems that taught me wrong. But I’m not.

I suspect that in part my bias has morphed. For one of the positive words, lucky, I could never assign it to the African American children. I have a hard time associating being born black with luck, as I continue to hear every negative thing associated with it. I got it wrong every time. That is bias too. And it’s silly of me to think I can overcome an entire lifetime of being taught white supremacy in the time between two quizzes. Afterall, it wasn’t such a long time ago at all. 2 years. Those years, while 10% of my life, while drastic and changing, are only the start of an inner revolution. It takes a lot to relearn.